Power: How Far Is Too Far

7 Pages 1777 Words

“I follow him to serve my turn upon him, we cannot all be masters, nor all masters cannot truly be followed.” (Othello, I, i, 45-47). Your closest friends could just be people who you think are your friends, but they’re really your enemies with secret identities and disguises to hide their true colors. The old saying about keeping your friends close and your enemies’ closer stands true. Especially when the issue at hand is who has power and control. There are people in this world that just can’t feel satisfied or fulfilled with themselves unless they hold a position of power. Sometimes the desire to have power and control is so strong and compelling, that people will go to extreme lengths to get it. They allow that desire to overcome them and they become manipulative, destructive, irrational and reckless in their pursuit. Willing to sacrifice anything or anyone. It’s almost as though they become blind to everything else around them.
I’ve noticed that people will do everything possible in order to become powerful. Those who are not satisfied with their current role in society will stoop to desperate and extreme measures to move up on the scale of life. The notion of power can have strange affects on people. Becoming there sole motivation and the reason they do the things they do, the idea of being powerful can make you forget everything else important in life. As evidence to support this concept, there are several characters from plays and novels that I would like to refer to.
From the William Shakespeare play Hamlet; I would like to mention the character King Claudius. He let his desire for power to become so strong, that he killed his own brother and married the Queen to take control of the throne. Being powerful became like an obsession and he was sure that others sought to take it away from him. Because of power his mind became clouded, he even saw his nephew, Hamlet, who was heir to the throne, as a ...