The Power Continuum

It seems to me that power exists on a continuum. On one end is power-from-within which we all possess to varying degrees, and at the other there is power-over. The stations between these are complex, as we learn to negotiate with others in the universe. No doubt, students of political science, sociology and psychology will have more refined descriptions than the following which comes mostly from my observations.
I see power-from-within arising from thoughts, feelings, imagination, learned skills, the arts and self-discipline. Words like express, share, understand, design, empathize, inspire, indicate to me a power-from-within.

 
Power-over resides in social position and opportunity. Parents have power over their children, teachers over their students, managers over employees, police officers over city streets, etc. Words like teach, enforce, control, limit, protect, withhold, give, take, coerce, extract – indicate power-over. 

 
Power-over is not necessarily an abuse of power, and power-from-within is not always harmless. A functioning civil society requires a sophisticated awareness of how and where power is expressed or used for the greater good. As we become more mature we are more empathic and conscious of the way we use our power and the effect it has on others. We learn to be more specific in dealing with conflict seeking outcomes that satisfy all. 

 
When societies become stressed, it’s easy to fall for a quick fix, dismissing and discrediting the complex structures that have taken centuries to evolve. The default quick fix focuses on “who is to blame”. Nature becomes a menace to be controlled. Diversity intolerable. 

When meaningful debate is discouraged and replaced with slogans and propaganda, the human conscience loses its voice. The individual feeling powerless may side with hard-line political movements for a spurious sense of power by association and a false confidence. 

When power-from-within no longer dialogues with power-over, as in times of war, power becomes a misanthropic ritual marching towards an ever greater contempt for life. It is estimated that between 136 to 148 million deaths occurred through wars and conflicts in the 20th century. This year alone there have been nearly 50,000 fatalities due to conflict.

However, there is no indication among my neighbours, friends and peers that suggests we want to murder others. So what is the cause of war? 

Retired minister, Rev. John Alexie Crane, in his sermon on Human Nature and War asks us to look more closely “at the most crucial of war’s causes, namely, the actions and ambitions of the alpha males who continue to hold positions of leadership in the nations of the world.” Leaders who have been led to believe by their supporters, that their power is all there is and they alone are responsible for saving the world.

How does power-from-within meet the alpha ego? 

When we stop asking “what is wrong with the world”, and ask instead “how can we build a livable one?” For all the territory and wealth that has been fought over and for all the lives lost and being lost, the very least we can do is to learn how power works for and against life – examples are everywhere. 

 
Power-from-within meets the centre of the continuum in community before it reaches a critical mass where the conscience reminds the discouraged mind that it can’t afford to shut up.

(First published in The Flying Shingle, August 4, 2014)

Community or Asylum

In Chris Hedges article "Welcome to the asylum" he spells out the ways in which civilizations dissolve into madness.

"The quest by a bankrupt elite in the final days of empire to accumulate greater and greater wealth, as Karl Marx observed, is modern society’s version of primitive fetishism. This quest, as there is less and less to exploit, leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, a collapse of infrastructure and, finally, collective death. It is the self-deluded, those on Wall Street or among the political elite, those who entertain and inform us, those who lack the capacity to question the lusts that will ensure our self-annihilation, who are held up as exemplars of intelligence, success and progress. The World Health Organization calculates that one in four people in the United States suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood disorder or depression—which seems to me to be a normal reaction to our march toward collective suicide."

The Western world who has wholeheartedly embraced unfettered capitalism, without any concern for social consequences, are rushing to follow in this suicidal spiral, and the good citizens question whether they can ever have a conversation with the mad bull-dogs whose jaws are firmly hanging onto any flesh linked to power, no matter how decomposed it might be.

Democracy is supposed to be that conversation that limits the damage done by megalomaniacs. But Lawrence Martin asks if we are still living in a democracy.

"... anyone who scrolls through recent media, conservative media included, might be forgiven for concluding that we have something more closely resembling the opposite. Something more akin to billy-club governance. Think of the ironclad controls, the scorning of accountability, the censorship, the smearing of opponents, the power unto one. The abuses are not just opposition talk. They’re writ large in Auditor-Generals’ reports, in internal documents and journalists’ investigations. Some of the abuses have happened in other governments but have they ever happened on the scale we’ve seen from this crowd?"

You may wonder, how did we get to this point where our elected leaders behave as though they feel contempt for democracy?  Well all you have to do is read a little history or speak to survivors of war to understand that power is based either on contempt for life or a reverence for life.

It will seem outrageously stupid to say that loving kindness or compassion is the only weapon that sustains life, until you visit or listen to some of our First Nations people who have survived the most terrible violence at a time when they were most vulnerable. They have fought every minute of every day of every year since, to mend their broken spirits by re-educating themselves and their children on how to live. The fight is never over as they now are fighting the threat of oil tankers and pipelines, as we all should be.

The tragedy of our age is that, on the one hand we witness the madness of violence and destruction designed by a controlling elite, and dismiss the goodness under our feet as benign.  This is the way power has corrupted our spirit by making us blind with anxiety. 

Anxiety will control and diminish our power as long we fail to stare it in the face, and ask our discomfort to speak to us on a deeper level. What does it mean when our governments have given up on their people and we can no longer hope for jobs, education, health care and a clean environment?

Imperialist nations that thrived on oppressing other nations for their resources are now feeling the violence of the system that fed and controlled them through propaganda and ideology until there was no ideal left uncorrupted, untainted. We live in an age now where we can't escape the immense depth of violence which we once supported through loyalty.

What can each one of us do to re-create new systems?  What do we possess that we can choose to build upon?  What can we believe in?  These are questions to ask ourselves for our answers will be our legacy.

While socialist and capitalist governments have abused power, Pickett and Wilkinson tell us (in an article published in StraightGoods)

"the evidence shows unmistakably that more equal societies — those with smaller income differences between rich and poor — are friendlier and more cohesive: community life is stronger, people trust each other more, and there is less crime and violence. So the deep human intuition that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive is true.

People in more unequal societies have worse health and lower life expectancy; they are more likely to have drug problems and to suffer more mental illness. Measures of child wellbeing are worse and children do less well at school. Rates of teenage births, obesity and violence are all higher, and more people are in prison."

It's time we stopped working for our oppressors by examining the power of institutions and the frames they contain us in, and then by re-creating the world based on social justice, compassion, freedom and responsibility.

Re-aligning the Future

What can we do in our one short life to create a sustainable, just, future?

First we need a 'level gaze' at the global situation as it is today - the wars, the marginalization of people, the economy, the gap between haves and have-nots, the environment, and all the other problems threatening this planet.

And then we need to look at how things work. How do movements begin and how do they affect change? Do they have to be funded by corporations and governments? Is it possible for grass roots values to emerge and challenge the status quo, staying true to the original cause?

Given the endless examples of corrupt power that began with good intentions, it would be easy to turn away from the world and entertain ourselves to death. Anyone who dares to utter ideals is likely to be laughed at or viewed with suspicion. That is the problem - we have lost faith in humanity's  ability to solve the big problem.

Imagine an alien nation visiting this planet after everything has been destroyed, scrambling through the ruins looking for clues to the final cause of our demise. The answer might be that we were smart enough to build rockets, write symphonies and create political systems, but couldn't work together for the sake of our survival.   Humanity showed signs of being experts on what was wrong, and what or who was to blame, but in the end, were unable to identify their own culpability.

Each age has its own allusions of grandeur and every nation its own conceits, and these are the blessings and threats to our survival - the tragic flaw.  It's not a solution or an invention that we need now, it's humility and compassion.  The way to the future cannot be mapped out onto a blueprint. 

It is, I believe, a spiritual quest where we learn how to honour the other equally with the self, to recognize when we are misguided, acknowledge mistakes and then recalibrate the journey.

We have the scientists, the healers, the visionaries, the artists and musicians, to guide and inspire. There will always be the optimists and pessimists, those who say too much and those who don't speak up, those who give and those who take.  And we have communities that work because of the focus and commitment of individual members.

We have the capacity for empathy and to read between lines. We have emotional intelligence and rational objectivity. We share the bond of one mother.  Our home provides enough air, food, water and shelter for us all.  So what is holding us back? What is muddling the discussion and obfuscating the goal?

The answer, I feel, can be rendered down to one simple flaw which possibly goes back before history, to the beginning of patriarchy, when men sought control over women and women sought protection from men.

The muscular male body appears fit for the hard labour of social construction, and the softer female for nurture, and so each has been socialized to fit into one gender or the other. Other primates with similar social systems remained close to earth, but we, with each century magnified power, worshipped it, extracted it from the life force and turned it into a god. Graded all elements into a  hierarchy through rituals that keep beings in their designated place.

What we need now is to align our sights, to see how ideology and socialization that breeds false illusions of superiority, is the cause of our inability to live together, to find a way through.

We need to understand that power belongs to all in strength and responsibility, and not be diverted by the attempts of the few to intimidate the masses. Or to hope that saints and saviours will rescue this global human project. Nurturing a place for the future is our task, our power.

What each one of us can do, in our one short life, is dis-invest in power-over and re-invest our goals and hopes in power-from-within in terms of influence and responsibility.

What has become clear to me since 9/11

9/11 mostly consolidated what I had suspected as I witnessed changes in media, politics and behaviour patterns since arriving in Canada in the sixties.

In the years since that day I have come to see two parallel operating systems and all that is reported in the public domain fits into one or the other of those two. Power-over and power-from-within. These systems govern our feelings and emanate out towards our thoughts, actions, and relationships. So it could be said that 9/11 has either clarified my beliefs or that I have become a victim of my own ideology.

 

Watching the evolution of leadership in North America, Canada and Europe, the wars and crises in the Middle East and Asia, I perceive that those who organized 9/11, those who organized the war in Iraq, the rise of the Taliban, the rise of the Nazi's, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, and the illicit drug trade - are the same tribe. They may have different names and different ancestors and believe they have a unique role to play in the scheme of things, but they are committed to the goal of absolute power over all. All political, financial and ideological investment leads to the zero sum notion of power that decrees people must be kept away from their innate power and centralized into the realm of the ruling elite.

What is increasingly apparent in Western capitalist societies is that consumerism replaced civil society. The huge influence of the entertainment media has filled our lives with structural violence that informs us we should be scared of our community, that we are too fat, too ugly, don't know enough; and no matter how hard we try or wish to believe in ourselves, we are reduced to our fleeting appetites looking for the next fix. Whatever our true nature might be, we lock our doors, get in our cars, and compete for the most of what each of us wants. We have consumed our future and given up our imagination to corporate services. So when we are faced with countless images of crumbling towers, bomb shattered cities, we believe we must choose sides.

In the power-from-within world I have witnessed more determination, more strength in character, more insight and more organization to create community that reveres and sustains life. Theatre, health, music, support for those in crisis, along with the new examples of human nature. The strength of those who organize these events is often heroic.

 

Ten years after 9/11 I realize our greatest threat is our collective illusion of power. All the wars in our history  have not been about the enemies we have been told to fear, but about the power within we are asked to sacrifice, for the insatiable egos of those who have built their fleeting empires on the blood of others.