Power reduces empathy, makes us hypocritical, and causes us to dehumanize others. To a degree, there’s a good reason for this: people in powerful positions need to make hard decisions that may be bad in the short term but good in the long term. Generals need to send soldiers into harm’s way to win a war. If they felt paralyzing guilt over every loss of life, there’d be no way they could do the right thing. But as we saw with denial, this same emotional distance can quickly spiral out of control.
