Hatred of power is a response to a felt sense of powerlessness. If you hand such people power nothing changes, because they are still powerless. What is given can be taken away. They are merely wielding something handed to them by another. What they actually long for is the expression of personal power that flows from their own competence and values, the feeling of an appreciated and unique contribution to the well being of others. This can not be taken away, but can also not be granted by fiat. No one can give it to you. They can only create the conditions amenable to it. The anger is directed at the perception that conditions are not conducive to the cultivation of such personal power and furthermore that no one gives a shit that that's the case. So there does not seem to be a way out. People who feel cornered lash out.
How did Lee Kuan Yew and his party deal with this universal problem? They created a system that builds as much shared buy in as possible.
In his own words:
"Once people have a stake in the system, they stop voting for crazy economic schemes."
Okay, but how specifically? The centerpiece of this plan was getting as many people as possible to be landowners, so they would share in long run prosperity. Notice that this is sort of an inverse of what happened in the US. In the US, the idea of having landowners be the voters was a strategy for aligning incentives. When the system broke down it moved towards having women, minorities, etc be allowed to vote even though they didn't own land. LKY's solution would have been figuring out what needed to change in order to turn women and minorities into landowners, giving them stake and say in the system in which they lived.
In retrospect, it should be obvious that giving people a stake but no say, or a say but no stake, are losing strategies. And inducing a hatred of power is a viscous cycle, as it directs people away from some of the very things that would most help.
