Get the Ricochet app

Ricochet will work fine in a browser on your mobile devices, but for the best experience please download our app.

Download on the App StoreGet it on Google Play

Become a member.

Tired of the toxicity of social media? Why not join Ricochet for just $5/month? Think of it as an online bar. Come in, have a drink, hang out, say whatever you want. But don’t badger, bully, or berate the other drinkers. That's our only rule.

Does Influence Corrupt Just Like Power?

iWe
@iWe
Join to bookmark18likesJoin to like22comments

Let's say you are an acknowledged thought-leader. You might be a religious authority or a scientist or a popular academic. People listen to you, and they tend to repeat what you have said. You have influence. Your ideas can change the world, even if you are otherwise a total nobody.

This is the opposite of power, which is coercive, and scales with money and government. Big Men have power. But men like Moses and Plato and Aristotle have influence. The latter are far more important to our lives today than the most powerful men of their ages - Pharaohs and Alexanders and Caesars.

Ideas shared are doubled. Power shared is halved.

We also know that power corrupts. It does not take long, and it seems to be inevitable. The more power one has, and the longer one has it, the more corrupt a person becomes. But is this true of influence?

Part of me thinks it is. Evil ideas can do an awful lot of damage before they are checked. Marxism and Freudianism and Eugenics are still, in many ways, dominant ideas polluting the world today. On the other hand, ideas should have checks and balances. Other voices. Hard data. Absent following influence with coercion (as was done with Covid), influence by itself still requires the listener to buy in. So ideas must persuade to work. And that, too, is a limit.

It seems axiomatic that powerful people are not, in the long run, influential. And influential people are rarely powerful. But, as we see in the pop culture and politics of today, they are magnetically attracted to each other.

Should we be as suspicious of influential people as we are of powerful ones?

This post was promoted to the Main Feed at the recommendation of Ricochet's members.

Discussion (22)

  • Percival@Percival

    Influential people are easier to fact-check than powerful people. Powerful people label certain communications as "misinformation" and use that label to justify suppression of its propagation. They don't refute the "misinformation."

    So my position is to try to fact-check whatever I can, particularly the things that are too good or bad to be true.

    EDIT: added "suppression of" where I meant for it to be.

  • Randy Weivoda@RandyWeivoda

    I think influential people can be corrupted by the desire to maintain the appearance of being influential. Someone becomes popular because they are saying things that many people agree with. At some point, the influencer may become captive to that fame and stop saying what he or she truly thinks, because a lot of their fans don't want to hear nuance or that the other side may have a couple of legitimate points. So the influencer stops actually influencing people with his own message. He's just a verbal mirror, reflecting back what the fans already think.

  • JoelB@JoelB

    Wormtongue was an influencer who did not wield power directly, but he could influence powerful ones. Did the ability to influence others corrupt him, or was he corrupt in the first place and it worked itself out as his influence grew?

    Is influence in itself a type of power? I think so. It is not the power to command, but the power to suggest and convince. They seem to be two sides of the same coin. As they grow, they strain the effects of accountability. The expert says it is so, and it is accepted without doubt or investigation. The dictator with the power to cast someone into prison has few near him who will oppose him.

  • Paul Stinchfield@PaulStinchfield
    iWe (View Post):

    But we also know that power corrupts ... But is this true of influence?

    Without a doubt. Think of influence as status, and that the desire for ever more status can be deeply corrupting. Consider celebrities who pronounce the absolute truth to adoring fans. Nobel laureates who begin to pontificate on matters far outside their expertise. And so on.

Scroll for later comments
+17 more comments
Join the conversation

You're seeing five of 22 comments. Sign in, or join for just $5 per month, to read them all and add your own.