Reading Shakespeare we see that power can be poisonous. In the case of Bush and Cheney testosterone can be poisonous.
A new understanding of power is replacing our old understanding of power as the ability to manipulate and control. The old understanding of power has become counterproductive to our evolution. What used to be good medicine has become poisonous. Pursuit of the ability to manipulate and control now produces only violence and destruction.
America is dumb. It's like a dumb puppy that has big teeth that can bite and hurt you - aggressive. My daughter is four; my boy is one. I'd like them to see America as a toy - a broken toy. Investigate it a little, check it out, get this feeling, and then get out.
Politicians - power itself - are abject because they merely embody the profound contempt people have for their own lives. One should be grateful to the politicians for accepting the abstractness of power, and ridding others of its burden. This inevitably kills them but they get their revenge by passing onto others the corpse of power.
It is not the misuse of power that is evil; the very existence of power is an evil.
If this power could be used for good, it wouldn't be this power.
The power is detested, and miserable the life, of him who wishes to be feared rather than to be loved.
That's what Judith Herman is saying, and she's absolutely right. Power then breeds an intensification of all because the power can never be absolute power - to some extent it's stymied - but the isolation while in power becomes even more dangerous. Think of it as a vicious circle. The power intensifies these tendencies and the tendencies become more dangerous because of the power.
The attraction of power is heady, addictive. And as we know from real life, it can be a disease. A horrific disease.
I feel like a goddess, jailed in her Olympus. Little wonder how the gods toyed with humans. Toyed with women, to watch them squirm, pollinate the seeds of despair; toyed with men, to satiate their Seven Deadly Sins.
Contact with men who wield power and authority still leaves an intangible sense of repulsion. It's very like being in close proximity to fecal matter, the fecal embodiment of something unmentionable, and you wonder what it is made of and when it acquired its historically sacred character.
