Is it? Look at the behavior among our own kind. We have the power to return from death. So what do we do with it? Kill and die over and over again. That said, corruption can mean a lot of things. Hatred, greed, covetousness, lust for power, I could go on. A dictator isn’t necessarily like that bastard Kuvakei.
I myself have heard another phrase: “What a man can do is what a man will do.” Our decisions are tempered by our sense of ethics. Most of the Minmatar tribes would consider the Amarr Emperors to be monsters, but the Emperors had their own idea of right and wrong. They had their own lines that they wouldn’t cross. I don’t see the Empire shoving slave implants into their servants like Sansha, even though it is within their power. Why? Because in their system of ethics that would be a perversion of the Reclaiming and thus unconscionable.
Corruption, then, is a sliding scale of subjectively interpreted ideas. It is a failure to judge oneself.