I know my sample size is extremely small, but I tend to believe these qualities help reaching the top, if they are not mandatory.

Sly, idiotic and lazy people eventually fall from the sky.

- The hold that powerful entrenched interests have over government that only maintain a positive status-quo with respect to themselves. But negative for the long term development of society

- The offensive allowance and use of patents and litigation by powerful people with the intention to slow progress lest they become obsolete.

- The lavish displays of opulence despite the fact that people are still starving to death

- The still strong existence of classicism

- The love to hate relationship society has with divas and their transformation from normal people

- The inverse proportional relationship between net-worth and probability of proper enacting of justice

- Concentrations of power in government and finance are not typically associated with honesty. Politicians, lawyers and wall street are not held as paragons of noble behavior.

- The prevalence of dictators and corrupt rulers in developing nations

- The extravagant efforts available and taken by the extremely wealthy to minimizes the relative damage of taxes.

- The paucity of efforts like the X Prize, Gates Foundation, Planetary Resources, Space X.

- The difficulty in ensuring that money given to charities actually end up being used efficiently (powerful less needy people somehow end up getting the lion's share of this aid).

Years of M.I.C. brain washing at work. Star Trek is run by a military Junta. (Did you note?)

Excepting people like Page who got there thanks to technical acumen.

It's like the brilliant quote by Douglas Adams: "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."

I think that's a false dichotomy. Power corrupts and the corrupt get power. Also, it's not binary but rather goes by degrees. Thus the long pursuit of power tends to lead to thorough corruption.

I don't think someone like Page is completely immune to the allure of power, but he may have a high resistance to it.

Caveat: I'm using the term a little loosely - there are different sorts of corruption.

FYI: You can't really tell if someone is genuinely goodhearted by watching them being interviewed by Charie Rose. It's what they do when they know no one is looking that will reveal the true nature of a man.

http://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html

Big part of society is actually concerned about their privacy. It is not like 99% of people are brainless zombies.