Power and how to give it away

or do you think that you have none?

lead

"to guide," Old English lædan (transitive) "cause to go with oneself; march at the head of, go before as a guide, accompany and show the way.

leader (n.)

Old English lædere "one who leads, one first or most prominent," agent noun from lædan "to guide, conduct".

Maybe it’s just me but I don’t like the idea of someone having ‘power over me’, I never have. I particularly hate someone telling me what to do and what I cannot do.

Having said that there have been many occasions when I have let someone tell me what to do. The last time was building the wood frame roof for a friend’s house, a few of us arrived in the morning and bumbled around a bit not really knowing how to start. Then Sylvain turned up and he’s built a lot of similar roofs, each one of us decided to let him lead the work and we were pretty relieved when he did. After we finished that relationship disappeared and we were all equals again.

This struck me as being very similar to how we think our gatherer-hunter ancestors sorted things out. Thanks to experience or innate ability one member of a group would be better able to find, for example, a food source. What would the others do when that person headed off to gather? We’d follow them. The person would be the ‘leader’ they would “go before as a guide, accompany and show the way”. Afterward back at the camp, the gathering done, that relationship leader/followers, would disappear and everyone would be equals again.

This type of leading, competence/experience-based, didn’t mean someone having ‘power over’ others. Nor did it require people ‘giving away’ power to decide for themselves. Anyone had the choice to head off and gather as they wished. This is very different from how we do things today and have done since the first power-hungry people got going a few thousand years ago.

According to researchers at the University of Gothenburg, “there are now more people living under dictatorships than in democracies.”

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. —George Orwell, 1984

Frankly, I couldn’t say how many times I’ve been in a bar listening to someone complaining that 'all politicians are liars’. What’s strange is these people will go out and vote for a politician despite this point of view. “Maybe it’ll be better this time,” they say. Two months later they’ll be back in the bar complaining that “nothing ever changes” and that “the new lot are bigger liars than the last lot of crooks". Come the next elections they head off to vote and restart the cycle, round and round.

It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power. —David Brin

We’re brought up to give away our power to decide. Trained from the cradle to think in terms of power hierarchies and that we must follow leaders. From authoritarian schools we go to work for a boss, under orders all the time except for weekends and bank holidays. During these periods we are merely under the control of the agents of the state enforcing the laws put down by politicians.

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any. —Alice Walker

Not only are we trained to obey but the different political parties have also figured out how to manipulate us. Warm and cuddly, firm and fierce, expert and competent, whichever face works is the one they put on. Bring on the music and cinema stars to give an extra boost to the campaign. Look at the crowds shouting and cheering at a political meeting, now look at the crowds supporting their favorite football team or rock star, no difference. As individuals having a quiet think about stuff in the toilet we may have some doubts about the political heroes. Back in the crowd we drop this discernment to joyously run with the pack.

If you want to convince people of something, for example “the election was stolen” just keep repeating the message. Economists at the University of Surrey argue that people are systematically deceived by repeated information, leading to irrational decisions.

“It’s good to have strong leaders in times of crisis,” a bloke said in the bar yesterday. Yet it’s these strong leaders who get us into these crises in the first place.

The better-than-average effect, people generally tend to rate their abilities, attributes, and personality traits as better-than-average. How many individuals have scrambled their way to ‘power’ despite being completely unfit for it?

The Peter principle: employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent. Most of us have heard of this principle but fewer of us know that Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, Cesare Garofalo won an Ignoble prize for their research which showed that “not only is the Peter principle unavoidable …. that to avoid such an effect the best ways for improving the efficiency of a given organization are either to promote each time an agent at random or to promote randomly the best and the worst members in terms of competence.”

I’ve got a piece of land and it’s covered in 2-metre-high brambles. If I leave the land alone it will soon be covered by young forest, basic ecological succession. A place will tend to move from a simple form, bare rock for example, to a complex form such as a forest. For some reason this isn’t happening with our governmental systems, we’re stuck in the brambles.

In the farming world we stop ecological succession by plowing, in your garden you do it by digging. The political world does it by sending us to school to learn to obey and believe that there are natural-born leaders. We then get told that these leaders can sort it all out, we just have to trust them to do their job. If they don’t, we are told, we can vote them out and vote in some others who will sort it. We get told this again and again which the Economists at the University of Surrey would point out leads us to make decisions that defy logical norms.

We need to give the whole thing a kick to move it out of its current successional phase and onto the next bit. We’ve been running around in circles for too long now and untold millions have suffered and died because of it and still do. Ocean levels rising, fisheries collapsing, drylands expanding, the planet is getting hotter and hotter. The Durango Fire Protection District in Colorado can’t build a new fire station because they can’t get insurance cover because there are so many wildfires in Colorado.

How can we give it all a kick? Bring back good food, radically change our education systems, and hope for the best. In the meantime, we must go back home and sort out our local communities.