The Ordinary Madness of Power
There is a strange illness that touches almost every age, every people, and almost every individual: the fascination with power. Crowds push and jostle, even kill each other, to seize the reins of the Leviathan, that monstrous creature we call the State, or any other entity capable of multiplying the consequences of a single human choice. Yet no one is forced into it. Nobody truly obliges us to take on this infinite, crushing, terrifying responsibility. Candidates step forward on their own, hands raised, as if the abyss were a balcony instead of a cliff.
The decisive question is not how to govern, but what drives people to want to govern. For this desire, when stripped of its disguises, reveals a primitive psychological mechanism, a grammar of elementary emotions dressed up as grandeur. Once this engine is unmasked, the very nature of power appears for what it truly is: a crushing responsibility, impossible to bear without failure. From this lucidity arises a simple and radical philosophical demand: to refuse the race toward the Leviathan until we understand the horror of its moral weight.
The Motivations Behind the Quest for Power
The Mirage of Power
The first error is disarmingly simple: confusing direction with possession. We believe that to lead is to dominate, accomplish, or control. Yet political power gives nothing real. It lends a temporary façade of control in exchange for a moral debt beyond comprehension. The one at the top thinks he is holding the instrument. In truth, the instrument holds him. Institutions, interests, bureaucratic routines, economic forces, invisible loyalties, all compose a machine of which the operator is only a cog. A human being does not grow through power; he shrinks into it, reduced to the shadow of the role he pretends to inhabit. It is not an ascent, but a narrowing down to the size of the faults to come.
The Flight From Fragility
Beneath this mirage lies another logic: the pursuit of power as a defensive strategy. Many seek power to be subject only to superior forces, rare and distant, perhaps even inaccessible. The calculation is simple: if I rise high enough, I will face only a handful of giant players. The horizon clears of diffuse threats. This strategy grows out of fragility and a realistic knowledge of social life, where predators abound. By climbing, one hopes to fall under the yoke of fewer sharks. But the calculation is childish. It replaces one vulnerability with another, rarer but more ferocious, and mistakes fewer enemies for less danger. Fewer adversaries often means stronger adversaries.
The Emotion of Altitude
Power produces a raw sensation of elevation above strangers. One feels higher than a crowd of people known neither by name nor by face. This emotion of altitude is a joy without real substance, the sheer pleasure of believing oneself above others. What is the point of “ruling” over two million strangers you will never meet and know nothing about? This abstract superiority disguised as concrete sovereignty is childish. Here the principle outweighs the reality. The idea “I rule a people” masks the fact that one rules nothing tangible, only statistical symbols. Real domination of concrete beings is impossible at such scale. What remains is a positional fantasy, not real control over lives.
The Intoxication of History
Another engine is the morbid excitement of inscribing one’s name in the collective story. To decide “historical” matters flatters the ego. We confuse the thrill of a moment with the value of a life. The illusion takes the form of a promise of immortality: a treaty signed, a war launched, a reform proclaimed, a monument unveiled. But what are these traces worth after death? Posterity is no salvation, only a broken mirror where scattered reflections remain without a face. To revel in this prospect is to accept a funeral distraction. Public glory has never saved a private conscience. It buys neither peace, nor truth, nor repair for the harm committed in the name of good.
The Prestige of Influential Circles
Power also seduces through its rituals. To be president, minister, diplomat, general, is to circulate among layers where titles serve as totems. Respect is exchanged in coded gestures, recognition flows by rank, and the inner circle is cultivated as a guarantee of importance. This prestige is symbolic capital that replaces value with appearance. The goal is no longer to serve, but to be seen as “great.” Banquets, delegations, dashboards, press releases, protocol greetings, all this becomes an internal currency of esteem that substitutes itself for justice. It is theater, where the costume makes the role, and the role devours the person.
Primitive Pride and Its Moral Misfire
At the heart of these motivations lies a stubborn pride. It resembles the vanity of a species still chained to its tribal reflexes. One feels “proud” to stand in the high place, to hold the baton, to command the crowd. This pride is primitive because it ignores a moral obviousness: those who accept power should be pitied, not envied, and if they have courage, it lies in daring to shoulder such a burden. A commanding position is not a windfall. It is a massive moral risk, an almost certain exposure to injustice, a multiplication of irreparable consequences. Pride, in this context, is a misreading. It rejoices in a privilege where one should tremble before a charge.
We must invert the affective grammar. It is not the absence of power that should humiliate, but power itself that should cause unease. Not because acting is impious, but because acting almost inevitably harms countless innocents who cannot be seen or compensated. Pride crawls low, lucidity climbs high. The more we grasp what power demands, the less we glorify it, the more we measure its sadness and its danger.
A Primitive and Superficial Psychology
Gather all these motives now. The mirage of mastery, the flight from fragility, the emotion of altitude, the intoxication of history, the prestige of circles, the pride of being above. Together they form a primitive and superficial psychology. Primitive, because they answer basic signals of dominance and belonging. Superficial, because they confuse signs with realities, public inscription with value, the impression of strength with moral strength. What is sought is not true good. What is sought are the sensations of good, the decorations of good, the narratives of good. Power becomes a theater where one plays at saving, while in fact administering unpredictable, often irreparable consequences.
The Nature of Power as a Crushing Responsibility
The Voluntary Burden
What makes power morally terrifying is that it is voluntarily assumed. Nobody today is forced to become president, minister, general, or even mayor. Yet everywhere, men and women compete for this burden, without trembling, as if they ignored the weight of what they ask for. This unconsciousness is the ordinary madness of power. One accepts to hold a weapon that fires far and wide. One pulls levers whose trajectories cross invisible lives. What elementary morality would forbid for a visible act is accepted for abstract decisions. The costume softens the scruple, distance dilutes the guilt.
The Fundamental Perversion: Desiring an Impossible Responsibility
The true madness lies here. To desire power is to desire a responsibility that exceeds human capacity. The actions of a state, a large organization, a security apparatus, or an economic empire propagate across time and space, crossing causal chains no one can anticipate. Every mistake is multiplied, every injustice acquires an inertia that outlives its author. One enters a regime of irreversibility. No repair can perfectly undo a destructive policy, a poorly judged war, a reform that shatters lives. This responsibility is not relative, it is absolute. It is not negotiable, it is final. To want it is already to fail the humility such a burden demands.
One might reply that someone must govern. A serious objection. Yet it does not justify celebrating power. It only justifies, in cases where there is no alternative, a lucid acceptance of sacrifice, under draconian conditions, with real checks and limits, and a clear awareness of inevitable imperfection. To confuse this tragic necessity with a vocation to greatness, that is the perversion. Power, if at times necessary, is no privilege. It is a useful penalty. One endures it to prevent worse, not to ennoble oneself.
Awareness and Philosophical Urgency
Inverting the Gaze
Before speaking of methods, constitutions, or procedures, we must correct the affect. As long as power is desired as a good, nothing will work. It must be seen as a moral abyss. Not a dignity, but an exposure to incommensurable fault. Not an apotheosis, but a slippery slope where good intentions turn into machinery that produces injustice despite themselves. The first true reform is not institutional. It is psychological and ethical. It consists in stripping the function of prestige, making it socially normal to admire not the rank but the ability to refuse it. We should envy those who know themselves too human to govern, not those who believe themselves strong enough to do it.
Reformulating Gratitude and Complaint
If someone still accepts this burden, our gaze must remain double. On one side, there is measured gratitude for the courage it may take to embrace such danger. On the other, there is an anticipated complaint for the inevitable injustice that follows any great decision. We should stop weaving laurel crowns and start offering brakes and shields. Fewer applauses, more safeguards. Fewer red carpets, more moral speed bumps. Greatness is not measured by the number of decisions taken, but by the number of decisions resisted. There is more value in not harming than in acting to shine.
Redefining Success
Political success should not be measured in growth curves or reform counters. It should be defined by the density of prudence infused into the system, by the amount of suffering avoided, by the number of temptations of power survived. A good leader does not maximize the imprint of his will. He minimizes the imprint of his mistakes. The decisive criterion is not scale, but reversibility. What can be corrected is worth more than what dazzles. What protects strangers is worth more than what fascinates insiders. And if the irreversible cannot be avoided, at least let it be strictly necessary, under reasons tested against passions, against the intoxication of history, against primitive pride.
Conclusion
The race toward the Leviathan is explained less by love of the good than by love of its appearances. We want to feel mastery, to protect ourselves from diffuse threats, to hover above strangers, to inscribe our name in the story, to mingle in circles where respect is distributed by rank, to taste the pride of being on top. All this is a bouquet of primitive and superficial emotions. None of it increases justice. All of it increases the risk of injustice.
The simplest truth is also the hardest. To desire power is already suspect. To accept it may sometimes be necessary, but only as one accepts a penalty, not a reward. We should learn to pity those who risk it, and praise only the lucid courage of those who do not believe themselves fit for such a burden, or who accept it only on the condition of treating it as an unavoidable evil to be contained with all their strength. Until this affective inversion takes place, until pride outweighs prudence, until the intoxication of history outshines the awareness of innocents, we will go on celebrating what should trouble us, rushing into a responsibility whose very nature calls for restraint.
To stop the race is already to govern better. Not because inaction is a virtue, but because the desire for power distorts everything it touches. The task is clear. We must strip power of its ornaments, present it plainly to those who covet it, and make prudence not a shameful brake but the very honor of decision. Only then can we open the serious discussion: within what limits, under what guarantees, for what strictly necessary reasons can one accept, for a time, to hold the controls of a mechanism that surpasses any reasonable soul. Until this question is faced, everything else is decoration.