Sunday, September 20, 2009

Power Corrupts

Lord Acton: Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

But power is like a mirror. If you are potentially ready to be corrupted, power gives you the chance; if you are not potentially corruptible, then it is impossible for power to corrupt you. However, human life has many strange aspects to it. Only the potentially corruptible person moves toward power. The potentially good person has no desire for it because good can manifest without power. There is no need for good to have power. The will-to-power is the need of a corrupted being, because he knows that without power he will not be able to do what he wants to do.

Anything that needs power from outside is not good. It is something intrinsically impotent; it will live on borrowed life.

Kahlil Gibran made little story of beauty and ugliness, that ugliness took beauty's clothes and run away Only ugliness needs something to hide itself behind, to help it pretend---to have a false mask.

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Reading List

  • Alain de Botton: The Consolations of Philosophy
  • Alec Wilkinson: The Happiest Man in the World
  • Bhagavad Gita As It Is
  • Daniel C Dennett: Breaking the Spell
  • Daniel C Dennett: Consciousness Explained
  • Daniel C Dennett: Darwin's Dangerous Idea
  • Daniel C Dennett: Freedom Evolves
  • David Weeks: Eccentrics
  • Edward O. Wilson: On Human Nature
  • Friedrich Schiller: Essays (The German Library)
  • G. I. Gurdijieff: Life Is Real Only Then, When "I Am"
  • Hil Washburn, ed: The Many Faces of Wisdom
  • John Kekes: The Art of Life
  • John Strohmeier: Divine Harmony (Pythagoras)
  • Matthew Stewart: The Truth about Everything
  • Michel Foucault: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth
  • Michel Foucault: The Hermeneutics of the Subject
  • Michel Waldberg: Gurdjieff: An Approach to His Ideas
  • Osho: The Book of Understanding
  • Osho: The Book of Wisdom
  • P. D. Ouspensky: In Search of the Miraculous
  • P. D. Ouspensky: The Fourth Way
  • Paul C. Vitz: Faith of the Fatherless
  • Pierre Hadot: What Is Ancient Philosophy (tr: Michael Chase)
  • Robert Wright: Nonzero: the Logic of Human Destiny
  • Robert Wright: The Evolution of God
  • Robert Wright: The Moral Animal
  • Seneca: Dialogues and Essays
  • Seneca: Letters from a Stoic
  • The Upanishads
  • Xenophon: A History of My Time

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We love philosophy because we love wisdom: it will set us free.