The What and Why of Power

What is Power?

Put simply, there is Good power and Bad power.

Good power is the drive to better oneself in a variety of ways and contribute to making the world a better place.  This is personal agency power that generates satisfaction, accomplishment, compassion, and empathy.  It also builds and nurtures community. It is internally focused power - self power. This form of power helps individuals and groups accrue the benefit of pleasure at making a positive difference in the world.  And, it creates a virtuous cycle of people helping people - the Golden rule - do unto others as you would them do unto you.  Finally, it can make a positive material difference in the lives of others. 

Bad power is essentially concentrated power.  When power becomes sufficiently centralized, it begins to move across the terrain of bad power.  Fortuitously, not all concentrated power is fully problematic.  Concentrated power can be divided into two forms: mediated, moderated, and constrained ,and, unmediated, immoderate, and unconstrained.  The former can be considered excessive and dangerous but the latter can often feel like pure evil. 

While the mysterious and ultimately random vagaries of genes and life experiences all bequeath a blend of the children of light and the children of darkness within all of us, we all are driven toward power, both good and bad.  

Why is there Power?

We are driven, literally compelled to seek all manner of power for many particular or proximate reasons but there is one essential or constitutive reason.  We seek power in all its forms to due to perhaps the most fundamental fact of our existence - we will die.  This meta or foundational reality is the contradictory dyad of life vs death.  The normal human impulse in the face of this is either to deny the contradiction all together, or to “resolve or solve” it.  Either way, this cannot succeed - death is too certain and always wins, and life fights for life against this reality.  I maintain that death and our fear of death has deep-rooted and complex power over much of human history and consciousness. This power can be a source of both darkness and light. The darkness results when the fear of death and the desire for immortality wins, the light comes forth when acceptance of death and grace carry the day.

Humans are of course extremely fragile and in life confined to a temporal existence.  In addition, and long before the discoveries of modern science, we have always known that we are a minute and transitory speck in a vast, essentially limitless universe.  We really do have remarkably little control over events, nature, and our own lives.  A fundamental consequence of this is the problem of power and will to dominance that underlies many of humanity’s woes.  The will to power and desire for control is driven by the fear of our own fragility and ultimately our mortality (the penultimate fragility).   If we can feel powerful and in control, we can all to effectively deny this fragility.

“For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his “ideas” are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality” 

Jose Ortega y Gasset

And somewhat more hopefully,

Paradox..confuses us because it asks us to live with simultaneous opposites. To live with simultaneous opposites is, at first glance, a recipe for indecision at best, schizophrenia at worst. It need not be…When we are used to it and understand, paradox is no bother…It is, however, the understanding that is the key…Balancing the opposites, or switching between them, must not be a random or haphazard act…Living with paradox is like riding a seesaw.  If you know you the process works, and if the person on the other end also knows, then the ride can be exhilarating. If however, your opposite number does not understand, or willfully upsets that pattern, you can receive a very uncomfortable and unexpected shock…We can even come to realize that for the seesaw to work effectively, others must get as good as we get” 

Charles Handy 

The challenge for all of us is to confront the life vs death paradox through understanding and acceptance, not through denial or attempted resolution.  How well we do this, as individuals and communities, leads directly to the good and bad power balance and forms we create.  

Note:

For further reading on this, see:

Facing Death, Epicurus and his Critics, James Warren

The Age of Paradox, Charles Handy

The Denial of Death, Enerest Becker

Building Bridges - The Negotiation of Paradox in Psychoanalysis, Stuart Pizer

Immortality - the Quest to Live Forever and How it Drives Civilization, Stephen Cave

The Revolt of the Masses, Jose Ortega y Gasset