I am human, and nothing human is alien to my consideration
– Publius Terentius Afer
Perhaps the most fundamental human experience is that of weakness. We are born completely helpless and our childhoods leave us at the mercy of other humans who are stronger and outnumber us. Everything we need, we must get from them, and there is little to nothing we can do to stop them if they choose to hurt us.
The physicist and physical therapist Feldenkrais wrote of being a child a seeing two men grab, kill, and butcher a small pig; almost exactly the same size as him. He realized he was defenseless, and spent decades trying to overcome that experience. He wrote a self-defense manual, figured out from first principles, and later he became the first western Judo black belt, before WWII, and when it was still a powerful combat art.
Even as adults, we know that there are many who are stronger than us, and society decides what we can and can’t do. This is more obvious to women, but even the strongest man knows he isn’t invincible. Most of us have to work for others, doing what they say, often on a minute-to-minute basis, and even those who escape close supervision still must please others for their daily bread. Few, indeed, are the genuine hermits.
(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)
And then there is the body, which so often betrays us with injury, illness, and pain. There is the mind, over which we have so little control: we have thoughts and emotions we’d rather not experience all the time, and often feel like our own minds and bodies are tyrants.
So, humans are weak, and we feel weak. We often deny this to ourselves, because feeling weak is awful, frightening. A full admission of how much is beyond our control means admitting we can die or be in horrible pain at any moment, and the most we can do is influence the odds of it happening. We can never rule something awful happening out entirely.
The feeling of power is thus one of the strongest feelings available to humans. I remember reading a review of a book by a torturer in the Lebanese civil war. He wrote that torturing people was the most intense experience he ever had; so intense, in fact, that it ruined everything else for him. Food was tasteless, even sex was meaningless. After the rush of power from torture, the ultimate violation of social norms and one of the ultimate expressions of control over another person, nothing else ever came close.
This may horrify you. Perhaps you think you would be different (though it is best to never find out, by never torturing), but I think that most people would find the same.
Now, torture is an obvious extreme, but it’s done all the time. It’s routine in prisons in most countries, police even in “civilized” countries regularly inflict beatings severe enough to qualify, and when the US officially tortured in the 2000s there was no punishment for it beyond rapping on the knuckles of a few low-level grunts. The most severe penalty anyone received was given to the CIA whistleblower who revealed the details of the CIA torture — not the people who perpetrated it or ordered it.
Power comes in gradations. There’s the simple bully, which we’ve all experienced, I think, as children. “Do what I say, or I’ll hurt you.” Most authority is ultimately based on this, including routine authority of parents, teachers, and bosses. If you think otherwise, do the thought experiments of what happens if you just refuse to do what people with power want you to.
When a bully pushes you around, they feel powerful. It’s a good feeling, it’s pleasant. If you say otherwise, you’re lying to yourself. You must understand how the world actually is, even if you personally don’t enjoy forcing other people to your will.
But schoolyard bullies or screaming bosses — or even muggers and serial killers — are the Deltas of the world of power. They’re nothing, insects.
Real power is what top-level politicians, generals, executives, and ritual leaders have. There was an Indian guru who told some of his male followers to castrate themselves. They did.
Then there’s political power. Bill Clinton cut welfare, passed a terrible prison bill, and did many other horrible things, and he was beloved by so many of those he hurt. Obama, the first Black president, was terrible for African Americans, but they love him anyway. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s selfishness on staying on the Supreme Court when she was old and sick with cancer helped pave the way for the loss of abortion rights, but many women who support abortion rights consider her a hero.
George W. Bush sent the children of poor whites off to Iraq and Afghanistan to die, get PTSD, or get maimed, and the parents of those he sent and many of those he sent love him. Politicians, for generations, have pursued policies which impoverished 90 percent or so of Americans, and each of them was loved by millions.
Power is hurting someone, and having them love you anyway. Power is “believe me, not your lying eyes.” The sheer rush of being Clinton, Obama, or Bush and crushing your supporters — hurting them terribly, and having them worship you; this is pleasure.
Don’t think that they don’t get off on it. Don’t think they don’t enjoy it. Bush had brain damage by the time he was President (listen to him talk in ’92, then in ’02), but all three men were smart, and Clinton and Obama were borderline geniuses. They knew what they were doing; they knew who they were hurting.
And those people loved them for it.
That’s power. And for some people, that’s pleasure. They do it because they enjoy doing it.
Then there’s the executives. The ones who raise insulin prices so high that thousands die. They know. They know they’re killing you. They like it. They have that power, and even as you’re dying, begging for insulin money (or cancer money, or whatever) online, they’re laughing, because they know you’re powerless and will do nothing to hurt them, even while they kill you.
Power. Pleasure. The groveling of the weak before the strong.
If someone does something and doesn’t actually need to do it to survive, they do it because they want to. When a very rich person decides to kill thousands to millions of people to get more money, they’re doing it because they like it. When Jeff Bezos treats Amazon workers like animals, having ambulances parked outside to take the fallen away, he does it because he wants to.
We humans are weak. The feeling of power is one of the ultimate experiences, and power over other humans, animals, and the world (destroying the world for money, knowingly) is pleasurable for a lot of people. It isn’t just that they don’t care, it’s that they like it.
Now, despite everything, power isn’t innately evil. It can be used for good, and there are cases and times when it has been. It’s been hard to do so for most of human history since the advent of agriculture, because we set up systems that incentivized cruelty, in which more cruelty led to more power. Capitalism is almost explicitly such a system, and certainly agrarian civilizations were almost uniformly evil, with few exceptions.
But power can be used for good, and you can get as much pleasure from using your power to help others as you can from using it to hurt people. I suspect there is even more pleasure, honestly. I think Obama, who had the opportunity to be the next FDR (who did some evil, but much more good), was a fool to choose the pleasures of elite regard and cruelty over what would have been a vast tide of love and loyalty from the majority of Ameircans.
We’ll talk about that in a followup piece.
But for now, you’re ruled by evil people who hurt you because they like how it feels.
