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Video Description
Power is the demon of mankind — endlessly seductive, and impossible to fully refuse. This lecture from Academy of Ideas lays bare what power is and how we misuse it. Modern societies concentrate power in the hands of a distant elite while teaching everyone else to feel helpless. But the remedy is not to seize the tyrant’s throne; it is to cultivate your own power through self-realization and self-reliance. Nearly four hundred years ago, La Boétie showed the way: resolve to serve no more, and the tyrant falls like a colossus with its pedestal pulled away.
Full Video Transcript
Neither necessity nor desire, but the love of power, is the demon of mankind.
You may give men everything possible, health, food, shelter, enjoyment, but they are and remain unhappy, for the demon waits and waits, and must be satisfied.
Let everything else be taken away from men, and let this demon be satisfied, and then they will nearly be happy, as happy as men and demons can be.
Power corrupts. Power is endlessly seductive. Power developed to its utmost is happiness.
Power has been many things to many people, but one thing is certain, whether we admit it or not,
we all desire power, and how we satiate this need, or fail to do so, greatly influences the
course and quality of our life. In this video, we explore the nature of power, and we discuss how
the games of power that define modern societies are rigged in ways that favor tyranny at a social
level and mental illness at an individual level. The 20th century mathematician and philosopher
Bertrand Russell defined power as the production of intended effects. Power, in other words,
is the ability to cause deliberate change to the conditions of the world so as to bring them more
in line with one’s needs and desires. Power is thus a value-neutral force. It can be used in
the service of life-promoting ends or it can be used for destructive purposes. But to judge an
expression of power as good or bad, the ends aimed at, are not the only criteria to consider. As in
most acts of power, other people play an important role as the means in the achievement of our ends.
Or as the psychologist Silvano Arrietty explains, if a man relied only on his own ability to satisfy
his desires, power would be a synonym for personal ability. Any achievement would be the result of
one’s performance, but this is seldom the case. In order to bring about intended effects, people
need other people. They must exert an influence on them so that the latter will help attain the
desired results. Influence over others can take immoral forms such as through the use of force,
domination, coercion, or manipulation. But we can also influence people in value positive ways such
as through an appeal to truth, the setting of a good example, or by making others aware of how
their interests align with ours. While each of us has the ability to choose the ends we aim at and
means we use to attain our ends, what is not under our control is our desire for power.
For power is among the most fundamental of our needs, or as Nietzsche explains,
every animal instinctively strives for an optimum of favorable conditions under which it can expend
all its strength and achieve its maximal feeling of power. Every animal abhors, just as instinctively,
every kind of intrusion or hindrance that obstructs, or could obstruct, this path to
the optimum of power. The ability to express power promotes survival in a world full of threats,
and it helps create a life worth living in a world that can bog us down with suffering and boredom.
It is the ultimate antidote to what Carl Jung calls,
the eternal experience and the eternal problem of mankind. Namely, our helplessness and weakness,
and thus power is needed if we are to flourish. Without power we stagnate. With power we venture
out into the world in active pursuit of what we need and want.
We can deny our will to power, or our will to power can be crushed by external forces,
but as Jung notes, when an impulse as strong as our will to power is thwarted, we suffer.
We may be able to suppress an impulse, but we cannot alter its nature.
And what is suppressed comes up again in another place in altered form, but this time loaded
with a resentment that makes the otherwise natural impulse our enemy.
While our desire for power is rooted deep within our nature, power differs from our
other biological needs in that it is not self-limiting.
Too much food or drink produces illness, too much sex produces disgust, and we can only
sleep for so long before our body forces us to wake.
But as Arrietty explains in his book The Will to be Human,
The drive for power is potentially endless and boundless.
Some people in search of power cannot conceive any limitation to it.
Such people as Alexander the Great and Napoleon could have had all the wealth and sex they
wanted in the early period of their political life, but they continued to seek more and
more power.
That mankind’s thirst for power is for all practical purposes limitless presents a problem.
For while each of us needs a modicum of power to properly function, and while power is the
force that leads to the achievement of great feats, too much power, especially when expressed
in the social or political realm, can easily corrupt.
If a society is to flourish, therefore, there must be rules, norms, customs, and social
institutions that help channel the expression of power in life-promoting ways and that limit
the accumulation of too much social or political power in the hands of any one person or group.
In most modern societies, the opposite situation prevails.
Immense powers being centralized in the hands of statist and globalist institutions and
the wielders of this power are now using it in ways that inhibit the ability of the rest
of us to cultivate our power in socially cooperative and individually enhancing ways.
But to the extent that government is strong, writes Leopold Kaur, the individual is weak,
with the result that even if his title is citizen, his position is that of subject.
As a population we have been divided into two classes.
There are the ruling elites who believe that they should have the power to control the
world, while the rest of us are being conditioned to believe that we shouldn’t even have the
power to control our own lives.
This is a perilous situation which, if not corrected for, could result in us being a
generation forced to endure a brutal reign of tyranny.
For as George Orwell wrote,
We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.
So what is the solution to this challenge we face?
Some claim that love will save the world, but tyrants are not moved by such feelings.
Others claim that the truth will set us free, but as Nietzsche recognized, truth alone is
never enough.
Truth in itself is no power at all.
Truth must either attract power to its side or else side with power, for otherwise it
will perish again and again.
This has already been sufficiently demonstrated, and more than sufficiently.
In the end, only power thwarts power, or as Frederick Douglass wrote,
Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never did and it never will.
If a society is to escape the grip of tyrants, power must be brought to the side of freedom.
But the type of power needed to accomplish this feat is not the same as the power that
backs tyrants, as more people cultivating the ability to dominate, manipulate, and coerce
others will only lead to one group of tyrants being replaced by another.
Tyrants are defeated by more people cultivating their personal power and then using this power
to live in a free manner and to resist the chains of tyranny.
How is this life-promoting power cultivated?
Through the process of self-realization, which, according to Jung, represents the strongest
most ineluctable urge in every being and which is a law of nature and thus of invincible power
to self-realize is to actualize our potentials to cultivate our skills to adapt to the outer world
and to bring harmony to our inner world every individual writes jung needs revolution inner
division overthrow of the existing order and renewal but not by forcing them upon his neighbors
under the hypocritical cloak of the sense of social responsibility or any of the other beautiful
euphemisms for unconscious urges to personal power. Individual self-reflection, return of
the individual to the ground of human nature, to his own deepest being with its individual and
social destiny. Here is the beginning of a cure for that blindness which reigns at the present
hour. Many people spur the call to self-realize as they question how personal development can
help change a world descending into chaos. But such a perspective overlooks the fact that if
tyrants are to thrive, the masses must be weak, as tyrants, and those who benefit from their rule,
are always but a sliver of the population, and so lack the personal resources to exert
widespread control over a population of strong men and women. If, therefore, enough of us cultivate
our personal power through self-realization, and in the process become more effective in all realms
of life, the weakness on which the tyrants prey will be replaced by the self-reliance upon which
the power of tyrants dissolves. Each of us who reclaims the power to control our own life is
one less person tacitly supporting tyranny. And when enough of us take this step, a peaceful
transition to a freer world becomes possible. For as Etienne de la Boétie noted nearly 400 years ago,
tyrants can be dethroned without any use of force, and without the need for prolonged strife,
so long as enough people desire freedom and have the strength and inner fortitude to practice
non-compliance and civil disobedience, and to resist commands that are immoral and contrary
to the functioning of a free and prosperous society.
From all these indignities, such as the very beasts of the field would not endure, you
can deliver yourselves if you try.
Not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free.
Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed.
I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that
you support him no longer. Then you will behold him, like a great colossus whose pedestal has
been pulled away, fall of his own weight, and break into pieces. Some may think that time is still on
our side, and that if things get really bad, enough people will then take the appropriate
stand on the side of freedom. But to take this passive approach is to flirt with danger. For one
of the most important lessons of the 20th century is that when totalitarianism is unleashed on a
population, it proves very difficult to internally dislodge. Unless we are vigilant in protecting our
freedoms, they will be taken from us, for as Voltaire noted, so long as the people do not care
to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so. Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
in a footnote to volume one of the Gulag Archipelago, expressed the profound regret that he
and his fellow Soviet prisoners felt for their lack of action in the early days of communist rule
and the following passage should serve as a warning to us all.
If, if, we didn’t love freedom enough, and even more, we had no awareness of the real situation.
We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit.
We submitted with pleasure. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
Source: Academy of Ideas