There is a particular expression that settles over a person the first time they are handed a small amount of authority. You can see it at the meeting right after the election, when the newly seated chair of the architectural committee squares the stack of papers, clears their throat, and discovers, perhaps for the first time in a life, that what they say in this room is going to happen. The fence stays or it comes down. The shade of beige is approved or it is not. It is intoxicating, and it is almost always invisible to the person feeling it.
Hobbes thought we hand authority upward to escape the war of all against all. He said little about what that authority does to the person who receives it. For that you want Hannah Arendt, who noticed that the most ordinary people, given a function and a procedure, can become rigid enforcers of both. Not from malice, but because the rules are now the medium through which they exist. Scale that insight down from the twentieth century to a forty-home subdivision and you have the architectural review committee.
The curious thing is who handles it well, and it is frequently not who you would expect. The retired general, the former city manager, the executive who once signed budgets larger than the entire reserve fund: these people tend to wear the HOA gavel lightly, almost amused by it. They have held real power and learned its costs, and a dispute over mailbox finials does not summon the same hunger. The danger sits instead with the person tasting authority for the first time, late, in a small room, over small things. To them the stakes feel enormous, because they are the only stakes they have.
None of this makes anyone a villain. The first-time enforcer and the unbothered ex-executive are both responding, in opposite directions, to the same human fact: power changes the person who holds it, and the change is hardest to see from the inside. A board that knows this about itself governs better than one that does not.