Let us accept that british system
is the worst of possibilities, it’s a confluence of benefits from colonial atrocities,
racism, Christianity -instead of guiding- exploiting the situation for proselytizing,
anachronistic absurdities of monarchy that normalizes feudal values and spurious
ascriptive claims, nepotism and cronyism, a flawed parliament that reserves seats
for worst of people -and the gall to call them lords, and not the least patronizing
customs, traditions, from worst of religions and systems into ‘developed’ societies
hence severely degrading enlightening progressive efforts in poorer societies, as also nurturing
charlatans claiming to represent beleaguered people from across the world. Britain
has done good and bad to the world. Bad is worst, and it stands out. It really
is worst of possibilities, and it happens because lack of vigilance -taken in
by laziness of arrogance and exceptionalism as guiding light of the world -it
may have been true in scientific achievements century back but the world has firmly
moved on and looks back in amusement. Neo-liberal capitalism unleashed by Thatcher onto
the world, and now reaping the worst possibility by presenting vilest mediocre
puppets as leaders. Britain has just gone through a long post-colonial yawn of
indulgent excesses and is now startled out of its siesta to find all its claims
in shambles.
Sane people would have called for
general election to stop this calamitous fall of British politics. This absurd stampede to be PM by ticking all the right boxes just for overwhelming naked greed for power while the situation turn utterly ridiculous. Politics run
by people who are so isolated from reality that they come with new claims of absurdities
every day to startle with their appalling lack of presence, their lack of empathy
and their utter narcissism.
Quite coincidently I am reading this book Corruptible
-Who Gets Power And How It Changes Us by Brian Klaas. The book mentions
about famous Stanford University prison test conducted in 1971 (there is also a movie based on
this) wherein the volunteers who were given power become abusive. The experiment
claimed that demons are within us and that power lets them come out. Interestingly
in 2007 researchers in Western Kentucky University conducted the same
experiment, they replaced these words for the ad asking for volunteers “for a psychological study of prison life” with “for a psychological study”. In some town they placed “prison
life” ad while in other they placed “psychological study”. So, the idea was to
have people volunteering for “prison life” experiment while others for generic “psychological
study” experiment, and to see if there is any difference. What they found was extraordinary.
Those who responded to the prison experiment advertisement scored significantly
high on “aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and
social dominance and significantly lower on dispositional empathy and altruism”
by just including the word 'prison' they were able to attract disproportionately sadist
volunteers. The study may demonstrate that sadist people seek out power. Power could
be magnet for bad people rather than a force that turns good people bad. In this
understanding, power doesn’t corrupt -it attracts.
