Power - Some of my notes

Written from various sources in the early days of my independence and escape from the Tyranny of my Family of Origin – 2001 in an attempt to understand this central operating concept. Core Concepts for anyone  living under any form of Tyranny – Final Draft Written November 22 2011 – Dartmouth.

 

 

Power

Most notes taken from Ken. B Clark Pathos of Power

Power is the mediator between dreams and realities. The quest for domination is deeply rooted in human striving. It comes into play when soaring dreams and ambitions confront practical realities. Power is linked to anxiety and insecurity. Power is a function of the person’s response to powerlessness. It is the search for security through power, hoping to enhance self-esteem and individual autonomy, the search is unending and the dilemma insoluble at every point in life. Children reach out for greater amounts of power, to reach independence hoping to find the answer to the timeless question,” who am I?” A children’s growth is always in some kind of tension within family stability and the status quos. Rivalry goes on at every level of human life. There are power struggles in all relationships, husband and wife, parents and children, spouses and in-laws. Humans are not just interested in physical survival they also seek prestige and social approval. People seek security against the anxieties of the world by seeking power. This then puts in jeopardy the security of their fellows individually and the collective as a whole. The quest for power is couched in the language of ideologies all so embracing and controlling that people cannot retreat from them.

Within groups the intensity of group conflict grows out of the tendency of collectiveness, whether families or tribes to express both the virtue and the selfishness of their members. The contempt for another group, the ‘other’ tribe, simply ‘The Other’,  whether family or nation is the pathetic form that most  respect for one’s own worth frequently takes the form of.  In families the tender emotions that bind their members together are sometime expressed in indifference and distrust of others. Nationalism is fuelled by the frustrated aggression of the masses, which seek through the nation to achieve the supremacy denied to them as individuals. We are so finite yet infinite in our views of ourselves, of society, and our destiny. There is of course a dualism in man. Man has always been his own vexing problem. How is he to think of himself? We are caught in the search for security and the lust for power. The call for rationality in any classical and objective sense is denied us by the passions and vitalities of our lives. Reason is finite and spirit is limitless, we cannot know our limits then through reason and not knowing them we become anxious, troubled, and insecure. True security requires expression of the spirit. Power means survival, the ability to impose one’s will on anther, the capacity to dictate to those who are without power and the possibility of forcing concessions from those with less power. There is an interrelationship between power and love. In the escape from loneliness, persons will lust for both power and love, between longing and lack of achievement.

 Humans seek their extensions of themselves through their work, through their offspring, in study and so on. Love is about mutuality; power on the other hand is a union through unilateral imposition, so that the other will mirror the self. Power and love are always corrupted. Lovers in the end resort to power to do what love cannot do. Love, as the opposite of power seeks to enhance the individuality of each individual in the relationship. Power on the other hand tends to break down the potential of individuality.  An irreducible element of power is required to make a stable relationship of love. Without power, love cannot persist. It is through power; love is corrupted and threatened with destruction. This is the ambiguous relationship between power and love. Political stability depends in part on the submissiveness of the ruled to the ruler. Failing to win the love of their subjects, from Stalin to Hitler to Napoleon, sought compensation in the accumulation of more and more power. From the subjection of ever more and more men to their will, they believed they were ever expanding their personal achievements. The more men the master holds bounds to himself the more they are aware of his loneliness. His success in terms of owner only serves to illuminate his failure in term of love. The ruler ends up by experiencing frustrated love that breeds hate and distrust of all men. The loneliness of men is imperious to both love and power. Power can only unite through subjection. Love can only unite only in fleeting moments of spontaneous mutuality.

Power – The Search for the Holy - William Kraft

 Will-To-Power is considered a central motivating force in humanity.  Man makes himself the centre of the universe, as the most important part of all reality. This type of man tries to be completely independent, to control everything. Usually coldly efficient and superficial. He doesn’t accept limits in himself, as he wants to be perfect, in fact he want to be God. Others are only means to his pleasure. He is greatly repressed. There is no room for faith, risk, mystery, and paradox, as there are all too threatening and beyond his control. Everything is conditional as the end is he. He attempts to escape from his nothing-ness by making himself something. Since he defines himself, he believes that what he is good for is the same as everyone else. He thinks in closed systems... His life depends on winnings, on conquest. From his position of power, he now is no longer afraid as he thinks he can control everything. He knows exactly where he stands in relation to others.

Will-To –Power is a reaction –formation (conversion-reaction, compensatory), against his unconscious feelings of helplessness and inadequacy. In early life he rejected himself and consequently has no faith in himself, he replaces the certitude of faith with the certainty of thinking. Through his tragic self-deception he has escaped from himself. He becomes more and more fragmented and alienated. He is trying to escape from nothing-ness through control and manipulation of others. As he ages he finds himself in less and less control of others as others have turned away from him. He now faces depression, loneliness, anxiety, and meaninglessness flood in on him. Self-experiences are absent. Ultimately he is caught in the quagmire of a meaningless and groundless existence. He loses control of everything and life begins to overwhelm him. He in fact doesn’t have a will only a will to power. Instead of becoming a powerful God he becomes a helpless “no-thing”.

 Power

Def.

1. The ability to act or to make something
2. The ability to respond and /or resist
3. The force itself – energy

For Aristotle the 3 general categories of power

1.      That which is the agent or cause of change of something

2.      That capacity /potential in things enabling them to act and or to do things

3.       That ability or tendency of a thing to remain itself, to retain its substantial from in spite of efforts to change it.

Ideology

Def.

       1. In modern usage, it has a pejorative sense, as dogmatic theorizing or speculation that is false or unrealistic.

        2. in a non-pejorative sense, any system of ideas regarding philosophic, economic, political, social beliefs and ideals.

Natural Rights

Def.  1 Freedoms (privileges, prerogatives, powers, claims) possessed innately (inalienable) and / or assumed by the very fact of being human. Contrasted with civil rights. Lists of natural rights usually include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, ownership of property, the right to work, equality of opportunity, equality of treatment under law. Both natural rights and civil rights constitute the foundation of social justice. Governments are the principle means of protecting and maintaining any system of rights.

Human Rights – those rights to be achieved by individuals and/or provided by such as a good education, decent housing, health care, a secure job, an adequate standard of living, freedom of interference in the pursuit of goals, freedom from oppression, equality of opportunity.

Political Rights the power to perform certain activities in a politically organized society such as run for office, vote, petition. Lobby, communicate with and criticize public officials, speck out and not be censured, express and defends one’s beliefs, protect one’s property.

Rights

Def. 1. That which one has due to him

         2. That upon which one has a just demand

4. That to which one has a proper claim.

       5.  That which doesn’t infringes, harms, coerces or restrains upon the interest of others.

Rhetoric – Def. The art of oratory, pleader

1.      The art of expressive, persuasive speech and argumentation

2.      The art of using eloquent language to impress as well as to persuade.

3.      In the classical rhetorical tradition, rhetoric has been concerned with the power of the sovereign, intending speakers to work positive and reconstructive change through manipulations of language in public discourse.

Hegemony - is the primary and theoretical site at which rhetoric and ideology have been negotiated. It is the political and economic control exercised by a dominant class, and its success in projecting its own way of seeing the world, human and social relationships as “common sense” and part of the natural order by those who are, in fact subordinated to it.

Machiavellian Politics

Works by creating a “myth”, the creation of a concrete phantasm, which acts on a dispersed and shattered people to arouse and organize its collective, will. Once organized the collective will rationalizes itself by an entire “logical” argument that now appears as nothing other than auto-reflection on the part of the people that is an inner reasoning that is worked out in the people. This results in Ideology as Myth

Children and Cults

How Cults and other Authoritarian groups harm children.

1. By an absolutist ideology that uses harsh physical discipline and rejection to control.
2. Functions as a closed system, often physically isolated. Resist any investigations.
3. Uses religious beliefs to justify their ideology and reclusive nature.
4. Use of elaborate rationalizations for their child abuse.
5. Denigrates independent thinking
6. Maintains members in a state of dependency
7. Fosters a private insecurity by attacking members while demanding they not protest and show a positive front to the world. This creates the anxious, dependent personality. Even after rehab the child’s anxious dependency may become a fundamental characteristic.

Their Ideologies tend to be non- falsifiable. They are subjectivist systems that are threatened by the outside world. The cult’s ideologies cannot be challenged and must be considered sacred.

In their hierarchical structure the parents are turned into middle managers with regards to their children. The leader determines all areas of child rearing activities and the parents carry them out. The tyrannical leader subjects parents to the same level of abuse as they inflict on their own children. Through fear of punishment and the hope of reward, the child becomes controlled. There is an atmosphere of suppressed anger from the various strictures, limits (censure / restriction) on any dissent within the cult. Much of this anger then goes onto the children from the parents as projection.

The main thrust is to break the Will of the child through a variety of means such as spanking weeks-old babies, any parental tactics to terrorize.

To cope, members of the ‘family cult, the children develop”pseudopersonality”. Treatment consists of an “awakening” of pre-cult personality. If their will is broken early enough the person will not have had enough pre-cult time in which to live a pre-cult life.

Secrecy is the heart and soul of bureaucracy. It is what creates all the privileges and consequently all the oppressions.

If you grant any man power over you that you cannot remove from him should he abuse it, that you cannot curb, and in the end cannot even question, it becomes tyranny and then finally enslavement. You have ultimately lost your freedom of conscience and that means you have lost your very soul. The Right of a person or people to liberate themselves from the occupation by others is a historic reality and right and has international legitimacy.

Violence is then justifiable as a means to a rightful end for legitimate liberations movements

Tyranny always brings about poverty, isolation and fear. Oppressive leaders always humiliate their people and dwell on the ritual of the religion instead on the spirit. This leads to spiritual alienation

One cannot appease a terrorist, one can only defeat and destroy them.