Power-holders must restrain themselves or power’s potential is squandered

Evidence

To expect all power to be exercised all the time would not only overstrain the power-holder – according to the prescriptions of the power-code it would also prevent the accumulation of worthwhile power. The power-holder must behave selectively in regard to his own power; he must consider whether he wants to bring it into play; he must be able to discipline himself. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 625

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to Stevens’s master Darlington: power requires self-discipline in the holder, so the butler’s deference is less a cause than a precondition of the master’s restraint — a subtle inversion of the reader’s thesis worth noting. — connects to: Survival under mythic divinities requires total submission to power; Exposing power risks replacing it with worse men, yet concealment is worse; The crisis of freedom is that power exploits rather than negates it — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 47 (+2 more)
• CANDY: A paradoxically counterintuitive point — that power is preserved by NOT being used — that works as a one-liner.