Power Corrupts

The idea that power is corrupting is an abstract and vague notion that nevertheless finds wide agreement. For one thing, popular conceptions of power have tended on the negative for good reason: our market society likes to posit an exchange mythology in which everything good can be had by honest and consensual exchange, and the raw exercise of power is to be shamed and sanctioned. This is a directive for the broader populace of course; the powerful can go on exercising every last bit of power they can get their hands on and they have every right to. 

It is the uneven application of this myth in the first place that lends much of the force to market power: for exploitative exchange to work without triggering too much hostility, the exploited have to believe they are getting a fair shake in the deal.  

Though the proper and responsible exercise of power remains an important aspect of all political life, there remains an important lesson within the aphorism. To answer in kind an abstract and vague foreboding, we'll posit an abstract and vague explanation: the accumulation of power requires a certain mastery of the elements, of the social and political environment and the natural and technical levers that those environments make use of to traverse the natural world. The repeated exercise of that power draws on those stores built up by that mastery, taking the system away from the the original processes of mastery and towards the procedural exercise of the accumulated power itself in the form of permissions and inherited power and amassed resources and the like, ultimately winding down the mastery and driving the system towards the dispensation and dispersion of the accumulated power. 

The corruption is a change in the nature of that thing.