One Ring to Rule Them All and In The Darkness Bind Them

Over the past week or so I have been re-visiting Tolkien for the first time in more than fifteen years. And one theme that has emerged so strongly this time through is the irresistible temptation to seize and employ the ring, the very embodiment of corrupted and worldly power, in order to achieve worthy ends or even ultimate goods.

Tolkien's message here is unequivocal: the ring cannot be used thus. Indeed it inevitably corrupts those who would so employ it. And the more noble the aims and the greater the power, the greater the fall. Or to use Phillip Selznick's wonderful quip: "power co-opts and absolute power co-opts absolutely." Those who would use the ring as a tool for good become tools for evil.

With this in mind, I stumbled upon Bill Moyers' wonderful little video essay on Barrack Obama's seeming abandonment of the poor and vulnerable:




Here he quotes a line from Obama's Dreams from my Father about power and indeed about grasping the ring:

I would learn power’s currency in all its intricacy and detail” and “bring it back like Promethean fire.

Indeed.

The entire sense of this presidency is that while the promise was that progress would grasp power, instead power has grasped progress, as Tolkien would say, to the peril of us all.