All power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.

Power attracts the already broken

We often think of power as something that changes good people into bad ones. But Herbert's insight flips this around: power is more like a magnet for people who were already broken in specific ways. It's not the position that corrupts so much as certain kinds of people being drawn to it in the first place. Watch how the people who climb highest in any organization—whether a corporation, a sports team, or a friend group—often show early signs of being willing to bend rules or steamroll others. They were like that before they won.

The second part hits harder: the addiction to using force or dominance. Once someone tastes power without real consequences, it becomes intoxicating in a literal sense. They want more of that rush, that feeling of unquestionable authority. This helps explain why so many powerful people seem unable to stop themselves even when everyone can see the damage they're causing. They're not thinking through consequences anymore; they're chasing the high.

This matters because it suggests the real problem isn't power itself, but our failure to keep pathological people out of it in the first place. The guardrails matter more than we think. It's much harder to fix someone already drunk on authority than to prevent the wrong people from reaching that intoxication in the first place.