The Intoxication of Power
With the second book on Scruggs-gate due out this week, Saturday's Wall Street Journal ran this article addressing how power blinds people to their flaws. The first sentence of the article is basically the same question people continue to ask about Richard Scruggs:
Why do powerful people with so much to lose push so hard to squeeze out a little more gain for themselves?
According to the article, the problem is power itself. Interesting insights include:
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"Power makes people feel both psychologically invincible and psychologically invisible," adds Adam Galinsky, a professor of organizational behavior at Northwestern University's business school.
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Power, explains Prof. Galinsky, focuses people on their own internal goals—blinding them, in the process, to how others may view them.
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Being in a position of power also may make people feel that they can do no wrong. In recent experiments, Dana Carney, a psychologist at Columbia University's business school, has found that acquiring power makes people more comfortable committing acts they might otherwise be reluctant to commit, like lying or cheating. As people rise to a position of power, she has shown, their bodies generate more testosterone, a hormone associated with aggression and risk-taking, and less cortisol, a chemical that the body generates in response to stress.
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"Having power changes you physiologically, reducing your body's internal feedback that tells you which actions are good or bad," says Prof. Carney. "Power temporarily intoxicates you."
Advance reviews of Curtis Wilkie's Fall of the House of Zeus indicate that there is speculation that intoxication on pain killer medication adversely affected Scruggs' judgment. Maybe. But based on the studies cited in the WSJ article, intoxication on power could have been the main factor.
It's easy to identify the likely motivation of many of the characters in Scruggs-gate: the desire for power and money. But Richard Scruggs already had both and what he did was not going to significantly affect either.
Was Scruggs intoxicated on power? It's as good a theory as any that I've heard.
