I got to thinking about that adage the other day when I was reading about various chief executive officers who have crashed in flames after their companies have gone bankrupt. Well, they haven't actually crashed in flames yet. Most of them are hanging onto millions they got as "golden parachutes" when they were fired or from stock options they exercised or from the sale of stock before the price went through the floor.

Most of these guys stood at the top of the corporate pyramid pretty much able to tell everyone below them what to do. Meantime, most of them complained intermittently about government intervention in their affairs and the affairs of their corporation. Down below them, their underlings, who mostly did what they were told to do, saw their retirement washed away by red ink. They didn't have any golden parachutes.

One wonders what goes through the minds of such executives as their wealth and power rises. That's where my old professor's adage comes in. I think it's the temptation of power that eats away at common sense and responsibility. The executive who sees his or her power increase exponentially somehow also sees his or her sense of responsibility decrease in the same proportion. This seems to be even more true of dictators.

Saddam Hussein, for example, seems to have so believed in his own infallibility that he took a chance on Kuwait—and lost. But that doesn't seem to have diminished his desire to try the same thing all over again.

Adolf Hitler, working from an unparalleled series of successes, decided to invade Russia. It was a fatal mistake, but by that time he was beyond recognizing mistakes and he couldn't figure out any way to correct the situation except to say there wouldn't be any retreat, Germany would fight to the last man.

Joseph Stalin had the Soviet Union so terrified of him it would do most anything he asked. Meantime, he was busy doodling cartoons of wolves. "They"—whoever they were—were closing in on him, ready to attack. They never did, but he thought they would.

The former leaders of Enron and WorldCom and the rest of the corporate crooks didn't, of course, have the absolute sway over human life that Hitler and Stalin and Saddam enjoyed or enjoy—although perhaps "enjoyed" isn't the right word. For all three were prisoners of their own power.

Saddam, for instance, can't sleep in the same place twice in a row. All his food has to be checked for poison. His swimming pools are all regularly inspected to be sure they don't contain something harmful. In absolute power, paranoia reigns supreme.

For the former corporate leaders who briefly enjoyed unparalleled power and wealth, success wasn't quite this bad, but one wonders how they justified crooked bookkeeping and corporate looting in their own mind as true-blue American capitalism at its finest.

I have a feeling there's a kind of mental compartmentalization going on with such folks—they must have an ability to separate their morals and values into sections so that what they do in one area of their life has a different set of standards than what they do in another. Thus, it is perfectly correct to do anything to make money in the corporate box, even as a sense of community, corporate and national responsibility rests undisturbed in another compartment.

This ability is very helpful for spies who appear to be loyal to their homelands in most respects but aren't in the one area where it counts. Thus, Aldrich Ames was in the business of spying on the Russians as an employee of the CIA yet still able to betray his employer and also his nation because he needed the money the Russians paid him. One box wasn't talking to the other.

Responsibility ought to be universal. Energy executives ought to be just as responsible for their actions as corporate officers as they are as fathers, husbands or neighbors. But, of course, sometimes they aren't. And the farther they get from this across-the-board sense of responsibility, apparently the less likely are they to be responsible for anything.

That is why we have governments: because there is a common good, a common standard that we collectively have agreed to respect, and, if we don't respect it, we have to face the consequences—the consequences to which we also have collectively agreed.

This doesn't mean, alas, that the guilty always get punished. But in the long run, most people with absolute power don't really have it after all. Because it corrupts, it contains the seeds of its own destruction.

It's just that those who are corrupted never seem to see this and keep on making the same mistakes over and over again.