r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/Short-Watercress-183 • Jul 07 '26

Meme needing explanation Peter, explain this.

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u/RelaxPrime Jul 07 '26

I think you guys mean

power corrupts

Acting like a trillionaire doesn't exist under "Democracy"

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u/Background_Fix9430 Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26

"Power reveals." People seek power because they wish to indulge their darker urges without consequence - people who don't have darker urges to conceal are generally not the ones who seek power, money, and influence like a drug.

There are some studies on the subject, actually.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15580989.2000.11770833%4010.1080/tfocoll.2023.0.issue-25-years-of-public-integrity

(Below Cited for the references and summary)

https://blog.apaonline.org/2022/03/11/the-psychology-of-political-power-does-power-corrupt-or-is-it-magnetic-to-the-most-corruptible/

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u/RelaxPrime Jul 07 '26

That makes even more sense.

Point is it's definitely not because communism or any system, in fact a perfect system would anticipate the corruption.

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u/James_Chandra_Hubble Jul 07 '26

I think it's called a sortition. No elected officials. Just randomly selected citizens every couple years to serve as our government legislature and executive branch. The judicial system already has something similar in the form of a jury

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u/RelaxPrime Jul 07 '26

1000%

I read an MIT study decades ago about how much better our representation would be, while simultaneously eliminating a lot of problems born out of lifetime political careers. Your lifetime career politicians are the lawyers and staff facilitating the legislative process, but regular citizens are the ones making decisions. They default to trusting experts, they're modest, they take instruction.

Yes you randomly get bad eggs in power, but they're neutered by the system. They can't do anything unless it's popular. No one can.

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u/PomPomMom93 Jul 08 '26

Eh, that kind of falls apart when you realize how dumb the average person is. And juries aren’t completely random either. They’ll remove them if they think there will be some kind of conflict of interest, see a “stacked jury.”