The Incompatibility of Power and Moral Heroism

Every civilization has its own myths of the righteous ruler. The philosopher king in Plato. The saintly monarch in Christian lore. The benevolent emperor in Chinese dynastic cycles. These figures loom large not because they were frequent, but because they were so rare as to be nearly imaginary. A culture doesn’t need to invent myths about things it can routinely observe. The very insistence on the possibility of a moral leader atop a superpower is evidence that such a thing is painfully uncommon.

Modern democracies have updated the dream: instead of a divinely chosen sovereign, we have the selfless technocrat, elected by a clear-eyed public and bound by enlightened norms. The West cycles through figures like Obama, Macron, Trudeau etc as if auditioning them for the role of secular messiah. We elevate them, then punish them for being what we always should have known they would be:

Flawed.

Moral purity and political ascendancy are not unlikely bedfellows; they are mutually exclusive currencies. One is spent to obtain the other.

“Power” doesn’t mean influence, status, or even mere authority. It means the capacity to project decisions into irreversible outcomes on a national or global scale. It means choosing whether wars are fought. It means allocating death and debt. It means making treaties, breaking embargoes, sanctioning regimes, lying in speeches and apologizing in memoirs.

To attain that kind of power, one must climb the machinery built to protect it. And that machinery is not morally inert. It is a filtration system.

Lyndon B. Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act. He also escalated the Vietnam War catastrophically. Was he a hero? A villain? The categories break down under proximity to nuclear codes.

Churchill is, quite rightly, revered for defying Hitler. But his policies in India arguably led to the Bengal famine of 1943. Did he save civilization or doom a colony? Does it matter that he believed in empire more than equity?

Once a leader controls armies, borders, or reserve currencies, their sphere of action is so entangled with realpolitik, compromise, and strategic cruelty as to make any genuine moralism indistinguishable from negligence. The idealist who refuses to drone-strike a terrorist safe haven is lauded by ethicists and condemned by national security briefers.

You don’t get to be the most powerful person in the world without also becoming the most complicit.

The scale makes it so.

The public insists on using ethical frames that cannot withstand scale. We want the global leader to be both surgeon and saint, to wield the scalpel without piercing the flesh. But at scale, every decision generates a field of victims.

Obama expanded the use of drone warfare, believing it to be a cleaner alternative to boots-on-the-ground wars. It reduced American casualties, but it also normalized extrajudicial killings, often based on questionable intelligence. To the electorate, he was either a pragmatic commander or a covert executioner. To history, he is an icon.

In truth, he is all the above.

There is no such thing as a large-scale action without collateral harm. Every lever of power has blood on it. And the person who pulls it cannot claim ignorance. The best they can hope for is triage ethics: to believe they minimized the worst harms, even if they authorized many.

And that’s if they’re acting in good faith.

Institutions do not elevate saints. They elevate operators. The qualities necessary to win an election, to rise through a bureaucracy, to dominate a party, are not the qualities of moral clarity. They are the qualities of persuasion, coercion, obfuscation, and coalition management.

In Machiavelli’s terms: it is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both. But also: to be feared and still elected, you must be lovable enough to lie convincingly.

The selection process rewards ambiguity. It rewards those who can say one thing to donors and another to voters. It rewards those who can stomach compromise without losing sleep.

In this process, even decent people mutate. You cannot swim in a river of sewage and climb out of the muck smelling of roses. Every rung climbed is a concession made. Every concession becomes a pattern. And eventually, a character.

The idea that someone could emerge from this with clean hands is not only naïve. It is dangerous. It gives rise to a politics of personality worship, where atrocities can be reframed as tactics, betrayals as necessary realism. It gives rise to what Arendt famously called the "banality of evil" - the bureaucratization of harm through ordinary decisions made by ordinary people in extraordinary roles.

It also creates disillusionment cycles. We elect a reformer. We project onto them our hopes. We discover, inevitably, that they trade in influence, not virtue. Then we retreat into cynicism, until the next one arrives.

This cycle is only broken when we understand that morality and leadership at global scale are orthogonal.

If this is true, is moral leadership possible anywhere? Perhaps, but not where most people look.

Moral action is local. Not always small, but local. It is constrained by context, but guided by fidelity to principle, not results alone. Vaclav Havel wielded power reluctantly. Mandela held power briefly, and left. Neither sought empire.

True morality in leadership seems to correlate with refusal: the refusal to cling, to expand, to dominate. The refusal to become the state.

But such figures do not lead superpowers. They do not command fleets. They do not decide interest rates. They write essays. They organize communities. They resign rather than compromise.

The larger the platform, the more brittle the virtue. And the more global the power, the more theatrical the ethics.

This is not a popular conversation because it undermines the entire premise of electoral idealism. It makes every foreign policy debate a trolley problem without brakes. It makes every campaign promise a hostage to necessity. It suggests that we are not choosing between good and bad leaders, but between those willing to lie about what they will do and those who won’t bother.

It also implicates us. Because we are complicit in the system that demands bloodless results. We vote for comfort. We demand safety. We reward deception if it spares us difficult truths. We do not want a moral leader. We want someone who acts immoral on our behalf, then reassures us that everything was unfortunate but necessary.

What should we do with this insight?

Not despair. But stop pretending. The honest frame is not: who is good? But: who can wield power with the least damage? Who can navigate the brutal calculus without enjoying it? Who can be pressured?

We will not find philosopher-kings. But we might find reluctant surgeons.

There is a reason why most great moral figures were not rulers. Gandhi had no nuclear arsenal. Martin Luther King Jr. held no office. Solzhenitsyn led no party. Their power came from refusal, not command.

And maybe that’s the distinction worth keeping.

To lead the world, you must make peace with your own corruption. To remain moral, you must refuse the world’s invitation to lead.

The mature politics of the future will need to abandon the fantasy that good men will save us from evil institutions. Instead, it must confront the inverse: how to prevent institutions from turning ordinary men into agents of evil.

That means building systems that make moral abdication harder. That means limiting power rather than centralizing it. That means confronting the reality that greatness and goodness rarely coexist in the same seat.

We can ask more of our leaders, but only when we stop asking them to be angels.

Because no one rules the world cleanly. And anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.

Or campaigning.