Wisdom and Power

I am a woman who thinks it is dangerous to worship power more than life. Not that I can prove it but it's a feeling that comes back to me whenever there is a crisis.

When I learned about the unmarked graves of Indigenous children near residential schools and the reported high number of children who were lost it seemed like a horror story. How could it happen I asked myself?

Then as I read about it, just as I read about any atrocity, I am horrified that people who have achieved a position of power are willing to stoop to such cruelty and disregard for life.

Then as I hear the news on any given day the reason for such contempt is that power in the corporate world is merely a chess piece, a thing to manoeuvre on a board and the ones who can scheme without conscience wins.

Our species loses that part of our intelligence that understands compassion, duty to do no harm, an understanding of our place on this earth upon which we depend, as well as all the other relationships that require a responsibility to reciprocate in kindness and protection.

We call it a mental illness when a person cannot relate to others except in how it benefits him or herself.

People like Jack the Ripper, Adolf Hitler, along with those given a high position where we assume they have passed the mental health test and are capable of working for the greater good. Lately though the greater good is laughed at in decisions made by people such as billionaires who deposit their earnings in foreign accounts while paying wages their staff cannot survive on.

If social responsibility is a quaint value found only in fairy tales and history, how can we trust anyone?

Yet corporate managers, regional politicians, police officers and priests sometimes rule their empire by strategically creating division and any hope for the greater good is destroyed. 

Now our home, planet earth, is being destroyed so that the most powerful can gain more profit to store in their chosen vault. Climate change, pollution, crime, despair and confusion hides the battered human heart and it seems we must watch the world become uninhabitable  along with the cruelty and violence to the most vulnerable.

“The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace.” ― Mahatma Gandhi 

However the spectre of our current system and history lead to a quote by Carl Sagan in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle In the Dark (brainyquotes.com):  "Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

The stories we love, purchase, watch and read have a formula: a singular person seeks a better life, and comes across another person who is determined to not allow her, so together they battle it out and one of them wins while the other loses. Narratives around power are much more understandable, the good guy vs. the bad guy, with the struggle being the main and central story.

So all our problems, all that is cruel, nasty and violent comes to this. The worship of power by all political endeavours.

We are broken and doomed. Except we are not if we value the gifts we bring into this world. Gifts of witness, language, compassion and even fear.

Human societies are a tapestry of our best efforts against our worst appetites; to have power over ourselves and to see how we need healing more than gold or titles. Big problems can only be solved by small acts of empathy as we imagine how painful it is even for the rulers grasping for power which is never guaranteed in the heart and dreams of psychopaths.

My friends and family are sick of my emphasis on power whenever I write but I have learned that those who love to abuse power over others don't want to talk about it and those who have been subjected to another's power over them find it too painful to think about.  So the stage is set for the powerful interests to continue to keep us in fear while we blame those who have the least power over us.

This cannot be ignored. To modify a quote by Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - I do not wish for you to have power over another, but over yourself.