Sarajevo Safari is the name for an alleged war tourism phenomenon during the siege of Sarajevo (1992–1996) involving human hunting. According to the reports, wealthy foreign nationals were enabled, for large monetary fees, to shoot at civilians in the besieged city with sniper rifles for entertainment purposes.
I don’t think that’s wrong, exactly, but I think it’s an oversimplification. Most poor people who win huge lotteries don’t become sinister tycoons, they spend the money and then go back to being poor. Sort of like how when Smeagol and Bilbo and Frodo and Sam wear the one ring, they don’t gather armies unto themselves and conquer Middle Earth. They don’t know how, and they don’t want to learn. I think the corruption of power requires two elements: a knowledge of the cruel mechanisms by which power accumulates, and a will to exercise those mechanisms.
The more one knows about the mechanisms of manipulation, I suspect, the greater the temptation to use them becomes, because the true awesome scope of the power becomes clearer in your mind. Suspect, because I have never enjoyed the option of declining to use massive wealth or political influence. I have had the smallest possible serving of this malignant thing: I once held the title of Manager. It’s a small sliver of capitalist power, and while much (if not all) of the power of that role is illusory, the title can confer a small amount of real power over other people. The small decisions I made had huge consequences for the people I had been assigned to manage. When submitting performance evaluations I had to consider the consequences my teammate might face if they lost their job. The temptation to use it for gain is subtle, and justifications for abuse come almost effortlessly to mind. Not abusing power is work, and it’s not fun work. It’s much easier to just relax, and make decisions as they come, and not worry too much about whether every little decision is fully morally justified. It’s so, so easy.
I think it’s kind of like a drug in that once you start habitually abusing power, you become dependent on it and have to keep doing it to keep the teetering tower of your own reputation from collapsing. You get to the point where not abusing power is so far from the realm of viable options that you stop even thinking about it as an option, and when you can’t even imagine life beyond the cocoon of misery you have spun around yourself, you have been enthralled by power and cannot escape. You are a wraith.
Power is horrifying.
P.S. If by chance there’s anyone reading this thinking that they can’t imagine a life beyond the mountain of abuses and bad decisions their life has become, that they have become a wraith and are beyond hope: I think you give yourself too little credit. Wraiths can never consider the idea that they are wraiths. If you can as the question “Am I beyond hope?”, the answer is “I am not beyond hope.” It’s not easy; you will have to do a lot of work and you will probably need to ask for help along the way. It’s not fun. It’s work. It’s worth doing, but you have to actually do it and not just imagine doing it for it to get done.
It’s a self selecting position. Political positions reward the cutthroats, the ones who will make backroom deals and compromise their morals.
Kind and considerate people are rarely in power, and never for long. You will be replaced if you don’t “play the game”.
In the Lord of the Rings example, looking exclusively at humans here, only the lords were allowed to wear the rings of power. Hobbits and peasants were not given rings. Even the country town’s seventh prince, who would have made the ideal king, was not given a ring. Only the people already at the top, who already had to fight their brothers and sisters for succession of the throne, who were used to political games and dealing with the devil, got the rings. Of course they became evil; evil was already within them.
Sauron gave rings of power to political leaders because he wanted to usurp their political power, not because they had earned them. They just happened to be the type of person he was targeting. Similar rings could perhaps have been mass manufactured and distributed to the masses, but when power is concentrated, it makes more sense to corrupt the locus of power than to faff about with corrupting the commoners directly.
Do you think the nazgul were all born evil?
I’m a bit confused by this reply, sorry. We seem to agree? Or are you saying that the kings were good before getting the rings?
I kind of feel like the LOTR metaphor barely works in this thread context anyway, since they had a mind control element to them. Most people in power in reality seem to become evil perfectly fine without any mind control at all (that we know of).
That’s ok, I was confused by your reply too, and I was trying to guess at what you meant. Your last sentence seemed to imply that evil people naturally rise to power and were only given rings because they were already evil and were therefore Sauron’s natural allies. Where I was headed with my reply was that it doesn’t really matter if the ringwraiths were good or evil before they received the rings, because the purpose of the ring was to convert all that they were, political power, personal identity, and all, to the service of Sauron’s will.
On the subject of mind control: The Nazgul purportedly can’t resist the will of Sauron (at least not by the time of the events of LotR), but many characters (Bilbo, Gandalf, Galadriel, Faramir, Sam) willingly refuse to take the ring even for a moment, and some can even willingly give it up after they’ve possessed it. I’d call what the rings do “influence” or “temptation” before I called it mind control. The Nazgul cannot resist Sauron because they can no longer imagine themselves not in thrall to him. Sauron doesn’t mind control them in the classic sense; he doesn’t have to.