Oldguy Muses About Power

Power is something that has taken me a long time to get a handle on. It may be that I have had something of an aversion to it. Yet I kept coming back around to it in several different ways. Little by little, I’ve begun to get a little grasp of it.

Power has many different forms. For instance, there’s the power of the natural world. We’re well aware of its more extreme forms since they impact us greatly. Events like earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes and tornados, ice storms or fire storms like we recently saw in California. Our position in this is of one that has no power to affect these events. We do have power to mitigate the effects on us by using what we have to at least find a way to survive this exercise of natural power.

Then there is social power. This gets played out in a number of ways. We’re all familiar with the political, at least we should be. For most of history we had these high mucky-mucks, who through their use of strong-arm methods of force made us do their bidding. They were known as emperors or kings. Generally their kingdoms and empires were organized in hierarchical fashion, with those higher on the social ladder exercising power over those beneath. It was always the few over the many, with one guy (usually) saying he’s the top dog. Basically, the power relationship was that of the bully and his victim, the dominator paradigm. It took the Enlightenment to begin to overthrow this arrangement, but it hasn’t been eradicated yet, not by a long shot.

Next we have economic power. To continue to live we have to eat food, drink water and have shelter from extreme weather and predators. In our present system, the vast majority of us have to sell our labor and/or our brains for a medium of exchange (money!) that we can in turn exchange for said food, water, and shelter. Prior to this a preferred method was for some folks to own other folks as slaves, whom they forced to do whatever the master wanted, what I like to call the master-slave paradigm. When the industrial revolution hit, wage slavery was the preferred method used by the industrialists and Robber Barons. I’ve read some of the debates by ante-bellum southern senators defending the “peculiar institution” that formed the basis of the economy of the southern states, in which they critiqued the wage-slavery of the north as a worse institution. Frankly, I think they were right on. The employee is in a dependency relationship, in that he/she depends on their paycheck. The only power that the employee has is their labor, to give or to withhold. The employer’s power resides in his control of the transaction. Additionally, he finds an ally in the coercive power of unemployment. If the employee has no income, they cannot continue to live, not being able to purchase their sustenance.

The final power for tonight is the power over people’s immortal souls. The priests insert themselves as the gatekeepers to the spiritual realm, and presumed themselves to speak for some God that all others must obey or face eternal punishments. While the religion may have originally had a spiritual basis rooted in the spiritual experience of the founder, once it became organized empty ritual replaced actual experience, faith (or belief) substituted for the real deal. Once someone gains control of the ability to define everyone’s eternal position, great power is accrued to them.

Well, that’s it for now. Chew on this for a while – we’ll be coming back to these ideas regularly.