When you worship power, compassion and mercy will look like sins.
When you worship power, cruelty towards your "enemies” will look like righteousness and truthfulness.
When you worship power, tyrants and bullies will look like your saviors.
We don’t often think of the typical workplace as a site of worship, but workplace-based worship is widespread among the religious and the non-religious alike. From the devout believer to the avowed atheist, many or even most of us worship power.
It’s why the ambitious can never have enough. Why the mid-level executive must climb atop their colleagues to ascend to the vice presidency. Why the VP must annihilate competitors to become the CEO. Why the CEO must suppress all challenges to reign supreme, and on and on.
Yes, remuneration can spur ambition, but power is key. Top executives have long known that while money buys much—hard work, tolerance, and silence, among other things—the mere promise of power and prestige purchases all that and more—enthusiasm, fealty, submission—and often for free. Money will inspire underlings to suspend their values. Spiffy titles and the taint of power will entice them to forever abandon their values and whatever else they hold dear.
Indeed, the worship of power does not begin and end with bosses and aspiring bosses. People at every level stand in awe of authority. That’s why so many of us put up with cruelty and abuse toward others and even ourselves. We venerate our bosses as demigods and grant them full rein. This warped worship also plays out with politicians, government officials, the ultra-wealthy, and other perceived betters.
Power worship distorts our perspectives along with our values, which is why we tend to blame the victim. How many times have you heard, “If she wasn’t doing something wrong, she wouldn’t be in trouble,” despite the utter lack of evidence of serious wrongdoing?
Juries even do it in criminal cases. Sometimes jurors will argue that, while the evidence is flimsy, the defendant “must have done something to get arrested.” They accede their judgment to the authorities: the cops, prosecutors, and judges. I was once on a jury where the forewoman made that very argument, that the police wouldn’t arrest a man for domestic abuse unless he were guilty—this despite the abundant physical evidence that the poor defendant was the actual victim.
Power worship, like power itself, is almost a form of brain damage. Studies show that power negatively affects the part of the brain that enables us to empathize. I would posit that our awe of power may do much the same. This would explain why so many workers are utterly callous when their colleagues are suffering under a boss’s cruelty.
I experienced this myself when I was a vice president to an unstable president. One of my lieutenants smugly advised me to just knuckle under to her abuse because—and here’s the entire argument—“She’s the boss.” I never told him how I’d been protecting the people under me, including him. If not for my intervention, she would have succeeded in making his life miserable too.
I’ve also seen this situation operate at scale, with swaths of colleagues reactively blaming the victims for being in the way, being in the wrong place, or simply being, just like that jury forewoman did.
What’s more, our distorted perspective causes u s to reserve our most fervent worship for the worst of the worst: the loud boss with bottomless ineptitude, the executive evincing insatiable ambition, the manager bent on fierce cruelty, the deviant delighting in exploitation, or the team leader showering rewards on favorites and abuse on everyone else. Not one of these miscreants deserves the least respect let alone awe and worship. Nonetheless, we willingly disable our gag reflexes and slather them with adoration in hopes of one day currying their benevolence or at least staying out of their line of fire.
We, but Not Me (or You)
All of which is to say, we willingly and regularly defile ourselves to worship power in all its forms. Well, maybe not you or me, but the collective we of our society. That we finds power entrancing, alluring, irresistible. We want to be with the powerful; we want to be the powerful, and we’ll pay any price.
The quote from Benjamin Cremer at the start of this essay lays out the stakes. The worship of power comes at a high cost. We risk betraying everything we ever regarded as virtuous.
Oscar Wilde said, “Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.” By “patriotism,” he meant that very same adoration of strength. Wilde lived in England in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the height of the mighty British Empire. Power and nation were one and the same, so patriotism was in essence the veneration of power.
Thus, Wilde and Cremer are simpatico. The worship of power flips every value on its head and turns it inside out. Virtue becomes vice while vice dons the cloak of goodness. George Orwell famously satirized this inversion as a key feature of autocracy in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
As I have argued before, many workplaces are indistinguishable from autocratic governments of the sort Orwell has imagined. For some reason, though, we constantly demonstrate our willingness to abandon our basic freedoms and dignity to submit to the foibles of our employers as well to as the whims of our political overlords. What is the appeal of this yoke of servitude?
Cremer concludes with, “When you worship power, tyrants and bullies will look like your saviors.” Imagine that. The worship of power induces us to adore the very people who take away our freedoms and torment us as our “saviors.” Is that true? Surely not.
Yet, who can deny the fact that we regularly tolerate, condone, and even expect cruelty from bosses? The cruelty is so widespread that we call it “casual”—casual cruelty—a feature not a bug.
Be it the boss who occasionally undermines employees only to berate them, the finger pointer who’d rather assign blame than solve problems, the chronic bureaucrat hiding behind arbitrary rules, the yeller lacking self-control, or the creep who sees employees as possessions to be preyed upon in every way possible—all are incompetent cowards compensating for their fragility through bluster and bullying.
Without power, the appearance of power, proximity to power, or the protection of the powerful, no one would get away with such behavior for long. And nothing on my far-from-comprehensive list should strike anyone as rare or exotic. For millions, such cruelty is just the day to day.
Meanwhile, we continue to worship power in all its corrupt forms. If we don’t have power, we revere the powerful. Some seek it. If we have power, we exercise it as fully as possible and pursue more at nearly any cost. I think I’m right, though, when I say that power worship alone, without necessarily granting any actual power, afflicts us with the worst symptom of having power—an inability to empathize. Power worship is a lose-lose proposition.
We, Meaning Me (and You)
Again, I say “we,” but I don’t mean you and me, right? And we—this time meaning you and me—can identify plenty of individual exceptions: those people who have power but eschew the trappings and evade the trap by maintaining their character. In fact, there are plenty of people who forego power altogether yet still exert considerable positive influence and even authority.
To be sure, a viable alternative to power worship exists. It emphasizes productivity and success by focusing on values, transparency, trust, and teamwork. It nurtures cultures that reward and foster the best behaviors at every level. Ambition is fine, but only within the context of that collaborative culture.
We’d be wise to demand such an alternative—whether we sport some lofty title or rank as the lowest peon. It behooves us all to expect nothing less than human decency from those in charge, particularly if we’re the ones in charge. Everything else is, well, indecent.
So, what is this heresy that renounces the preeminence of power? Why doesn’t power—being powerful—just crush it? Because this alternative—its value flowing from its core values—can be much more powerful than power. Its effectiveness is undeniable. Its virtue is its strength. Its strength is overwhelming. It’s called leadership.
How do you view power and the powerful? Do you ever compromise your values in deference to power or ambition?
Leaders must resist the corrupting lure of power, and I can help.
Unlock the Great Leader Within! Download my free resource, the Transform To GREATness Toolkit, now!
I look forward to hearing from you.
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About Dr. Sal
I founded Guidance for Greatness to mentor rising professionals after serving 30 years in higher education as an English professor, dean, and VP.
In my speaking, writing, and coaching, I blend academic credentials (Ph.D. from Toronto, certificates from Harvard and ACE) with practical coaching certifications (Tiny Habits, Thrive Global) to offer something different: leadership development built upon human decency.
My mission? To guide today’s managers to become the next generation of great leaders.
I offer practical, values-driven strategies so that managers can lead authentically.
Why? Because great leaders aren't just effective managers—they're teachers whose example makes a true difference in the world.
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Discover the practical strategies that transform good managers into exceptional leaders. Look for my new book, Greater than Great: How to Excel in Leadership through Learning, Logic, and Life to Make a True Difference in the World: May, 20, 2025!
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