The Virtue Or Morality Of The Hierarchies
"Pollice Verso" — Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1872 | The power of hierarchy over life "He railed, in Pompey's name, at the Immortal Gods for always allowing vice to triumph over virtue. How they laughed." — Robert Graves, I, Claudius Hierarchies surround us everywhere: the corporation, the family, the State, the military, nature itself. But are they moral, or simply necessary? Can virtue truly exist within the exercise of power, or does all power inevitably corrupt the very virtue it claims to defend? In this essay from the book "Resisting the Sisyphus Average" , Miguel Troncoso Castro draws on his own experience in the world of engineering and construction — where two symbiotic cultures coexist, that of the field and that of the central office — to explore one of humanity's oldest tensions: the relationship between power, virtue, and morality in hierarchical structures . From classical Rome to the conte...
