Not just in the church, but business, government, academia, all group activities. Once personal ambition is diverted from "doing the best for myself" to "getting the collective to do the best for all of us" the mentality changes. The professional manager sees himself not as the leading talent in his particular organization or profession, but as possessing a talent independent of the field in which it is exercised. If you're a good general you'll make a good CEO, or politician, or college president. If you've worked yourself up from the produce department to running a chain of supermarkets, that must make you qualified to be an airline executive, right?

This cult of management, the myth that there is a separate skill called "management" that is easily transferred from one discipline to another, spawns leaders who see organizations (and individual workers) as equivalent plug-in modules that require no creativity or talent. We have even deluded ourselves into thinking management can be taught, and we pass out college degrees in it. This allows the manager to see himself and his class as some sort of interdisciplinary master, the essential component required to mold and direct the lazy and unruly production units he commands. This, in turn, leads to a condescending and patronizing, if not downright contemptuous, attitude to anyone who is not a member of this class.

This is a human tragedy, and has nothing to do with how we choose to politically organize ourselves as communities. There is little psychological or cultural difference between a big business executive or a high level government bureaucrat. In fact, at that level, people tend to slide effortlesly from one position to the other and often do so several times throughout their careers. I bet in Russia and China the bulk of the new capitalist class is made up of former Party members. For all our talk of individual excellence and personal creativity, we are primarily social animals, everything we do is done collectively, and collectives imply hierarchical organization. For some of us, the natural human impulse to work at something worthwhile, and the natural human desire to better one's self and family through labor, can only be accomplished by the exercise of power over others. For the manager, personal self-fulfillment can only come from the direction of others, from leadership, from command. For him, it is the ultimate human art. All other human talents, no matter how sublime, are simply tools they can call on to carry out that noble task.

It should also be kept in mind that management has little to do with entrepreneurship. It is difficult to be a successful entrepreneur unless one is a skilled manager, but the reverse is not true, most managers are themselves hired employees, professional bureaucrats, they adopt an entrepreneurial demeanor and vocabulary but they rarely put their own cash on the line. Managers see entrepreneurs the same way they see engineers: a valuable skill which can be leased when needed and discarded when not.

Leadership does not guarantee corruption, any more than virtue is a necessary result of solitary labor, but it does tend to attract the corrupt, and it tends to reward corruption disproportionately, so it makes the consequences of corruption more destructive.