Shakespeare somehow always said it first, didn't he?

Do you remember in The Merchant of Venice (you probably didn't; I had to look it up, too) when Gratiano said: 'I am Sir Oracle. And when I open my lips. Let no dog bark?'

It is considered polite when you use other people's words at least to say you are quoting them.

Preacher, poets and politicians, as we know, often don't, giving the impression that other people's wisdom is their own, but then, as Basdeo Panday told us, 'Politics has a morality of its own.'

Is it something medical? A kind of creeping insidious infection that people have in their DNA?

Ivan Illich, the great modern philosopher and social critic, introduced the term 'iatrogenic disease,' which means that the medical industry (and it is now more of an industry than a profession) often causes more disease than it cures.

Illich pointed out that 'great organisations' start out with high ideals and ethics about serving humanity, but as they grow, their objectives and goals slide into self-preservation and self-empowerment. They justify it by claiming that their original objectives can only be achieved if they, and they alone, maintain absolute power and control.

Is this true of individuals as well? Wasn't it Drucker who posited in business organisations that once you put a modest man into a position of authority he will grow into it?

Or is Ilych right? Does power ultimately infect people's brains, however slowly and insidiously, so that they become corrupt on some level?

Corruption does not necessarily involve money, although various forensic audits into government enterprises have convinced most citizens of TT and the vice president of Guyana that in TT it does.

Corruption grows out of the decaying of the soul that is seen in other addicts: addicts of power - educational, religious, domestic, creative, artistic, spiritual and intellectual power.

It is that creeping addiction to control that convinces people that their perception of reality is not just one of a possible many but the

only reality, so they need everyone else's to conform.

Is it that, if they can't control their external reality, their inner world is so fragile or vulnerable that they fear it might collapse? Hence the Merchant of Venice: and 'let no dog bark'? Could be.

Addiction trumps everything. When it creeps into people in charge of large corporations or government ministries, ideals die. Ideals like democracy, respect for the law, freedom of speech, opinion or belief are devalued then demolished...And we thought substance addiction was harmful?

To live is to work. To threaten to terminate someone's ability to work via 'do as I say, think as I think, my way or the highway' without redress is to threaten death. There is a law that says to threaten death is a crime. Isn't there?

One of the reasons why capitalism as a methodology for creating and sustaining economic growth has proven so successful, arising out