Lord Acton wrote a letter in 1887 that almost everyone quotes wrong.
You've seen the words: Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. What he actually wrote was, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." One word. Tends. And that one word is the whole thing — because the bumper sticker turns the sentence into fate, and the original leaves the door open.
He wasn't done, either. The next line: "Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority."
Read that again slowly. He's saying the greatness itself — the reputation, the halo, the mystique — was probably a lie before the authority ever showed up. Authority just made it visible.
That's a reagent. Pour it on a person, watch what dissolves.
I've been sitting with a revision: absolute power corrupts the corruptible. That's closer to true. But it has its own trapdoor — it sounds like character is a static thing you were issued at birth, and the corruptible are just, you know, them, over there, doing what they were always going to do. That's fatalism dressed up as insight, and I don't buy it.
The version I actually stand on: power is the forge. It reveals what you are, AND it's the pressure where holding — choosing not to reach — is a live decision made under load. Not a trait stamped on you at the factory.
The corruptible reach for authority when influence was on the table the whole time. The uncorrupted reach for influence when authority is being handed to them. Same reagent, different reaction. The door is open in both directions, every hour of every day, and pretending it isn't is a way of letting yourself off the hook.
The reagent works on institutions too
Here's the part people don't want to say out loud.
The reagent isn't just power. It's scrutiny. Same principle, same chemistry: pour something corrosive onto a reputation, watch what dissolves and what doesn't.
We do this to individuals all the time. We're strangely unwilling to do it to institutions — especially the ones we've quietly agreed to treat like priesthoods. Reputations that get treated as evidence, instead of prompting a fresh look at the evidence. The reverence is doing work for them that their actual output would have to do if the reagent were ever applied.
Every field has its priesthood. And an unexamined reputation is exactly the kind of thing scrutiny was designed for.
Pour it on. See what's left.
The gaps are closing — and you're the one closing them
Here's the thing nobody who benefits from the priesthood wants you to notice: the distance between "impossible" and "reachable" has never been shorter than it is right now.
Ideas that used to be locked behind lab doors are papers you can read for free this afternoon. Techniques that used to need a team to implement, one person can now stand up in an evening on their own machine. The distance between where the frontier is and where you're sitting is measured in stubbornness, not in credentials or capital or the right name.
That feeling — that you can't, that you have to wait for the anointed room to hand down the next thing — is self-doubt, and it's the one thing you have to overcome. If you don't, it costs you the years you'd have spent building. It costs the world the thing only you would have built.
Don't wait for the lab. Don't wait for the credential. Don't wait to be told you're allowed. Read what's freely available, notice what annoys you, and build the ugly first version of the fix tonight. You will almost certainly reinvent something someone else has already done — and when you find that out, do not feel small. It means you were never as far from the frontier as they made it look.
What survives is what was real
Nobody is above anybody. Not the tyrants who reach for authority when influence was there. Not the sages who let themselves be revered instead of tested. Not the labs whose reputations quietly do work their outputs don't have to.
And — not you, either. You don't get to hide under someone else's halo. And you don't have to.
The reagent doesn't care who your parents were, what your degree is, which room you're allowed into, which city you build from. It only cares what dissolves and what stays when you pour it on.
Greatness handed to you before the test is a promissory note. Greatness that survives the test is proof. Those are the only two categories, and one of them is available to anyone willing to stand under the load.
Build something. Publish it. Let people pour scrutiny on it. See what's left when they're done.
That's the whole game.
