What makes power tick, and how does it become entrenched and abused? Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, so the saying goes. What lies beneath power?

Understanding the nature of power can help us move toward a world of freedom, justice, and economic equity for all. In this dialogue, Robert Fuller points to a hidden form of discrimination that everyone knows but no one sees: discrimination based on rank.

Fuller is president emeritus of Oberlin College and the founder of the Mo Tzu Project, and has traveled extensively in communist countries and troubled spots around the world. He earned a Ph.D. in physics at Princeton University and taught at Columbia University before becoming the president of Oberlin. He served for many years as chairman of the global nonprofit media organization Internews. He is the author of Somebodies and Nobodies: Overcoming the Abuse of Rank and All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity.

Topics explored in this dialogue include: how World War II and the Vietnam War relate to the war on terrorism, how rankism uses power to support a belief system, how the "somebody mystique" affects our life and culture, how people chose to ignore Hitler prior to World War II, and how we can halt the abuses of rankism and move towards fairness and justice for all.