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Zen-ish Thoughts About Political, Corporate, and Religious Power

The Problem

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" – Lord Acton, 1877.

"Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts, but that it is magnetic to the corruptible." – Frank Herbert, in Dune, 1985.

Both of the above are true, but there is something even more fundamental than that in play. Corruption aside, people who are attracted to power are people who are attracted to power. Power itself is problematic, even in the absence of corruption.

Imagine a personal relationship with an obvious power gradient, like the idealized 1950s marriage. It may have seemed glorious then, even to many of the women who were harmed and hemmed in by it, but in today's sensibilities we see it as unhealthy. I think we have it right this time.

There are no two people who are peers in all the many, complex dimension of human life. Someone will be better at managing the finances, and someone will be better at managing the household. Sometimes that's the same person. Someone will make more money, and the other person less. Someone will be more skilled in their handling of relationship challenges, and the other person less so. Someone will be a better cook. Someone will be a better vacation planner. The list is endless. But no item on that list should read, "One is not as good at X, so they should just shut up and go along." Let alone asserting that who is good at what is an unvarying law of nature based on gender.

Leveraging people's individual strengths in a relationship is not the same thing as adopting a prescribed, across the board, rigid power hierarchy. That's not healthy. And that's exactly how we run companies, countries, religions, publishing, movie and music production, colleges, pretty much every human enterprise.

Will a sensible couple be practical enough to default certain tasks to one partner and others to the other? Certainly. If one person craves power, will that get distorted into something unhealthy very quickly? Certainly. Should the "junior partner" in a particular domain be the silent partner, the unconsulted partner? Certainly not. Will the person less skilled in and less experienced in a given area nonetheless sometimes have really good ideas? Certainly. For the health of the relationship, should both partners be included in a discussion of anything consequential and many things that are not? Yes.

Companies and other organizations all the way up to whole societies face these same dynamics. A division of labor is necessary and helpful. A gross power imbalance is destructive. And … companies through societies have gross power imbalances by design.

Now, add it all together: Politicians are very likely to be attracted to power, or they'd be doing something else. Power is problematic in relationships, including those between politicians and the people they are supposed to serve. Politicians are very likely to be corruptible, or we wouldn't see what we do see every day in the news. Corruption undermines public trust, which undermines society itself. Politicians operate in an environment that overflows with opportunities, invitations, and even requirements to be corrupted – this is very well documented. All together not a great starting point for good governance of a country, or of a company or any organization.

Why has democracy repeatedly devolved into abusive oligarchy, even though the premise of democracy is egalitarian and humanistic? Why has communism also repeatedly devolved into abusive oligarchy, even though the premise of communism is to have an egalitarian, classless society? Why has religion so reliably devolved into an abusive oligarchy, even though the premise of each religion is that it is the way to make every human life the best it can be? Why are companies so likely to be run as exploitive oligarchies, even if they have a sincerely held prosocial, pro-pet, pro-planet, pro-health, or other positive purpose? Why are even agencies and charitable organizations so likely to be bureaucratic oligarchies, even if they have a service-oriented mission?

I put it to you that the reason for these things is that all of these inherently have very steep power gradients. The people in positions of power in each of these enterprises are primarily people who are drawn to power. Power is problematic even in the absence of corruption. Corruption, like corrosion, just makes things worse.

There is no such thing as not having power gradients and leaders, and this becomes more and more the case the larger our companies, countries, religions, and the world population get. So, how can we function with strong leadership, but with less power mongering?

The Exceptions

What happens when someone enters the most power-oriented parts of the world – big business, federal government, conservative religion – and that person is genuinely indifferent to the accumulation of power, and just wants to do a good job? This is a very hard question to answer with examples, because such people are extraordinarily rare. Not rare in the way that great athletes are rare – rare in that such people typically avoid high power environments, and the few who enter them tend to fare poorly and therefore disappear from our view.

It is worth looking carefully at a few examples that we can find. Unfortunately, they do not reveal a model ready to be copied, but at least they show that principled leadership is possible. When it happens, how does it happen, and what does it cost?

Jimmy Carter is the poster child for decency in American politics. It's not a coincidence that he is also the poster child for what to not do to be successful in American politics. History has rendered him as an incompetent, a one-term cautionary tale, a colossal failure.

He personally brokered peace between Egypt and Israel, returned the Panama Canal from US control to Panama, made human rights an explicit factor in foreign policy, made the Department of Energy and the Department of Education into Cabinet agencies, and pushed hard for energy conservation and sustainability. His post-presidential life was defined by decades of genuine service: Habitat for Humanity, election monitoring in other countries, quiet diplomacy, leading by example. His work after being president is regarded with enormous warmth, reflective of his own warm, genuine and abundantly acted upon compassion. But "don't be like him", politicians are warned.

The Iran hostage crisis (not his doing, but he didn't promptly resolve it), the Middle East oil embargo (not his doing, but he didn't promptly resolve it), "stagflation" (largely inherited from Nixon and Ford, addressed by Carter with mixed results), and his weak response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (totally on him) dominate his legacy as president. It's fair to say that if he had been more of a power monger, and took more power-oriented approaches to these problems, they might have come to better conclusions. His reputation would have even if he failed.

People want their leaders to be powerful, even though they do not want to be imposed upon by powerful leaders. They fantasize that the power will always directed at someone else, and on their behalf. A leader who accomplishes little, powerfully, or who objectively fails or does harm powerfully, is more highly regarded than a leader who accomplishes much but does not put power on display. Trump and Biden put this into high relief. We don't seek leaders so much as we seek champions and call them leaders.

Would someone who was more of a conventional leader than Carter have been able to facilitate the first ever peace accord between ancient enemies, even as the allies of one of those parties pressed hard against it? Several tired. None succeeded. Would a conventional leader have had the decency to restore coercively held property (the Panama Canal) back to its rightful owner against domestic political pressure to keep it? Others considered the idea and backed way from it. Would a conventional leader have moved the country in the right direction on energy? Carter put solar panels on the White House roof, and Reagan took them off. Would a power mongering leader have elevated Education to a Cabinet level concern? Carter did, Reagan undermined it (previously in California and again as President), and Trump has blown it up. What Carter's story shows is not that decency overwhelmingly wins in an environment that is structurally hostile to it, but that even in hostile territory, decency sometimes produces good things that nothing else can. It also shows about us, collectively, that we would rather dismiss those who deviate from convention than learn from them.

Václav Havel did not just survive. He succeeded. He went from imprisoned Soviet dissident to president of Czechoslovakia and later of the Czech Republic, overseeing an unprecedented and peaceful transition from communism to democracy, despite significant political opposition.

Havel was outspoken in support of the LGBTQ community, and in opposition to the mistreatment of ethnic Germans – both of which were politically costly positions. He wrote extensively, before and during his presidency, about how power distorts the people who hold it and the institutions that channel it.

Havel became one of the most admired heads of state of the twentieth century, a moral reference point that extended far beyond his own country. Yet with all of that, he was replaced by someone who opposed LGBTQ rights, granted amnesty in a number of corruption cases, and had been made to resign his role as PM due to financial scandals. That is, following on the heels of Havel's excellent counter-example, his opponent-successor was just another normal politician.

At home and abroad, the political world that celebrated Havel produced nothing similar there or anywhere else. What they said they valued in him – principled leadership, transparency, genuine moral seriousness – turned out not to be what they actually selected for. Havel is honored, but not emulated, which is pretty empty.

Let's move from politics to business.

Yvon Chouinard grew up in a working-class family, taught himself blacksmithing as a teenager because he couldn't afford the climbing gear he wanted, and spent his twenties living on roughly fifty cents a day, climbing mountains and surfing. He eventually built a company, Patagonia, organized around values he actually held, and refused at every turn to compromise those values for growth. He was able to control Patagonia from its founding in 1973 until 2022 because he never took outside investment. When he retired, he transferred ownership to a nonprofit structured to direct all profits to environmental causes – giving up approximately $3 billion dollars in personal wealth in the process. He called it "making Earth the only shareholder".

Since Chouinard retired, despite the nonprofit's charter, the company has begun to show ordinary corporate pressures reasserting themselves. In 2024 it gave about a hundred employees 72 hours notice to decide to relocate or leave the company, citing 2 to 3 X overstaffing in their customer service department, and concerns about remote work, while in the midst of more sweeping operational changes due to slowed growth. Somehow, a company that was massively successful under Chouinard, couldn't balance its books without laying people off, just two years into being run by "real business people".

Aaron Feuerstein inherited Malden Mills, a textile company in Massachusetts. Under his leadership, the company invented PolarFleece in collaboration with Patagonia (run by Chouinard, above) in the late 1970s. Feuerstein deliberately chose not to patent PolarFleece, allowing competitors to produce it freely – reasoning that wide adoption of this new fabric was better for everyone than a monopoly was for him. If the company had not been not family-owned, he would have been fired for that. He later regretted that decision, but simply determined that his company would have to become the best at making it.

When the factory was substantially damaged by fire in December 1995, he invested the insurance money to fund keeping all 3,000 employees on full pay for 90 days and continued health insurance for 180 days, to spare them and the small towns they lived in from sudden economic collapse. This was widely celebrated at the time. It cost $25 million dollars that otherwise would have gone to physically rebuilding the factory or at least in large part to Feuerstein as an immense early retirement package. It took almost two years to rebuild the factory, but he did, and resumed operations in September 1977. Many former employees were happy to come back.

Now for the unsurprising part: His exceptional act of decency cost him his job once he turned to investors to help rebuild the company. The new owners got a functioning company with a strong product, a new factory, loyal customers, and loyal employees. Within 12 years, professional management had run the company into bankruptcy despite still having contracts on the books worth tens of millions of dollars. Under their "leadership", the pension plan became 50% underfunded by the time the company collapsed, leaving the employees Feuerstein had fought to protect with about half the retirement funds they had been promised and depended upon. The "real business people" who ostensibly knew better than the "nutjob" who gave away $25 million reduced the company to an asset sale and screwed the employees.

Bob Moore built Bob's Red Mill from nothing – he started the company at age 49, after being a gas station owner and a J.C. Penney manager. He was driven by religious conviction about fairness, and a genuine love of whole grains. Like Chouinard, he built the company without outside shareholders. He refused repeated acquisition offers from large corporations that would have made him very wealthy. On his 81st birthday in 2010, he transferred ownership to his employees through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan, telling them they had earned it. By 2020 the company was 100% employee-owned. When Moore died in 2024 at 94, the company was thriving – 700 employee-owners, over $100 million in annual sales, products in 70 countries. Moore's story is one of complete success, and is completely repeatable. Here is why it won't be repeated.

Building a company that has a widely respected product line, millions of happy customers, employees that are well taken care of, along with personal wealth for the person who led the company, which sounds amazingly ideal to me, is not even a goal in most businesses. It's not what success looks like because none of that matters as much as the fact-free fantasy that someone with the "right" business sense could have made it to $250 million instead of "only" $100 million. Because actually great product is subordinated to what's good enough that we can hype it up in marketing. Because having appreciative, happy customers is subordinated to just the sheer number of customers. Because having employees who are well taken care of is subordinated to concentration of wealth at the top. Because personal wealth for the person who led the company is subordinated to having even more money than one could ever use. Because cheaper products and lower employee costs would have produced more profit, and customers and employees are just a means to that end.

Moore's success certainly relied on many operational considerations, but like Chouinard's and Feuerstein's, what makes Moore's story distinctive is that the person with the most power and money did not think that power and money were the most important things. They matter a lot. There is no success without them. But they are not all that matters, and in fact it is power and money that are just the means to the end rather than customers and employees. We have it exactly inverted. There is no purpose for anything humans do except that it serves humans and human values. Power, money, politics, business, religion, … these are all just tools, not purposes.

Moving from business to religion, Thích Nhất Hạnh is not simply someone who chose a quiet life outside of power. A Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist, he was exiled from South Vietnam in 1966 as a direct result of his vocal opposition to the Vietnam War and his refusal to align with either side of the conflict. Hạnh's 39-year exile, however punishing, also freed him to build something entirely outside the structure rather than try to reform it from within. He built his influence entirely without institutional support, through writing, teaching, and the community he founded at Plum Village in France. In this sense his story is closer to Carter's and Havel's than it might at first appear to be. Like them, he was inside a system with a power gradient that keeps people like him from having much influence. Like them, he paid a real price for following his own conscience instead of the system's inbuilt mechanisms.

Among the six people reviewed here, notice the structural conditions that made their decency nearly impossible in the first place, and the demise of decency in their absence. Carter and Havel both required a specific political moment. Neither of them would have emerged under usual conditions. Even so, they are exemplars. Even so, their example is not being followed. Chouinard and Moore both required the unusual freedom of never having to take outside investment, which is not something most company founders can do. Feuerstein required the protection of family ownership, and lost it the moment he needed outside capital. Hạnh was cast out of the system entirely, and had to do his work while in exile. None of them has been adopted by mainstream business as an example to follow.

If you suggested following their examples in a boardroom today, you would no longer be welcome in that boardroom. If you suggested following their examples in a political planning meeting today, another candidate would be chosen. If you suggested following their examples in a religious leadership meeting today, you would be praised, and then things would proceed just as if you hand't said anything. The conditions for principled leadership are, in every case, rare and costly. The forces working against principled leadership are omnipresent, persistent, and powerful.

Six names, two or three of which you probably never heard before. And that is approximately the entire list for the history of the world. You may think of one or two others, and I'd be glad to hear them. Compile a list of the kindest, most beloved political leaders in history and examine it carefully. Even on this list, each entry contains a significant atrocity, either committed directly by them or occurring on their watch without serious resistance. Expand the frame to include everyone in a position of institutional authority – government officials, corporate executives, religious leaders, military commanders – and the pattern holds across every culture and every century.

The Conclusion

Now we are ready to answer what was asked above: How do we function with leadership, but with less power mongering? This is not a problem that gets solved. Like all persistent problems, it requires persistent management. We don't fix it. We refuse to stop governing it. You don't tend your garden by making one planting and digging out one weed. You tend to it day after day, season after season, year after year, or it turns into fertilizer for something that is not a garden at all.

The specific things we need to do are not mysterious. We need:

None of these are new ideas. All of them are subject to capture by the same power gradient they are meant to constrain. That is precisely why they require permanent tending rather than a one-time fix.

The power gradient will always be there. It is built into the size and complexity of the world we live in, and into the kind of animal we are. The question is not how to eliminate it – we can't – but whether, at any given moment, we are making things a little better or a little worse. In the institutions we build, in the people we elevate, in the behavior we excuse, and in moments, large and small, are we making things a little better or a little worse. That is the whole of the answer. It's mundane. It's boring. It's tedious. It's true. This has always been the whole, wholly unwelcome answer: it's up to all of us, all of the time, day after day. It's the culture governing its productions, not the productions somehow magically doing good things on their own. We make the culture every day by the sum of what we do and don't do.