Why I'll Never Run for President

    Don’t ever make me President. Not just because I can’t speak loudly or quickly make decisions for the life of me, but because I don’t want to risk being influenced by the corruption that may follow.

When reading The Clan of One-Breasted Women and about Williams’s dissatisfaction with sovereign immunity, I thought about my own dissatisfaction with our government and the corruption of many other governmental systems–not just our own–in the past. I thought about utopia as described by Sir Thomas More and why it is so unachievable. Really, if we want to avoid corruption, we want something like a utopia, right? We all want our own Garden of Eden, a land free of evil thoughts and temptations. All of our attempts to reach such a place have been in vain–and it’s completely reasonable to think that we will never be able to, so long as our human nature is not altered. I have plenty of reason to think that this will not happen for many years to come. 

Lord Acton, a historian from the 19th-20th centuries, told us that power corrupts and that “absolute power corrupts absolutely”. We talked about this last year when we read Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. As we read, we watched a man that was once heeded as a befitting leader turn into a man hated by some of his closest peers. We all know that he was given too much power. In reality, though, this aspect of the play is painfully evident everywhere; to this day, I’m sure that we all know at least one person that will act selfishly on their own desires once they have the ability to.

It’s easier to talk about avoiding this selfish part of our human nature than it is to actually do it. When that selfishness in our blood is fed by giving us a title of authority or the ability to do something of considerable weight, it is incredibly difficult to avoid getting drunk on that power, as you have probably noticed already in your own experiences with holding any sort of power. That’s why Eve was told to have tainted the Garden of Eden because the Devil told her that she would gain power that even God would fear and why the concept of a utopia on Earth is laughable. 

Perhaps one day, there will be a version of man that can avoid corruption. But with how we still act right now, especially those who are the faces of countries around the planet, I really don’t think that it will happen for many, many lifetimes. So for right now, I will avoid it. The luster of power is, to me, a facade that I hope will never successfully tempt me. Maybe that’s easier to say than do, too.