The Lust for Power

by George H. Smith

Smith explains how the insatiable desire for power and its corrupting influence have been dominant themes in libertarian theory and history.

In Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’État and Its Place in Modern History (English translation, 1957), Friedrich Meinecke wrote:

The striving for power is an aboriginal human impulse, perhaps even an animal impulse, which blindly snatches at everything around until it comes up against some external barriers. And, in the case of men at least, the impulse is not restricted solely to what is directly necessary for life and health. Man takes a wholehearted pleasure in power itself and, through it, in himself and his heightened personality. Next to hunger and love, pleonexia is the most powerful elemental and influential impulse in man.

The lust for power has been an important and recurring theme in western historiography.........It is the selfish lust of domination, not the rational motive of self-love, that will transform the most mild government into the “most insupportable tyranny.” A man motivated by that “destructive passion” will need the assistance of like-minded people” to serve as “subordinate instruments” in his pursuit of power, and this will require that he “put on as many shapes as Proteus.

[H]e must ever wear the mask of dissimulation, and live a perpetual lie. He will court the friendship of every man, who is capable of promoting, and endeavor to crush every man, who is capable of defeating his ambitious views. Thus his friendship and his enmity will be alike unreal, and easily convertible, if the change will serve his interest.

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My Take - The left is a philosophy lacking in any moral foundation at all, and if any article described the left any better, I haven't read it.