“Passionate, insightful, and occasionally jaw-dropping, Corruptible sets out the story of the intoxicating lure of power—and how it has shaped the modern world.” —Peter Frankopan, internationally bestselling author of The Silk Roads: A New History of the WorldBrian Klaas rocks. I am havin' too much fun, deeply into this one. Just as with his prior book Flukes.
“We know power corrupts, but how exactly? Is it a quick moral collapse or a slow rot? Dangerous as a drug addiction, power changes both those who have it and those who just want a quick fix. Klaas gives us a new, insightful, and seditious road map to this primal urge to dominate, which, thankfully, not all of us share equally.” —Richard Engel, chief foreign correspondent of NBC News
“The power-hungry don’t ask why, they only ask why not…. Keeping such people far from the levers of power is at least half the battle, as Brian Klaas explains so well in Corruptible—a GPS system for navigating a world increasingly full of illiberal democracies, modernized dictatorships, and populists who care only for power.” —Garry Kasparov, chairman of both the Renew Democracy Initiative and the Human Rights Foundation and former world chess champion
“A brilliant exploration… This book builds Brian Klaas’s reputation, offering an essential guide through our world of democratic decay, corruption, and cronyism.” —Dan Snow, bestselling author of On This Day in History
Could not be more timely, in the wake of Donald Trump's election victory.
The book is packed with cool observations.
Baby Faces and Bigotry
In your daily life, you likely encounter dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of strangers. Even in places you frequent, such as the grocery store or your office building, you’ll cross paths with people who are completely unknown to you. If you’re a frequent flier, or if you live in a major metropolis, encountering people who speak a different language, wear different clothes, or come from different cultures is routine.
But for our hunter-gatherer ancestors, such encounters were exceedingly rare. Because of territoriality, venturing into unknown land was akin to playing Russian roulette. The biologist and author Jared Diamond, in his book The World Until Yesterday, argues that hunter-gatherers classify everyone into three groups: friends, enemies, or strangers. Friends are those dozens of families that make up your band, or who are from bands you’re on good terms with. Enemies are people you recognize, but are from a rival band that lives in the same area. The third camp—strangers—are rare. But, to be safe, you must automatically assume they’re potential enemies. In the prehistoric past, hunter-gatherers would never meet someone who was from halfway across the world, meaning that encounters with people from different races were effectively close to zero. As a result, racism couldn’t have been reinforced by psychological evolution over hundreds of thousands of years the same way that biases for height and gender were. Plus, given the origins of our species, most Stone Age hunter-gatherers didn’t look remotely like modern Europeans or Americans. So, is all racism culturally learned?
Unfortunately, our Stone Age brains produce serious biases about people who look different. For survival, our social species has evolved to quickly use cues to identify whether someone is like us, and a friend, or unlike us, and a potential foe. This impulse gives rise to what social scientists call sorting between “in-group” and “out-group” individuals. In-group individuals are to be embraced, while out-group individuals are to be shunned, driven off, or even killed. Crucially, those from an out-group are more likely to be people that we see as potential threats—a point that we’ll return to momentarily.
Today, many people still rely on these arcane, bigoted sorting mechanisms as a cognitive shortcut, even though it’s completely irrational…
…Our prehistoric templates for determining in-groups and out-groups shift our behavior, even when it’s irrational and damaging to our best interests. We trust those whom we identify with. But we’re suspicious of those who don’t seem to be “one of us.
In the modern world, those templates from ancestral brains intersect with centuries of explicit and implicit culturally learned racism to create even more biased assessments of those who are from a different, particularly minority, ethnic group. That’s demonstrated with some depressing research that shows white Westerners sometimes behave as though black people are “strangers” who are potential threats—a phenomenon that further compounds the systemic institutional racism that plagues modern societies.
All human faces can be scored by how baby-faced they appear (the technical term is babyfaceness). Countless experiments have demonstrated that we instinctively pay attention to this trait when assessing others—and judge them based upon it. In the criminal justice system, there’s evidence that judges and juries treat baby-faced defendants as less responsible or culpable for their actions than less baby-faced defendants, even if they’re the same age. We seem to automatically believe that babyfaceness is a proxy for innocence. As a result, those who are more baby-faced are often perceived as less threatening than those with more hardened, adult facial features.
But there’s a disheartening twist.
Studies have found that whether babyfaceness helps or hurts you gain power is dependent on race. Here’s what the research seems to show: Black people are more likely to be viewed by white people as threatening. That’s partly because of the “strangers” template in our Stone Age brains and partly due to a long, grotesque history of learned and internalized racism. No surprise there. But just as white people are more prone to viewing black people as threats, they’re less prone to viewing baby-faced black people that way, according to experiments. Further research has shown that, in a white-dominated society, baby-faced black people are therefore more able to attain power than less baby-faced black people. White people view black people with more adult faces as a threat, leading to reduced career advancement. According to this research, this relationship is inverted for white people. In similar studies, baby-faced white CEOs were perceived to be weak rather than threatening. In a white-dominated society, it seems that having a baby face helps you if you’re black and hurts you if you’re white. It’s horrifyingly bonkers. But it seems, on aggregate, to make a difference that compounds preexisting racial biases in society. The point is this: irrational evaluations of faces based on archaic threat instincts still seem to be entrenching inequality in our modern world.
This could partially explain (but never excuse) why highly qualified people from ethnic minorities often get passed over for leadership positions in favor of less qualified white people…
Klaas, Brian. Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us (pp. 79-82). Scribner. Kindle Edition.
Indeed.
DIGRESSING FOR A MOMENT
Brian has a Substack site he's named The Garden of Forking Paths. I'm a paid subscriber. Snippet below from a recent post:
How I write
I, like everyone else, learned to write by reading. Brains are pattern detection machines, and we intuit how those patterns should look by observing them elsewhere.
But creativity requires recombination that breaks patterns; if we only recreated the world as we observed it, nothing new would ever be produced. The Middle Ages captured this dynamic by giving the world florilegia, or “gathered flowers,” which were bound anthologies of various snippets of wisdom or creativity.
All ideas are built on life’s florilegia, and a writer’s brain, like a flower, can only grow if it is given the right sustenance. That sustenance is some combination of life experience and observation, interaction with clever and passionate people, and, of course, reading.
Every writer, like every human, is a sort of mind thief—not due to plagiarism or dishonesty—but simply because our brains cannot produce a purely “original” idea. Creativity is little more than interesting, novel synthesis. Just as a musician is swayed by the tunes they feed their minds, so too is a writer shaped by the authors they deliberately consume. If I am writing a whimsical essay, I might sit down and read Douglas Adams or Kurt Vonnegut for an hour before I start typing, an offering of time to my playful muse as much as a subconscious prime for the mind.
As I’ve written previously, every good idea I’ve ever had has sprung, at least in part, from someone else’s good idea.
If you want to write, you must do at least two things relentlessly: observe the world and read. Crucially, though, you must observe and read what you don’t know, because otherwise the soil around you becomes overly stale. I have decidedly strange interests, so my bedside table is currently occupied by a teetering stack of books: one about plant consciousness; another about consumerism in modern Christianity; one on the history of ignorance; a Slow Horses thriller for good measure; and a delightful tome about the decline of belief in magic...
Be Yourself
When we converse, we are allergic to inauthentic interaction. You know what I’m talking about: the office bore who is always networking, always saying aggravating phrases like “let’s connect,” but never actually connecting with anyone. Our minds come, I happily note, fully equipped with bullshit detectors, and this aptitude for sniffing out fakery carries over into the realm of the written word. There is a lot of inauthentic same-y sludge out there, which has an astonishing tendency—at least on the nonfiction side of the ledger—to always appear, like an obscenely wealthy but dimwitted demon, on the bestseller lists in airport bookshops.
Even non-fiction requires characters. It’s obvious that fiction is character-driven. But conveying any idea in a compelling way for us—The Storytelling Animal—requires narrative, and narrative often works best when it flows, at least in part, through intriguing people...
Great advice. You ought read that entire essay.
QUICK REACTION
I was a rather unremarkable "B" student through high school. But, I always loved to read, from early childhood. I have routinely read multiple books and periodicals ongoing throughout my entire adult life. When I finally entered undergraduate school at the age of 34 in 1980, I first took the CLEP exam (College Level English Proficiency). The national 99th percentile score at the time was 920.BTW, Klaas was back in earlier session on Nov 7th.
Mine was 965. It saved me a year of Freshman English classes.
You just gotta read.
Now nearing age 79, I continue to average 2-3 books a week, 6 subscribed periodicals, and the broad raft of online prose.
Brian is right. Read. Explore. Be awake. And, learn to compose stories.We'll take this riff up more fully later.
DEC 1ST UPDATE
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I finished reading Corruptible. Marvelous. You owe it to yourselves to read and enjoy.
On to the next topics...
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