Power is not a joke. And treating it like a punchline is precisely why political and corporate institutions keep burning to the ground.
When former Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratunga famously quipped that power is a joke, but it gives her the authority to do what she thinks she needs to do for the country, she was parroting a comforting, aristocratic delusion. She framed authority as a necessary burden, a bad joke with a useful punchline: raw mandate.
The lazy consensus praises this view. It paints leaders as tragic heroes holding the steering wheel of a broken bus, sneering at the mechanics of the machine while desperately punching the gas.
That perspective is dangerous nonsense.
Power is not a joke. Power is a balance sheet. It is an exact measurement of leverage, dependency, and institutional friction. When you treat it like a comedy sketch you happen to star in, you ignore the math. And the math always wins.
The Myth of Benevolent Authority
The central error in the conventional narrative is the separation of authority from accountability. Kumaratunga assumed authority is a blank check signed by the electorate, redeemable for whatever moral or national vision happens to cross a leader's mind on a Tuesday morning.
I have watched executives and political operators make this exact mistake up close. They inherit a title, assume the administrative machinery bends to their personal enlightenment, and spend their entire tenure fighting the gravity of reality. They confuse having a legal title with possessing actual steering capacity.
Authority without structural alignment is just noise.
Let us look at the mechanics. In political science and organizational theory, power is typically categorized through French and Raven’s bases of social power: legitimate, reward, coercive, expert, and referent. Notice what is missing from that taxonomy? Humor. Irony. The aristocratic shrug.
When a leader claims power is a joke, they are usually signaling exhaustion or detachment. But detachment is not leadership; it is abdication with a PR team. If your primary defense for executive action is that the system is absurd anyway, you have already checked out of the rigorous task of institutional design. You are running on fumes and ego.
The Danger of the Saviour Complex
"Doing what I think I need to do for the country."
That phrase should send a chill down your spine. It is the battle cry of every autocrat, failed CEO, and mismanaged board. It replaces institutional guardrails with personal intuition.
History is littered with visionaries who felt uniquely burdened by destiny. They ignored market signals, sidelined dissenting legal minds, and bypassed operational friction because their intentions were pure. Look at how well that turns out for the entities they leave behind.
Imagine a scenario where a corporate CEO decides that regulatory compliance is a bureaucratic joke, but uses their executive authority to push a product launch through anyway because they know it is right for the market. Within six months, the lawsuits arrive, the stock price craters, and the board scrambles for a scapegoat. The CEO walks away mumbling about how nobody understood their vision, while thousands of employees pay for the wreckage.
That is not strength. That is structural incompetence disguised as conviction.
Real authority does not reside in a person; it resides in systems, incentives, and structural dependencies. If your entire strategy relies on your personal willpower to drag an unwilling population or workforce across the finish line, your strategy has already failed. You just haven't received the memo yet.
Redefining the Equation
We need to stop romanticizing the cynical leader who sighs at the absurdity of the state while quietly pulling levers in the dark. That archetype belongs in a 19th-century novel, not a modern governance framework.
The correct question is never "What do I have the authority to do?"
The correct question is "What structural incentives am I actively reinforcing?"
If your authority requires you to mock the very systems that grant it, you are building on quicksand. True operational dominance—whether in a nation-state or a Fortune 500 boardroom—comes from aligning your authority with the economic and social realities of the people you supposedly lead. You do not get to laugh at the machine while demanding it print results for you.
Stop looking for saviors who view power as a tragic comedy. Start building systems that do not require one.
