Well, since no one else really ever talks about it, I will mention the “P-word” today. That word, of course, is “power.”
I find it interesting that people very seldom use the P-word. People say, “I am seeking public office,” they never say, “I am seeking power.” They will say “I am applying to business school,” never “I am seeking to attain much greater than average economic power.” You might hear an announcement of a new company wide policy, but never is it couched in the phrase “I have the power to make hundreds of people obey my commands, and I hereby exercise it . . . and boy is it fun.”
I am convinced that some poepe shop because being a customer gives them power over shopkeepers. We never openly admit to it, but it’s there.
I can see why there is this constant effort to cover up the desire for power. Those of us who have less power tend to have general resentment and mistrust of people who have more power. After all, most of the “bad guys” in the popular culture are powerful people gone bad.
My biggest complaint about power issues is that nobody ever taught me how to manage having any of it. I guess that is because, we are all trying to acquire more power for ourselves. We are much better at sharing food than we are sharing power. I have to say, most of my “educational experience” consisted of being taught how to serve people who have more power, not how to get it and manage it myself.
I read a lot of blogs and such about management skills, but never once in all of these articles about “better management” have I ever seen anything about managing the purely emotional aspect . . . one might say the temptations . . . of suddenly having more power, and what experience that can do to one. The only person who speaks of it honestly is Machiavelli, and he’s been dead for 400 years. It being a wide-open topic, I guess I’ll jump in.
I used to work for an orchestral personnel manager who reveled in the power he held over the lives of the musicians he hired. He was someone who never had much power in his life until he became a personnel manager, and he played it for all that was worth. We actively genuflected to this guy every waking hour.
I used to complain bitterly about his abuse of his power over me and my colleagues, but when I became an orchestral personnel manager myself, I started to see his point. When you have power to hire and fire, your entire world changes. You go from being a private citizen who is largely ignored, to suddenly having all sorts of new friends. People you hardly know, who normally just sit and scowl, are suddenly all smiles whenever you walk in the room. At a basic emotional level, this is extremely pleasant. And of course, there is a terrible temptation to abuse one’s power in order to get more of this adulation . . . so much so that it’s easy to lose sight of one’s original goal, if indeed one ever had one other than getting more power.
I could go on at length about the constant conflict I had between serving the ultimate goal of my customers and just reveling in the fun of having power for the first time. I very much wanted to be generally fair and moral in my treatment of the people over whom I wielded power, but it was hard to do that, given my own constant desire to indulge in the sweet thrill of having so much control. There was a constant temptation, both conscious and subconscious, to do things that weren’t in anyone else’s best interests, but might acquire greater power for me.
I also think it’s important to start using the P-word in places where we tend to gloss over it. Again, if someone is running for public office, they say they are doing everything for me, but at some level, they are trying to acquire power. When we have the super rich gaining larger and larger percentage of the collective wealth, this doesn’t just mean that they can buy a better car or a nicer house. Having that much money means they have more power. And when you have more power, that also includes having the power to rig the game so you can get even more power.
I think the founding fathers really had their power management act together when they wrote the Constitution. They understood the terrible temptations of power, and so they put in all sorts of checks and balances. We are much more naive than they were. We expect politicians to “have character.” It’s an awful lot to ask of someone, to have restraint when they have power and nothing to stop them from using it. All too often, we forget the corruptive influence of power possession, and we try to get to a place where we can feel a sense of total moral purity, but there’s really no such thing. We all have power, we are dealing with other people who have power, and we are in a constant state of trying to negotiate more power for ourselves. People who go to college to “get an education” are also seeking a life where they will have greater power. We admire young people with ambition, but we should also remember that ambition means they seek greater power for themselves.
If we are constantly denying the fact that we are seeking greater power, and power is both delicious and inequitably distributed, this makes it difficult for us to speak calmly and rationally about people who have a lot of power and perhaps need to have it checked.
And what to do with the power one has . . . is a constant moral dilemma.
©) Justin Locke
