Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the ‘Experience’ post of the week. These are reflections from personal life. In this case, it’s a little more philosophical than usual.
Best,
Sam
ARE POWER AND FREEDOM OPPOSITES?
I remember being in an improv exercise around the time I was in college. The exercise involved changing status in several different scenes and the teacher noticed right away that I had a very difficult time inhabiting power.
She was right and it was a kind of unsettling observation that’s stayed with me ever since then. I just really don’t like power. I didn’t like it when I was in school - I just didn’t understand why the teacher, simply by virtue of being a grown-up, should have power over a whole classroom. And I didn’t like it in the workplace, just couldn’t really get used either to receiving or, as I was moving up, to giving orders. I mean, I did like giving orders to some extent - it felt like a payback for all the time I’d spent being a subordinate (which is how the workplace sucks you into it) - but I noticed that command just didn’t give me pleasure in the way it obviously did for some people, I spent additional time looking for consensus, I kept trying to signal in different ways to anybody I outranked that my role was basically just a matter of efficiency - that I didn’t feel like I had any higher status because of it.
And the odd thing was that I could feel people bristling whenever I did that. They kind of wanted the person the level above them to be a jerk, just like my improv teacher had been upset when my high-status character tried to lead by example instead of just sitting back and ordering everybody around. The feeling I started to get - this is by my mid-30s - is that I was the one in the wrong, that power is the inalienable concept and it’s not possible to live one’s life apart from it. To do so is just ineffective as well as arrogant. And to be human is to be part of this ridiculous status hierarchy all the time. As Bob Dylan put it in my favorite lyric of his, “You’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes instead. It may be the Devil or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.”
So to me, that’s really the critical question - is there a way to exist, some domain outside of power? Or, as Blondie just as shrewdly put it, “What makes the world go round? Is it love love or is it gravity?”
And I have no idea what the answer is. I’m sure I’ll spend the rest of my puzzling it out. Although I suspect, heartbreakingly enough, that I already know - it’s gravity of course; and everybody serves. Or as a sort of mystical teacher of mine intriguingly put it, “This dimension is based on fear but there is one just next to us that is based on love.” Which has sort of become my personal creed - a variant of Gnosticism. That we are in an extremely difficult reality, ruled by fear (which is the critical ingredient for power), and that we have no choice but to accept that - and that, as if to complete our tragedy, we have access fleetingly to a higher reality that’s ever and always just out of reach.
A little closer to home - more solvable without recourse to mysticism - is the question of the compatibility of freedom and power. And this strikes me as sort of an obvious enough logical puzzle. Most people spend their lives looking to become more powerful with the notion that as they gain in power they gain in freedom. And the trappings of power tend all to be metaphors for freedom: the sweeping view out of the corner office; the gorgeous vista from the fancy home; the ‘jet set’ lifestyle. Powerful people often seem to make a point of being whimsical - I’m thinking of somebody like Richard Branson - as if to inspire everybody else to follow the path of power, to show just how fun power really is. But nobody is exactly fooled. The famous complain all the time about how they can’t go to grocery stores, the powerful about how they are over-scheduled to within an inch of their lives. The issue is that power implies responsibility and responsibility is time-consuming, nerve-wracking, constricting. This is Kant’s idea of public life - that being in any kind of office, any position of power, means constraint, that it’s only the self-determined who have any kind of freedom. And renditions of power in books and movies tend to turn always on the endeavor of the powerful to break free of the trap they have put themselves in - for instance, the famous actor protagonist walking off into the desert at the end of Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere.
But if we are not convinced by the whimsy of the powerful we are not entirely fooled by their self-effacement either. The more time I’ve spent around power the more I’ve come to see it as a drug - but a socially-approved, biologically-condoned drug and more powerful than anything in existence. Nobody who has power, however misery-inducing it might be, ever seems willing to give it up. “Deeper than honor, deeper than pride, deeper than lust, deeper than love, is the getting of it all, the seizing and holding on,” says Francis Urquhart in House of Cards.
I think I spent some period of time fantasizing about a life that didn’t participate in the networks of power - not being a hermit but just not being very impressed with power, like the love interest in Eat Pray Love whose overridingly attractive quality is that he doesn’t know the names of any Hollywood actors. It’s a tempting vision, and I am still partial to it, but, recently, I noticed the logical flaw: that freedom, to be truly free, must be able to freely participate in the networks of power. But once within the framework of power, of course, it becomes virtually impossible to leave again.
This is why religious traditions emphasize always a thoroughly voluntary renunciation - it is important that Buddha had been a prince before entering the path of renunciation, that he chose renunciation not because he was lacking in power but because he had already had it and could tell that there was something greater; just as it is important that Christ had the devil’s vision of possessing the whole world before choosing a path of extreme sacrifice.
For those who are not Buddha or Christ, the paradox of power and renunciation presents a riddle that they will likely never solve. The religious traditions are almost certainly right - the way out is, in some form or other, to assume power and then to renounce it. As Joseph Campbell writes in The Hero With A Thousand Faces, the final stage of the hero’s journey is, after surpassing all obstacles, to immediately crucify himself. And that seems to be the not-wonderfully-efficient pattern that human beings are compelled to follow - to pursue power because that is our nature and that is the reality we occupy but to not be so attached to power that once we have it we cannot move beyond it. And if freedom exists it seems to exists within a vanishingly narrow sliver within that space - as freedom to renounce, to self-sacrifice. In other words, a very difficult, very uncomfortable path.
Sam, Flannery O'Connor in _Mystery and Manners_ comments: "Does one’s integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think it usually does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen." Perhaps, based on her reasoning, I have read, as you note, "essays, stories, reflections" since I learned how to parse the written word. xo ~Mary
I think of the polatch ceremony ceremony that occurs in many tribes—the ceremonial giving away of material possessions. But it also occurs to me that one must have a lot of possessions in order to give them away in a ceremony.