Power is addictive and eventually becomes its own end, perverting original purpose

Evidence

But power is not an instrument that its possessor can use with impunity. It is a drug that creates in the user a need for larger and larger dosages. And Moses was a user. At first, for a decade or more after his first sip of real power in 1924, he continued to seek it only for the sake of his dreams. But little by little there came a change. Slowly but inexorably, he began to seek power for its own sake. More and more, the criterion by which Moses selected which city-shaping public works would be built came to be not the needs of the city’s people, but the increment of power a project could give him. Increasingly, the projects became not ends but means—the means of obtaining more and more power. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 96

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘power as drug’ claim generalizes into a portable thesis about institutional reform and civic builders, well beyond Moses himself.
• STORYSTEM: A figure who acquires power to build one beautiful thing and who is quietly reconsumed by the machinery of influence itself—centralized patronage as an independent organism.
• BMF: The arc of Moses acquiring power to serve visions and then being consumed by its own momentum evokes the fate of the One State’s Builder characters and the shaper-institutions in We by Zamyatin, where technical construction is subverted into pure systemic control.
• XREF: connects to: Power itself is reinforcing because it grants rewards and avoids punishments; Power is an addictive drug that shifts from serving dreams to serving itself. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 96; Power generates the will of the power-holder rather than serving it (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Power is an addictive drug that shifts from serving dreams to serving itself. #corroborates (0.93) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 96
• Power generates the will it seems to express rather than serving a preexisting one. #corroborates (0.88) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 618
• Power generates the will of the power-holder rather than serving it #corroborates (0.85)
• Power itself is reinforcing because it grants rewards and avoids punishments #corroborates (0.82)