Power and Corruption

[qcontinuum]

OOC: Crossposted from muse_academy today.

Week 10: 1.A - Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Lord Acton

This, of course, is absolutely true... but depends entirely on your definition of power. And corruption.



If you're alive, you have power that the dead and the nonliving don't have, the power to grow and change. Of course, your power to do such things can be checked by the fact that you can be made dead. Anyone with any perceptual sense whatsoever has power over those that lack that sense, but that can be checked by the fact that you can be harmed or affected through your senses in ways that those who lack the sense cannot. No torturer's going to get very far tormenting a completely blind person by shining bright lights in their eyes, after all.

So power is relative. And for that matter, so is corruption. Is it corruption to use your power of sapience and problem-solving to figure out how to hunt down an animal for your dinner? The animal might think that was a tad unfair, particularly if you've got the technology of guns. But unless your species has progressed to a certain point where you've begun to think about the concept that non-sentient beings have any rights whatsoever, you probably won't think anything of it.

In your dimension, I am essentially omnipotent. In my home dimension, the Q Continuum, I'm basically just this guy. And as much as I enjoy exploring and messing around with your dimension, my sense of what constitutes having "power" is based around the experiences that formed me, and most of that involves interacting with my own kind. To me, omnipotence isn't power, it's basic abilities, and without it I would be a crippled, broken inferior being. I may think of myself as superior to those who have less power, the way you think of yourself as superior to animals who don't possess the powers of intellect, speech or opposable thumbs, but the power doesn't *corrupt* me because corruption is what we call the misuse of power, power exercised in a way that is unfair. It's corrupt to kill people and then use your political power to cover it up. It's not corrupt to kill animals for sport. Unless, of course, your society has decided it is. Then it's corruption.

See, here's the basic definition of corruption in a nutshell. Corruption is the exercise of illicit or illegitimate power over beings who are defined as like you, deserving of rights similar to your own. Using political power against your own kind is by definition corruption. Using superior abilities against your own kind would be as well if those abilities could not be checked; a single telepath on a world of the mind-blind can use their powers to have anything they want. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man becomes king through corruption, generally speaking. Same thing with mortals who suddenly acquire vast psionic power; becoming godlike is not something mortals can handle because they're not used to it, and they think in terms of exercising it over their own kind, which is sort of corruption by definition.

So the Q are not corrupted by power over mortals the way mortals are corrupted by power over mortals, because we don't perceive you to be like us. We're not corrupt for playing with you any more than you're corrupt for going fishing. But for this reason we have very strict rules about the kind of interaction we're allowed to have with mortals. You can't turn yourself into a fish and go hang out with them as if you were one, after all. We can... and then we can go fishing. That opens the door to corruption.

That was the theory, anyway.

Before the war, when our primary focus was on protecting mortals from the actions of corrupted Q and on protecting the Continuum from outside influences, the Q were not allowed to interact with mortals as if we *were* mortals if they knew of our power. There were exceptions made for some species, the El-Aurians among them, who we saw as having some limited ability to protect themselves from us, but for the most part we were not allowed to simply be friends with mortals. We could take an individual mortal away from their lives and take them on a whirlwind tour of the universe, expose them to things their kind had never seen before; we could pretend to be mortal and interact with mortals in that way; or we could present ourselves as gods, demons, spirits, or alien judges. But we could not treat a mortal who was continuing to live in mortal society, influencing other mortals the way mortals influence each other, as a friend or lover, singling them out for special favors, using our powers on their behalf with their knowledge. A Q doing such a thing was usually ordered to come home at once, under penalty of destruction if they refused.

I myself tried to use that rule to game the system, once; I'd been told to leave the Continuum while they deliberated my fate behind my back, and I was bored out of my mind... and lonely. It's one thing to avoid the Continuum because it's boring, quite another not to be *allowed* to go there. I had no one to talk to. So I figured, I'd join Picard's crew, flagrantly disobey the rules about fraternizing with mortals, and if the Continuum didn't like it they'd have no choice but to order me home... which was exactly where I wanted to go. Ironically, Picard probably saved my life by refusing me; I had no idea *how* much trouble I was in, and since I didn't know that the options being weighed behind my back included severing me from the Continuum entirely and/or killing me, I didn't know that breaking the rules in that particular way was most likely going to have resulted in my execution, not the end of my exile.

For the same reason we could not allow a Q with a broken mind to re-enter the Continuum. If for some reason a Q ended up in a position of helplessness -- and there are ways it can happen, aside from us cutting their powers off -- and was tortured or tormented in such a way that they would hunger for power over their tormentors, to get revenge... our policy was to destroy that Q. Which is totally unfair, of course, but fairness was never the point. A single Q can commit genocide with a thought, and we can't actually police that... and while we have the power to restore the dead, it's more limited than our power to kill. And this was part of the reason they were actually contemplating my destruction behind my back; about three hundred years before this, another Q had... done me a lot of damage. Because it was another Q, not a mortal, they didn't destroy me outright; they gave me the opportunity to heal, but... I didn't realize the extent to which a lot of the Q thought that I fell within the spirit of the law if not the letter. They believed the damage I'd suffered was leading me to seek to exercise power over mortals, deliberately, as if it actually *mattered* to me that I was more powerful than them... which would be corruption.

If you're getting the idea that maybe we were taking things too far, then let me add another piece of data. Nearly two decades before I tried to get Picard to let me join his crew, we executed two Q who were living amongst humans as if they were human, who were freely using their powers... in front of each *other*. They weren't revealing themselves to the humans around them; their bond was with each other, and their child, who was born in a human form but was physically a Q. The real reason the Continuum as a whole wanted them dead was fear of what the child could represent -- a new Q created by two individual Q and not by the Continuum as a whole, a Q whose nature was not fully understood and planned but who came into existence almost randomly... this was a powerful threat to the beings in charge of the Continuum. It wasn't against the law to create a child because no one had ever tried it before... so we got them on charges of using their powers while living among mortals. And they *couldn't* come home, because that would mean abandoning the child -- it couldn't possibly have survived entering the Continuum in its unformed state. (So we thought. Later on Q and I figured out how to fix that problem, but at the time, it would have been a death sentence for the kid.) And because they'd never entered the situation prepared to do without their powers, they couldn't stop themselves... so we killed them.

Yeah, taking things just a tad too far.

There's another kind of power-based corruption, the kind more commonly meant when the quote above is spoken... the corruption caused by *political* power. The beings in power in the Q Continuum started out with the best of intentions, just like the rest of us... but as they developed stronger connections to one another than to us, the Q who spent our time exploring the universe, they lost empathy for us. They thought in terms of protecting their own power and influence, and staying in their comfort zone, and things like Q who actually developed strong emotional ties to mortals or Q who created their own children would be a threat to that. And they had the power to influence the entire Continuum to exile or kill beings whose primary crime was suffering some sort of dire mental distress, or being in love with a mortal, or, well, having a child. I look back on those decisions and I'm horrified, because at the time, I went along with them. Most of them, anyway. I knew a lot of them were wrong, but I thought the circumstances justified the decision that the rest of the Continuum wanted to make... which means that for much of my existence I wasn't nearly as independent as I thought I was being.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely. All power must be checked, somewhere, or it goes very, very bad. I regret that there wasn't any way to check the leadership of the Continuum through means other than bloody revolution... it seems like such a primitive, mortal thing to do. We should have been better than that. But given that there *was* no other way... I don't regret having the war.

Comments

[amisophe.livejournal.com]

Not only that, but the original quote was "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely". So ultimately it's based on choices.