Beware the power de-rangers

You know that feeling when suddenly, though subtly, events around you seem to coalesce as if life, fate, God — call it what you will — is trying to tell you something?

At a time when my self-confidence and faith in my own judgment are at a nadir, I seem to be watching TV programmes, reading columns and blogs, picking up snippets of news and chancing serendipitously on authoritative articles about the terrible things power, its achievement and pursuit, do to otherwise reasonable people.

In his regular column in today’s The Citizen, Prof. Kole Omotoso, under the headline “When nutters win power”, comments on Lord David Owen’s sequel to last years’ The Hubris Syndrome. Aside from being a medical research doctor, Owen is former leader of Britain’s Social Democrats and now a member of the House of Lords. His latest book, In Sickness and In Power: Illnesses in Heads of Government During the Last 100 Years, examines both “specific (mental) diseases and how the intoxication with power have shaped major decisions by world leaders in the 20th century”.

Against a backdrop of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Idi Amin, Pol Pot and our own Robert Mugabe, one could easily see how the headline writer chose the word “nutter”. But Owen also deals with Tony Blair, George W Bush, Anthony Eden and JF Kennedy.

I suppose Owen could as easily have dealt with our own political leaders — Verwoerd, Vorster, Botha, Mbeki and the looming spectre of Zuma. But what of non-political people in positions of power?

Last night I watched the harrowing account of Allied soldiers “liberating” the extermination camps at Buchenwald, Bergen Belsen, Auschwitz and elsewhere. The personal recollections of officers finding young boys of the Hitler Youth shooting naked men, women and children as they tried to flee into surrounding woods seemed incomprehensible.

How could ordinary people go insane because they wielded power over other people?

Then I thought of Stanley Milgram’s famous series of experiments after World War II. They were premised on trying to determine whether “ordinary Germans” were merely following Adolf Eichmann’s orders in the Holocaust or did they act on their own.

In 1974 Milgram wrote in an article entitled The Perils of Obedience, “Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants’] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants’] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not.

“The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation. Ordinary people can become agents in a terrible, destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”

Thank God that was way back then, I thought. Then I remembered places such as Sharpeville, My Lai, Sabra and Shatilla, Lockerbie, Rwanda, Srebrenica, the World Trade Center, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and Mumbai. In most of those places the nutters were otherwise fairly ordinary, decent people.

One can hardly think of Stanley Milgram without thinking about Philip Zimbardo and his notorious Stanford prison experiment. The terrifying realisation of Zimbardo’s work, now published as The Lucifer Effect, is that most of us have the potential to be corrupted by power we might wield over others. We can become very bad people.

This happened at Abu Ghraib prison. It’s happened in Guantanamo Bay, in police stations from Los Angeles to East London, in prisons from Oslo to Oudtshoorn — wherever people in authority wield power over others.

But these are all extraordinary situations, you say, and people behave in extraordinary ways in extraordinary situations. This is not every day.

Kole Omotoso writes: “Intoxication with political, financial, emotional, parental, any form of power has always interested me, as well as the inevitable misuse of such powers.” Now that’s a whole different ball game.

Landlords, bank managers, tax collectors, government bureaucrats, company bosses, school teachers, employers and editors — any number of people wield great power over us.

And, as Lindy England proved at Abu Ghraib, Myra Hindley in Yorkshire or Irma Wiese at Bergen Belsen, power doesn’t only target men for corruption. You probably know some women who should be physically isolated from wielding any power. Our own 14-year-old political history has dumped some incredibly dangerous power-bitches on us.

Omotoso is not alone in saying not only heads of state become power crazed. There is a growing school of thought among psychologists and behavioural scientists that investing power in people should be done with far greater circumspection and care than is the norm today. A good track record does not mean you’ll keep on winning. Glory in the past does not equate to greatness in the future.

Psychological changes take place in people’s minds that lead to notions of grandiosity, narcissism, pathological inability to take criticism, the very real belief that they know what is best under all circumstances, that they are destined for great deeds and that they operate, and are entitled to operate, beyond the boundaries of normal moral behaviour.

We have all seen this time and time again. “And the longer they stay in (power), the stronger these tendencies seem to become,” says Kole. In fact, Lord Owen argues, pointing to Bob Mugabe among others, that the final outcome is absolute “incompetence in carrying out policy”.

As South Africa contemplates power shifts in the new year not only in the political battlefield, but in companies, financial institutions (as crisis after crisis is hitting them), public service and the Fourth Estate, we need to be watchful of those becoming deranged by power; for those losing their grip on reality that previously characterised them as good colleagues.

Someone recently said to me, “leadership isn’t easy”, oblivious to the fact that he isn’t a leader at all, merely someone with power over others. Martin Luther King Jnr said the same thing, though he knew what he was talking about. That’s what power can do to you.

Kole Omotoso mentions a novel he wrote 10 years ago in which some African heads of state accidentally end up in a mental hospital. Echoes of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest float about, don’t they?

He also mentions that the great Nigerian writer and poet, Wole Soyinka, once called for Nigerian heads of state to submit themselves to public medical mental and physical exams. But let’s not stop there, Wole. They should be compulsory for everyone who is put in power over others. And they should be conducted more often the longer the wielder of power stays in power.

By Llewellyn Kriel