Power has never been gentle. But what we are witnessing in our time is not just the old story of domination, corruption, or ambition. It is the crystallization of a new architecture of power one that feeds on contradiction, thrives on spectacle, and rewards precisely those behaviors that corrode the very systems it animates. This emerging power game is frightening not because it is chaotic, but because it is perversely self-organizing. It has rules, rituals, and incentives that make corruption not merely likely, but rational.
This essay seeks to dissect that game. Not in the abstract, not as another jeremiad about “corruption” or “the fall of values,” but as a concrete system of rewards, liabilities, and psychological hooks that shape politics, organizations, and culture. My claim is simple: we are in an era where power is increasingly secured not by competence or legitimacy, but by one’s willingness to perform transgression often obscene, sometimes deadly as a rite of entry. Once inside, the game becomes self-reinforcing, ensuring that only those willing to escalate remain visible, and those unwilling are discarded.
The unsettling brilliance of this power game lies in its recursive logic. It feeds itself. It rewards cruelty because cruelty commands attention; it prizes contradiction because contradiction generates spectacle; it binds through blackmail because complicity ensures loyalty. It is not just that the system is corrupt it is that corruption is the operating system.
I. What Makes This Power Game “New”?
Cynics will argue that nothing here is new. Power has always been ruthless. Rome’s emperors secured legitimacy by parading gladiators; Renaissance popes were as Machiavellian as any modern politician; colonial enterprises thrived on spectacle and brutality alike. Why dignify today’s dynamics with the label “new”?
The novelty lies in three things:
Attention as the primary currency.
In past systems, land, gold, or capital were the organizing resources. Today, the scarce commodity is attention. Control attention and you control the means of legitimacy, fundraising, mobilization, and suppression. The New Power Game is calibrated for the attention economy—hence its addiction to spectacle and contradiction.
Viral amplification as infrastructure.
Where once power relied on local rumor mills, it now depends on global platforms that can elevate a scandal to planetary visibility in seconds. Escalation is not only encouraged; it is infrastructural. The “feeds” and “trends” of our digital platforms are perfectly tuned to reward the obscene gesture over the measured act.
Institutional hollowing.
In earlier systems, institutions at least pretended to mediate churches, bureaucracies, universities. Today, these institutions are themselves hollowed out, chasing visibility rather than competence. Universities become brands, churches become media empires, and governments become performance stages. The game now penetrates the very organs once designed to resist it.
Thus, the New Power Game is not simply an evolution of old corruption. It is a structural mutation driven by technology, psychology, and institutional fragility.
II. Anatomy of the Game
The power game can be understood as a set of interlocking dynamics. Each alone would be manageable; together, they create a metastable ecosystem—stable on the surface, rotten within.
1. Signal as Currency
Competence is secondary; visibility is everything. To advance, one must send louder signals of loyalty or defiance, even when those signals have no substantive relation to outcomes.
Consider contemporary politics. A candidate who engineers outrage through inflammatory statements may have no coherent policy but will command disproportionate media coverage. In corporate settings, executives who make “bold” announcements mass layoffs, headline acquisitions are rewarded in markets even if the fundamentals worsen. The currency is not results but the signal of decisiveness.
2. Contradiction as Fuel
In classical politics, hypocrisy was an embarrassment. Today, it is an asset. The spectacle thrives on contradiction because it produces endless cycles of outrage and attention.
A leader who campaigns on morality while being exposed in vice does not vanish; their notoriety deepens. Corporations fined for malpractice use the scandal as advertising. The contradiction itself becomes the engine, feeding the system with attention. The more glaring the gap between words and deeds, the more powerful the spectacle.
3. Blackmail and Complicity
The initiation is never clean. To enter the game, one must participate in acts public or private that ensure loyalty. These acts create liabilities: recorded favors, financial entanglements, moral stains. Such hooks are not accidental; they are the cement of the system.
The mafia understood this well: the first crime binds the recruit. Modern organizations do the same, albeit more subtly. Executives are made to approve ethically dubious deals. Politicians accept favors they cannot publicly defend. Once compromised, retreat is nearly impossible.
4. Ritualized Escalation
The game requires ever-greater acts to maintain relevance. Yesterday’s transgression becomes today’s baseline. What was shocking last year is banal today. This creates an arms race of obscenity.
We see it in celebrity culture, where each new scandal must surpass the last; in activism, where radical purity tests escalate until they devour moderates; in politics, where inflammatory rhetoric must constantly one-up itself to hold attention. Escalation is not incidental it is the treadmill.
5. Layered Legitimacy
The surface rituals remain intact: conferences, awards, glossy reports, moral rhetoric. These provide just enough cover to reassure publics and stakeholders. Beneath, however, power is traded in feudal terms secrets, favors, coercion. The contradiction between the two layers is not a flaw but a feature; it keeps insiders bound and outsiders confused.
III. Why People Play
Why do rational actors enter such a corrosive system? Because the incentives align perfectly with human weakness.
Asymmetric Rewards. The rewards of spectacle (visibility, promotions, donations) are immediate; the costs (reputation decay, institutional fragility) are deferred. Rational actors pursue the immediate upside.
Survivorship Illusion. We see only the few who thrive by playing the game and assume it is the sole route. The countless casualties disappear into silence.
Sunk-Cost Trap. Once compromised, individuals feel trapped. Better to escalate than admit weakness.
Psychological Payoff. Outrage and transgression provide emotional highs for actors and audiences alike. The game hijacks the brain’s reward system.
Thus, the New Power Game is not sustained by malevolent masterminds but by ordinary incentives acting on ordinary psychology.
IV. Case Illustrations
Politics: The Performance State
The United States offers the clearest laboratory. Figures who once would have been disqualified by scandal now thrive because scandal is their oxygen. Donald Trump did not survive despite his contradictions; he survived because of them. Each new revelation of misconduct deepened his notoriety, making him indispensable to the game.
Nigeria provides another example, where politicians often secure legitimacy not by policy but by displays of patronage, patron saints of corruption who win admiration precisely for their audacity. The contradiction between poverty and their ostentatious wealth is not a liability but a symbol of power.
Corporations: The Risk-Takers’ Dividend
Consider Facebook’s repeated privacy violations. Each scandal generated outrage but also locked the platform deeper into public consciousness. Fines were treated as operating costs, while the controversies themselves amplified the brand. Uber followed a similar trajectory: scandals around culture and regulation paradoxically strengthened its image as a disruptive force.
Social Movements: Purity Spirals
Activist networks too are vulnerable. To be recognized, new entrants often feel compelled to demonstrate radical purity. Moderates are dismissed as sellouts; the most incendiary rhetoric garners the most attention. The cycle of escalation consumes the movement from within, leaving it brittle and divided.
V. The Damage
The costs of this architecture are immense:
Corrosion of Trust. Citizens no longer trust institutions because they sense the performance. Trust erodes faster than it can be rebuilt.
Talent Distortion. The competent and steady are sidelined in favor of the flamboyant. The system selects for audacity over skill.
Moral Pollution. Acts once unthinkable are normalized. Cruelty becomes “strategy,” hypocrisy becomes “savvy.”
Strategic Fragility. Systems built on spectacle may survive for years, but when a true shock arrives, financial crisis, pandemic, they collapse because resilience has been hollowed out.
VI. Countermeasures
The temptation is to imagine moral renewal will suffice. It will not. The game is a design problem. It must be countered by redesigning incentives.
1. Reprice Attention. Platforms, organizations, and states must recalibrate metrics. Reward long-cycle impact, not immediate virality. This means new funding models, new evaluation cycles, and deliberate friction to slow escalation.
2. Create Non-Spectacle Arenas. Invest in venues where competence is visible without theatrics: peer-reviewed research, long-horizon boards, closed accountability groups.
3. Build Optionality. Diversify reputational and economic anchors so individuals cannot be blackmailed by one platform or patron. Encourage multiple careers, parallel audiences, side networks.
4. Protect Exit Corridors. Ensure dissenters can leave gracefully. Trapped actors escalate recklessly; free exits reduce damage.
5. Reward Repair. Invert the “never apologize” logic. Make public repair and restitution the pathway to restored credibility.
6. Collective Refusal. Individual dissent is punished; collective dissent can break the loop. Coalitions of refusal are critical.
7. Surface the Hidden Costs. Make the casualties visible: the careers ruined, the institutions hollowed. Survivorship bias thrives on silence. Break it.
VII. Toward a Synthesis
The New Power Game is a corrosive but brilliant machine. It thrives because it aligns human greed with systemic incentives, turning contradiction into fuel and transgression into currency. It corrodes trust, hollows institutions, and destabilizes societies, all while appearing vibrant and alive.
But no system is permanent. Just as financial bubbles eventually burst, so too will this architecture collapse under its own weight. The task for those who see clearly is not merely to lament but to prepare alternatives to build new arenas where competence, repair, and resilience are more profitable than spectacle.
The lesson is simple, though brutal: systems fail not because people are bad, but because the reward structure makes badness rational. If we want to survive this century with institutions intact, we must change the rewards. Until then, the game will keep playing us.
Dr Charles Obiajulu Ugwu writes from Lagos
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