Recently, I was reading an article that delved into a very interesting problem: Why do people with power often lose their moral compass? Coincidentally, the same day I was reading this article, Federal prosecutors in New York issued an arrest warrant for P. Diddy for racketeering and sex trafficking offenses. Although this article was written before Diddy’s arrest, it was essentially explaining the root cause for Diddy’s actions. Since that day, I’ve had to reassess some of my most fundamental assumptions about morality, power and human nature.
Moral Flexibility
Moshe Hoffman, a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab Human Dynamics Group and Lecturer at Harvard's Department of Economics who studies game theory, has argued that humans have adopted moral principles as a strategy for establishing friendships. Hoffman’s work has shown that humans will espouse different morals based on the type of friends they are trying to court.
In other words, we like to think of our personal morals as being inviolate and immune from compromise, but, in reality, our morals are relative to the type of relationship we are trying to form.
Let’s say you move to a new city where you don’t know anyone. You have an 8-year-old daughter and you want her to establish friendships in the neighborhood. Obviously, you want those friendships to be with other children who will be a good influence, which means you are looking for parents who mirror your personal and social values.
While seeking new parental relationships, you have also started a new job at an electronics company and one of your first tasks is procuring raw materials for a new product. Your manager tells you to work the supply chain to secure the element cobalt, which tends to be found in conflict zones. Are you going to apply the same moral strictures to this new business relationship that you did finding friendships for your daughter?
You make some phone calls and find a cobalt source for a reasonable price that your company can afford. You quickly realize that the connection providing you with that cobalt is circumspect. She doesn’t want you asking too many questions about where the cobalt is sourced and how her suppliers bring it to market. You intuit this likely means the cobalt is being mined in suboptimal or even inhumane conditions. Although you might feel morally compromised by this arrangement, for this mutually beneficial relationship to function, you set those moral qualms aside.
Morality as Social Currency
You can probably think of many other scenarios where your morality will shift one way or the other to fit the environment in which you find yourself. When you attend a religious function, you’re more morally strict. When you’re out on the town with friends, you’re more morally lax. What these examples demonstrate is that morality is really less about absolute right and wrong and more about a means to an end.
We like to think of morality as being immutable: lying, stealing and murder are always wrong. But if lying, stealing and murder are part of the supply chain and my ability to feed my family is dependent upon me procuring materials from that supply chain, then I’m willing to turn a blind eye (by the way, you are likely reading this on a device that utilizes cobalt mined from a source that employs slave labor).
Hoffman argues that morality is a social currency among humans that enables trust within relationships. What this means is that my kindness towards other humans is not so much because I’m a moral person, but because I rely on other humans to survive. My kindness ensures that, in the event I fall on hard times and ever need help, the people I was kind to over and over again will likely reciprocate with kindness and help me out. In other words, morality is nothing more than a survival mechanism.
When I first read this, I was deeply skeptical, but then Hoffman provided an example which made me reconsider his position as not only plausible, but objectively true.
From Savior to Dictator
Perhaps you are familiar with a common path among revolutionary leaders. The person who leads the revolution espouses high moral virtues. The people they represent (often the poorest and most vulnerable) are being treated unfairly by the powers that be. Their movement upends the current political structure and the revolutionary is installed as the new president of the country, vowing to do right by the people.
At first, this new president is fulfilling their promises. They are changing policies and rooting out corruption, shunting resources to their constituents. But over time, their leadership style begins to change. The government becomes more authoritarian. The moral rhetoric of the president still reflects the early days of the revolution, but the actions of the regime become more oppressive. When the public begins to question the president’s decisions, rather than listen to those critiques and change course, the president cracks down with brutal force, ensuring that their power is preserved.
The savior of the oppressed has become the oppressor. We’ve watched this happen countless times throughout history and the reason often provided is that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Hoffman has a different take on this transformation and it’s one that opens the door to an entirely new way of thinking about human interactions.
Hoffman suggests that once a revolutionary is installed as the leader of a country, the dynamic of their relationships is transformed. Every interaction is defined by the leader’s power. No matter how moral that leader might be, there is an imbalanced power dynamic.
At first, the leader might ignore this imbalance and continue to try to relate to people on the level of morality. However, over time, because every person is relating to that leader due to the power that they possess, morality stops figuring into their decisions. What’s right and wrong matters far less than the power that leader exerts to influence a particular situation.
In other words, the social currency that fuels the leader’s relationships is not morality, but exchanges of power. For example, the leader controls the flow of money through the government, so if I want access to that money, my morality isn’t going to move the needle. What opens the tap on that money is the power I exert to help the leader achieve their objectives in a specific area.
This is why, within a few years of taking control of the government, the leader will often seem to lose their moral compass. Hoffman argues that this shift is not because the leader has become amoral, it’s because the currency of morality has lost its meaning in their relationships.
Recall that for people without power, we rely on morality to maintain our relationships. If I’ve been kind to you and I fall on hard times, then when I call you for help, you will be far more likely to assist me because of that kindness. For the leader, because their relationships are based on exchanges of power, if the leader falls on hard times, then their network of support is going to help them because of the power they possess.
For example, say that I’m a revolutionary leader and you can save my political career by getting your party to support me. You won’t do this because you’re kind, but because I, as the leader, have the power to move resources. Therefore, in exchange for your support, you ask for unmitigated oil drilling rights in environmentally protected areas of the country. Even though agreeing to this will ravage the ecosystem and hurt the indigenous people who live there, I say, “Yes,” because power is my social currency.
This is why these very moral leaders will often do anything to preserve their power, even if it means hurting the very people who propelled them into that leadership position.
The Social Currency of Power
When I read Hoffman’s theory, it’s like an explosion went off in my brain. When you apply his theory to other aspects of life, you begin to see how it plays out. One of the starkest examples of this can be seen in the Catholic priesthood. I think many people look at the Catholic Church and ask the question: Why have so many Catholic priests been caught up in sexual abuse scandals?
The sheer number of cases (4,392 Catholic priests and deacons have been accused of underage sexual abuse by 10,667 individuals) is so mind boggling that it defies explanation. Does the Catholic Church breed predators? When I dealt with this issue in the Restorative Faith Podcast, I was looking at the psychological reasoning. If a priest lacks boundaries and if the role of priest makes a person feel dehumanized, then that combination can lead to very poor decisions. Although I resonated with this answer, it felt incomplete.
However, if we apply Hoffman’s theory, then one can see exactly why this happens. The theology of the Catholic Church makes the priest only a few steps below God. The very nature of the position of priest in relationship to the parishioner in the pews is one of power. The priest is literally the gatekeeper standing in-between a parishioner and their ability to gain entrance to heaven.
Even though the priest is supposed to be a beacon of morality, the currency forging relationships with their parishioners is often not morality. For many parishioners, because the priest holds divine power over them, every exchange is either implicitly or explicitly based on this power dynamic.
Similar to the revolutionary leader who comes to power, although the priest might initially care a great deal about morality, over time, as the currency of their relationships becomes rooted in exchanges of power, the currency of morality becomes less vital. When all of your relationships are based on exchanges of power, your orientation towards actions that everyone else would view as immoral becomes less salient.
Again, similar to the revolutionary leader who hurts the very people who gave him his power in the first place, the priest will make decisions, like having inappropriate sexual relationships, because moral currency no longer dictates his decisions. When your relationships are based on the currency of power, then your decisions are rooted in expressing that power. Moreover, when you’re part of an institution that will back that power (like moving priests around who are accused of sexual abuse or burying any evidence of impropriety), then that power can manifest unchecked.
A 1% Chance of Consequences
A person whose relationships are based in moral currency will think of sexuality in terms of moral consequences. Is this person with whom I’m pursuing a sexual relationship accepted by society? Are they the right age? Have they given me consent to engage in sexual acts with them? Absent positive affirmations to all of these questions, the person who operates in moral currency knows that moving forward could have extremely deleterious consequences.
However, for the person whose relationships are based in the currency of power, none of those questions figure into their thinking. P. Diddy is a great example of this. Based on the reports, Diddy would host Freak Offs, multiple dayslong staged orgies where he would watch men and women perform sexual acts on each other at his direction. These sexual acts were often violent to the point that the participants would have to heal for days or weeks after the encounter.
For the person who operates under the auspices of moral currency, we can hardly fathom how Diddy didn’t feel his actions weren’t crossing major ethical lines. The fact is, he was never thinking of his actions in terms of right vs. wrong. He was thinking of them in terms of power.
To him, these men and women are actors who are being paid a handsome sum for their time. Injuries come with the territory, and they are compensated for whatever harm they endure. They are signing nondisclosure agreements before they perform, so they understand discretion is at the heart of their work. Moreover, Diddy has a whole security apparatus of hired muscle who will intimidate and physically harm anyone who voices concern. Given how Diddy allows people to be physically harmed during these Freak Offs, these threats are very real.
And yet, it likely never occurred to Diddy that the power he held over these men and women meant they felt they had no choice but to perform for him. Because all of Diddy’s relationships are based in the currency of power, he assumes that their exchange of money for time means these actors want to be there. He assumes that, like him, they view their relationships through the social currency of power.
This is a common mistake. People who operate with the social currency of power often forget about the social currency of morality because they believe they have transcended the consequences of morality. Power means you can make those moral consequences disappear. Indeed, 99% of the time, this is true. With endless resources, you can ensure that people never talk. Whenever Diddy was caught doing something that was morally dubious, he simply paid to make sure the person who caught him never said anything.
This worked for decades until, eventually, one person finally didn’t take the money and submitted a video of Diddy physically assaulting a woman to the police, which opened the doors to an investigation. The powerful get their way so often that they often forget about that 1% possibility.
Now that Diddy is looking at serious consequences for his actions, he is using every ounce of power in his arsenal to influence the outcome of the trial by threatening, paying off and offering benefits to anyone who might testify against him. Because Diddy’s social currency is power and he lacks moral currency, this is his only option—hurt the very people who gave him his power in the first place.
Reassessing My Position
I’ve spent my entire career thinking about issues of ethics and morality. I’ve always believed that humans are moral creatures because morality keeps our society from collapsing into chaos. In other words, I’ve never believed that murder is wrong because God said so in the Ten Commandments. Murder is wrong because, on some level, we all agree that a society where murder is acceptable impedes progress. Just ask anyone who lives in warzone where murder is common—it’s really hard to succeed if you’re always looking over your shoulder.
However, I also believed that, because the social contract of agreed upon morality provides a relatively stable existence, we all understand its necessity and importance in our lives. Yes, our morality is flexible, but there is an innate human desire to mostly do good and eschew the bad.
What Hoffman’s theory suggests is that humans adapt to the relational currency at their disposal. Consider the citizens of Russia, who have lived under an oppressive authoritarian regime for the last 100 years. One of the greatest criticisms leveled against the Russian people by Westerners is their lack of a moral code. In the past, this criticism was often filtered through the lens of Communism, which suppresses religion and promotes atheism.
However, in an authoritarian regime, where crushing control is exerted by the government in every facet of society, moral currency means very little regardless of religious freedom. Everyone’s social currency is defined by their power in relation to the government. Therefore, it’s not that Russians are amoral because they are bad people, it’s that morality has little social currency in their society. If you want to survive, you have to adopt the social currency of power.
How does this impact my view of ethics and morality? Well, I still believe that love (or a lack of it) is the most important force undergirding human behavior. That said, Hoffman’s theory has caused me to realize that if my social circumstances required me to abandon my morality for the survival of my family or the people I love, I likely would do so…and so would you.
Thanks for reading and let me know what you think in the comments below!
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