Power is often framed as success: a visible sign of influence, wealth, and control. Yet what is celebrated locally as coherence—a leader’s authority, a nation’s strength, a company’s dominance—depends on incoherence at the global scale. For every gain of control, there is a widening asymmetry elsewhere. This is not accidental but structural: power sustains itself by creating dependency, vulnerability, and dissonance. The more power is accumulated, the more it requires environments of instability to justify its own continuation.
This is why inequity and suffering follow power as night follows day. The immediate beneficiaries may appear to flourish, but their security rests upon externalizing costs onto others—onto workers, onto ecosystems, onto future generations. The consequence is long-term systemic fragility. A culture of domination degrades the very substrate it depends upon, ensuring that the broader outcome for humanity and the planet is failure, not success. The celebration of power is thus a short-term illusion: it masks a deeper entropy.
You will rarely hear this in media. Their role as amplifiers of prevailing orders means they circulate the myth of power-as-success while ignoring the incoherence that underpins it. Insulated by profit imperatives, insecure in their own standing, and gullible to surface narratives, they function less as watchdogs than as echo chambers. Their gormless repetitions obscure the simple truth: what we call power is often just the organized management of decay.
The corruption of power, then, is not only moral but systemic. It is not simply that leaders become arrogant or institutions self-serving, though they do. It is that power itself requires the perpetuation of inequity, conflict, and disorder to survive. The aphorism “power corrupts” is accurate but incomplete. More precisely, power is corruption—an orientation that mistakes local advantage for universal good, and in so doing guarantees collective decline.
Daedelus Kite 