Power, Hope, and Freedom

In these troubled times, it is easy to lose hope—to believe that we have no power to act. If, however, we rethink power, we might find hope and even a cup or two of freedom.

coffee cup with Drink Freedom

In a recent Bulwark podcast with Sarah Longwell, Heather Cox Richardson expressed frustration with progressives who have given up, those who say, “It’s over. Democracy is dead.”

Richardson’s response: “I’m not in prison, I’m alive, and, as long as those two things are true, I can continue to speak up.”

As I listened to this podcast, I kept thinking about power, how we think about power, and how that affects our interactions with our world.

To state the obvious, which is not always obvious to all people, if we think we have no power, we have no power. If we think we have no power, we have no hope and we fail to act. If we fail to act, we have no freedom. We have helped to create the dystopian world of Orwell’s 1984.

In this post, I want to work through some different ways of thinking about power.

Before I get into the weeds on this topic, I want share one key point: We create power. We don’t find it lying around and absorb it through our skin. We have to create it through our actions, also through how we think about power.

Freewill

Do we have freewill? Most contemporary philosophers and psychologists would say, “No.”

This is shocking, until we begin to understand what it means to be a human being living within a human society. Here’s what the smart guys say:

We have biological drives and needs that restrict our freewill.

Any culture indoctrinates its citizens to have certain values and act for some greater good, which is not always as good as those in power claim.

As I have written on this platform, the gap between propaganda and advertising, including political campaigns, has been closing since World War I, beginning with the work of Edward Bernays. We are living in a media saturated culture, and even the most intellectually protected of us are affected by these messages.

Okay. I agree, more or less. But, let me suggest that these views are basically platitudes. They may be platitudes fostered by intellectuals who read a lot, but they are still a little goofy.

We should, first, frame these comments with an understanding of how intellectuals think. The greatest fear of intellectuals is that they will be called naïve. The best way to avoid being called naïve is to be consistently cynical. I endorse skepticism, but I do not endorse cynicism.

So, let me be skeptical about the cynicism of intellectuals who are much smarter than I am.

Much of how we understand our culture, especially how its ideology affects us unconsciously, thus limiting freewill, originated with Karl Marx. If we are going to accept this line of thought, we also have to allow for the emergence of Marx. In other words, if we understand how ideology controls us, some person (i.e., Marx) must have been able to step out of that ideology to develop a theory about it. So, if Marx had freewill, maybe the rest of us have some.

As Charles Taylor wrote in The Ethics of Authenticity: “We don’t want to exaggerate our degrees of freedom. But they are not zero” (100).

This means we are asking the wrong question. We should not ask, “Do we have freewill?” This reduces a complex problem to a simple binary, which intellectuals shouldn’t do.

Instead, we should ask, “In what areas of our lives do we have freewill?” And, more importantly, “How can we increase our freewill?”

We can learn how to critique our habits and values. We can learn to pause before we act. We can study history and alternative views of history, like the archaeologies by Nietzsche and Foucault. These alternative readings of history help us to see our world in new ways. Instead of saying, “That is reality. It’s just how things are.” We will say, “That developed historically. If it developed historically, we can change it.” We are creating freedom.

Hegel and Power

In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegal writes about the dynamic of the master-slave paradigm (sometimes translated master-servant), which has been used to analyze a range of power relationships, including those related to gender. The paradigm initiated a shift in how Western philosophers think about power, including later political theorists like Hannah Arendt.

First, a qualification. Hegel discusses this paradigm early in The Phenomenology of Spirit, which is about the historical evolution of ways of being in the world, including the way we think about power. The master-slave paradigm, thus, is a way of relating to other humans that we should evolve from, personally and historically.

Hegel uses a parable to explain this form of power. Two people encounter each other. One of them says, “Do what I command, or I will kill you.” The other chooses life, which sets up a paradigm of exploitation. The slave becomes an object of desire. The master becomes an object of admiration. Notice that both are objectified. Both are dehumanized.

Moral development, for Hegel, consists in learning to view the Other as a subject, rather than as an object. Power is interpersonal, and even those who seem to be without power have power—in some form.

For Roman emperors to maintain power, the people must accept their position. This is why Roman emperors made sure that the people had bread, and they regularly diverted their attention with games in the coliseum. If we are satisfied with having a six-pack and a bowl of nachos as we watch sports, we have lost some of our freedom.

The Hegel paradigm helped Arendt to conceptualize how leaders use violence. We tend to think of the state or a strong leader using violence as the exercise of absolute power. Arendt, rather, says that violence happens at the moment when the people are withdrawing their power from the leader or the state.

State sponsored violence can take many forms. It might be as simple as the Director of the FBI polygraphing agents to find out if they have said anything against their boss, which happened recently. This is an attempt to control not just personal conversations but also the actual thoughts of FBI agents. This is, to state the obvious, antidemocratic. It is certainly a move toward totalitarianism.

Instead of thinking about this event as a form of state sponsored violence, which it certainly is, we should also realize that it is a leader’s expression of weakness. How weak does a leader have to be to fear that his people might be making nasty comments about him behind his back. This is insecurity on a pimple-faced high school level.

If we focus on the state’s violence, we react with fear. If we focus on the weakness of the leader, we are more willing to resist.

Just as state violence can be exercised in small actions, so too can resistance.

We should never feel powerless. One of the ways that the people create power is by coming together around the democratic values in our founding documents. We should view these values as emerging. They deserve critique, and they deserve further development. Just consider, for a moment, how much the “we” in “we the people” has evolved over the last two and a half centuries.

To ensure the survival of our democracy, we must maintain a dialogue. As I have often written on this platform, democratic dialogue must be built on mutual respect. If we objectify the Other (you can insert your political faction of choice here), then we shut down dialogue.

In practical terms, we objectify the Other when we fix that person in time. Said differently, when we reduce that person to a stereotype. If I allow myself to exist in time, if I consider myself to be in the process of becoming a better person, why wouldn’t I grant that kind of respect and grace to those around me?

If you take only one thing from this discussion of Hegel, I hope it will be that we cannot create freedom alone.

We should not enact the master-slave paradigm. We have to realize that we cannot be free if we enslave others. Freedom for all, or freedom for none.

Foucault and Networks of Power

As I said above, Hegel influenced most of thinkers who followed him, even when it might not be apparent. Extending Hegel’s view that power is interpersonal, that it is not top-down, Foucault argues that power is present everywhere in networks and discursive regimes.

Foucault’s analysis is complicated. He devoted his entire career to it. What I will say here just touches on his work. Luckily, YouTube has many good lectures on Foucault’s theory of power.

Here, I want to focus on one aspect. If power is not just at the top, if it is distributed into networks, then no one is in absolute control. We all participate in power. We can all affect the direction of history.

In “Truth and Power” (collected in Power/Knowledge, 1980), Foucault says this about the connection between power and truth:

Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, and its “general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances , the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.

To state the obvious yet again, this is not a simple view of truth and power, but, if we start to understand how truth and power are connected, then we are less controlled by powerful people making truth claims. This doesn’t mean that we should start to develop our own conspiracy theories. It means that we should be skeptical about all forms of truth. This increases our own agency—our own power.

Final Thoughts

Instead of thinking about Donald Trump as the most powerful person in the world, I prefer to think about him as a sad, needy little boy.

This is one of the ways that I create power. My next post will deal with one of the ways that we lose it—through mimesis, or imitation.

I would appreciate hearing your thoughts on how we need to think about power in our current political context.