The upstart could face expulsion, harassment, even death.

male faces are chosen in leadership experiments more often than female ones.

Agriculture made it easier to have excess food. Once there was more food to go around, some people hoarded it. Those surpluses made inequality possible.

Thankfully, once you recognize that tendency of power, you can counteract it.

as ranged weapons became more common, the dynamics of warfare started to dramatically favor societies with more soldiers.

Rotation is also important for an unexpected reason, related to something called the Peter Principle. The concept, which was coined by its namesake, Laurence J. Peter, asserts that people tend to rise to the “level of their incompetence.”

If our behavior and our thoughts can even marginally be affected by something so invisible and seemingly distant as the crops our ancestors grew, imagine how those in power are conditioned to behave depending on differences in work culture, pressure from their bosses, or learning bad behavior from bad apples around them.

When we say “power corrupts,” we mean that power makes people worse than they previously were.

Lord Acton was right: power does tend to corrupt. The problem, then, isn’t that the conventional wisdom is wrong, but that the conventional wisdom only focuses on a tiny part of the picture.