4 ANALYSIS & FEATURE TUESDAY MAY 26, 2009

Why are so many people in power tainted?

The corrupting influence of office is well evidenced, and the problem is global
By Chris Williams

What do British and Korean

politicians have in common with
American business leaders and
Greek Orthodox clergy? Their
names all appear with any
Google search of “corruption.”
Why are so many people in pow-
er tainted?
In 1770, in a speech to the
House of Lords, British Prime
Minister William Pitt said,
“Unlimited power is apt to cor-
rupt the minds of those who pos-
sess it.” A century later Lord
Acton elaborated, “Power tends
to corrupt, and absolute power
corrupts absolutely. Great men
are almost always bad men.”
They would have smiled last
week as two British peers were
suspended from the Lords for an
alleged willingness to take
bribes to influence law-making.
The last time the Lords took
such action was in 1642. In par-
allel, numerous MPs were ac-
cused of cheating with their ex-
pense claims, many are resign-
ing, and the commons Speaker
was forced to leave office, which
has not happened since 1695.
But does power corrupt, or do
corrupt people tend to seek pow-
er?
The corrupting influence of of-
fice seems well evidenced, and
the problem is global. Fine
words from world leaders a
decade ago, in the archives of
the U.N. General Assembly, ring
hollow in the light of subsequent
events. Speaking in 1995,
President Bizimungu of
Rwanda “stresses that mankind
must never again witness the
horrors of genocide and ethnic
cleansing.” In 2004 he was sen-
tenced to 15 years in prison for
embezzlement, inciting violence
and associating with criminals.
Narasima Rao, argued that “de-
veloping countries must be ade-
quately represented on the
Security Council.” He then be-
came the first Indian prime
minister to receive a prison sen-
tence, for bribing opposition
MPs. When I met him in 1994
he was grumpy, but appreciated
for speaking many local lan-
guages and hearing complaints
of corruption directly from rural
people.
In 1999, Peru’s Japanese
president, Alberto Fujimori,
proclaimed that “the 20th cen-
tury had been deeply scarred by
enduring human failures: by
greed and lust for power, by hot-
blooded hatreds and stone cold
hearts.” By 2000, he was
deemed “morally unfit for office”
and charged with “illicit enrich-
ment and inappropriate use of
public funds.” Last month he
Chris Williams
● Chris Williams is based at
the Centre for International
Education and Research,
University of Birmingham,
United Kingdom, and has
also held posts at the univer-
sities of London, Bristol,
Cambridge, Cairo and the
United Nations University
Leadership Academy. His
books include “Leaders of in-
tegrity: ethics and a code for
global leadership” (2001,
UNU Amman), and
“Leadership Accountability in
a Globalizing World” (2006,
Palgrave Macmillan,
London).
● He can be reached at
chrisunula@yahoo.com.
was given a 25-year sentence for
ordering killings and kidnap-
pings.
There also seem to be many
able, honest leaders who never
quite get to the top. Gandhi nev-
er became a head of state. When
a lone voice campaigning to get
action on climate change, Al
Gore introduced himself with
the phrase, “I used to be the next
President of America.” When we
try to think of a head of state
who has not left office under a
cloud, the names Aung San Su
Kyi and Nelson Mandela arise.
But that proposes another in-
convenient truth: that we need
to put potential leaders in prison
for decades, and curtail the
number of years in office, before
they behave properly.
There are many reasons why
we need to understand this
problem. One is that people of
ability and integrity will not be
interested to seek powerful posi-
tions, if they believe they will be-
come tainted. In their book “It
takes a candidate: why women
don’t run for office,” Jennifer
Lawless and Richard Fox dis-
cuss the obvious “glass ceilings”
for women. Similar books have
self-explanatory titles — “The
Girls Guide to Being a Boss
(Without Being a Bitch)” and
“Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner
Office.” But these books do not
explore whether a fear of becom-
ing corrupt is gender-related.
Did Groucho Marx provide a
more insightful analysis — “I
don’t want to belong to a club
that accepts people like me as
members.”?
Whether or not leaders are in-
trinsically corrupt, or victims of
circumstance, we need to make
an important distinction, pro-
posed by Howard Gardner in
“Leading Minds.” There are
“leaders of a wider society,” such
as politicians, but also “domain
leaders” who become elites in a
specific area of expertise, such as
Einstein and Picasso. In general,
the latter do not seem to engage
in widespread corruption. Why?
The conduct of hapless
Iranian Minister of Finance, Ali
Kordan, who last year falsely
claimed to hold an Honorary
Doctor of Law from Oxford,
might provide a clue. Domain
leaders are usually less inept
than politicians. Kordan put his
fake certificate on his office
wall, complete with grammati-
cal and spelling mistakes.
Dominic Johnson provides a
more subtle explanation from
evolutionary psychology, which
suggests that the seeds of cor-
ruption are sown in the charac-
teristics of those who seek pow-
er. In “Overconfidence and War”
he shows how leaders intrinsi-
cally suffer from “positive illu-
sions” — arrogance — which
makes them overreach them-
selves and take decisions that
are doomed to fail. There are
also psychological experiments
which indicate that intelligent
children are more inclined to
cheat than others, that an abili-
ty to cheat correlates with the
traits that are supposed to
make a good leader, and that
animals can cheat.
Intriguing insights come from
studies of fish. Experiments,
like that by Jens Krause of
Leeds University, identify
leader and follower fish, and
note how a bold leader will en-
courage more cautious followers
to forage for food in a more ad-
venturous way. But the re-
searchers do not consider that
many of those brave leaders will
probably get eaten. In terms of
keeping out of trouble, it is
smarter to be a follower fish.
But the research also shows
that the behavior of follower fish
can affect that of leaders. We
are not always helpless by-
standers and can, to some ex-
tent, influence the behavior of
leaders by not mindlessly fol-
lowing.
It seems most likely that lead-
ership corruption stems from a
combination of personal charac-
teristics, and circumstance. In
his book “In Retrospect: The
Tragedy and Lessons of
Vietnam,” one of the main archi-
tects of the debacle, Robert
McNamara, talks of “the fateful
choices (made by President
Johnson) that locked the United
States onto a path ... that ulti-
mately destroyed his presiden-
cy.” Leaders get trapped in an
inescapable downward spiral,
which I call “cumulative lock-
in.” This stems from intuition or
belief-based decisions, then de-
fended through misinformation,
and then leaders start to deceive
themselves and others. To this
mire can be added “sunk cost
theory” which explains how
leaders will not do U-turns if
they have invested political and
personal capital in bad deci-
sions. Building Concorde and
Vietnam are familiar examples.
But perhaps academics will
always make the understanding
of simple problems unnecessari-
ly convoluted. A lucid if pes-
simistic analysis comes from
Niayesh Yazdani: “They are like
cats. However much they get,
they will always want some
more. If they think another cat
has something they don’t, they’ll
want more. And whatever you
do to stop it, they will find a way
around it.” Niayesh, from Iran,
is 11. She probably should, but
certainly should not be a future
finance minister of Iran.
At this moment in Korean
history this is a topic that people
would probably prefer to ignore,
but it is worth noting some local
good news.
The 2008 report of the anti-
corruption NGO, Transparency
International, singled out Korea
because it had made significant
progress, but it also stated that
the United Kingdom had
dropped from 12th to 16th posi-
tion. For her Ph.D., London
University student Yun-joo Lee
interviewed Lee Man-sub, for-
mer speaker of the Korean
National Assembly: “If our lead-
ers want to lift Korea to be a ful-
ly developed country, there
must be no corruption or
bribery. In the future, this will
be the most crucial thing.” In
her public survey, Koreans put
“corruption” first and “leader-
ship skills” second, above the
normal concern, “economic de-
velopment.”
As the West loses moral au-
thority, is the East gaining it?
Will we soon hear Korea com-
plaining about having to deal
with corrupt nations in Europe?
There is a current Italian joke
that, “A fish rots from the head
down”, which echoes a tradition-
al Korean saying, “If upstream
is clean, downstream will be
clean.” If we in the west are not
careful, we might become the
rotting fish swimming against
an Easterly current.

Rest in peace, President Roh Moo-hyun

Prosecutor-General Im Chae-jin offers his respects to the late former president at a makeshift
mortuary in the Seoul Museum of History, central Seoul, yesterday. Park Hyun-koo/The Korea Herald

Mourners holding flowers wait for their turn to pay tribute to the late Christian nuns pay their respects to former President Roh Moo-hyun at a mortuary at Bongha vil- Former First Lady Kwon Yang-sook goes to the community center, where
former president at Bongha village on Sunday. Joint Press Corps lage in Gimhae, South Gyeongsang Province, yesterday. Joint Press Corps Roh’s body lay in state, at Bongha village yesterday. Joint Press Corps