Nearly All Men Can Stand Adversity, but to Test Character, Give Him Power

In 458 BCE, according to the Roman historian Livy, a delegation found Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus ploughing his small farm and told him that the Senate had appointed him dictator to save an army surrounded by enemies. He led the Romans to victory in two weeks, resigned his absolute power, and went back to his plough. Two thousand years later George Washington was compared to him when he gave up command of the army and later declined a third term. The line credited to Abraham Lincoln, that nearly all men can stand adversity but that to test a man's character one should give him power, is about exactly this difference.

The logic is straightforward. Adversity exerts an outside pressure that forces people to behave well or at least to behave carefully. A man in poverty has no choice but to be frugal and a man under threat has reason to be cautious. Power removes the pressure. When no one can stop, punish or contradict him, a man's own inclinations are the only constraint, and those inclinations, which were previously hidden, are revealed. In this reading power is a kind of experiment that strips away the external reasons for good behaviour.

History gives plenty of examples of the failure. Robert Mugabe led Zimbabwe's liberation struggle and spent a decade in prison under the white minority regime in Rhodesia. He took office in 1980 to wide admiration and ruled for thirty seven years, presiding over repression, the destruction of the economy and hyperinflation, until he was removed in 2017. Many revolutionaries who fought tyranny have become tyrants, as if the habit of command were the lesson they learnt from suffering. Lord Acton wrote in 1887 that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Yet the same history includes examples of the opposite. After the war in Kalinga around 261 BCE, Ashoka, who had won a terrible victory with enormous loss of life, turned from conquest and issued edicts urging tolerance, welfare and non violence across an empire in which he was supreme. Nelson Mandela, released after twenty seven years in prison, served a single term as president of South Africa and then retired. Their choices make the topic's point from the other side. Power revealed in them a character that adversity had perhaps only tempered.

Power revealed in them a character that adversity had perhaps only tempered.

Literature has examined the matter often. In Shakespeare's Henry IV the wild Prince Hal, who seems a wastrel, rejects his old companion Falstaff as soon as he becomes king, and the audience is left to decide whether this is betrayal or maturity. Sophocles' Creon, who begins as a sensible adviser, grows rigid and cruel when he takes the throne of Thebes. Writers across cultures have understood that a crown changes the way a man appears, even to himself.

Psychologists have tried to explain how power acts on the mind. Dacher Keltner, who has studied the matter for decades, describes a power paradox. People rise through qualities like empathy, openness and cooperation, and then, once they hold power, they tend to lose those very qualities. Experiments by Adam Galinsky and others have found that people given a sense of power become more willing to act but less able to see things from another person's point of view. On this evidence power does not merely reveal character but also changes it, so that the test alters the thing tested.

Another famous demonstration is the Stanford prison experiment of 1971, in which student volunteers assigned to be guards were said to have become cruel in a few days. It has been cited for decades as proof of what power does. But later investigations, including interviews with participants and an examination of the archives, found that the guards had been coached by the experimenters and that the study was less spontaneous than claimed. This should make us careful. The popular belief that power makes monsters is itself partly a story, and the facts are more mixed.

A deeper challenge to the topic is that it blames character for what institutions are supposed to prevent. James Madison asked in the fifty first Federalist paper what government is if not the greatest of all reflections on human nature, and observed that if men were angels no government would be necessary. Constitutions exist because it cannot be assumed that holders of power will be saints. Courts, a free press, elections and the separation of powers do not wait for character to be tested. They limit what a bad character can do, and they allow an ordinary character to behave well.

India's own history shows the importance of such arrangements. The Constitution's framers, many of them recent prisoners of a colonial state, were wary of concentrated authority, and Dr Ambedkar warned in his final speech to the Constituent Assembly against hero worship in politics, saying that in no other country was it so important as in India. A society that places its hope in a virtuous ruler has little defence if he turns out not to be. Strong institutions mean that character is not the only safeguard.

The topic also carries a personal meaning. Power is not only held by presidents. A manager, a teacher, a parent or a clerk who stamps papers has some, and the manner in which they use it reveals something that no speech does. A person who is courteous to those who can do nothing for him gives a truer indication of his character than any behaviour towards his superiors. If the line is right, then everyday life runs small tests constantly, and most of us pass or fail them without anyone watching.

What the line does not explain is how to give someone power in order to test him without harming those on whom it is exercised. The only people to pay for the experiment are the ones who are subject to the result. A society can therefore learn character only at the cost of the very people it hopes to protect, and so perhaps the wisest course is to assume the worst and build as though every holder of power had already failed. It remains uncertain whether such a design leaves any room for the Cincinnatus who would have passed.