This topic is inspired by the ‘my confession’ thread where conflicting desires of power and fairness where being examened. One of my suggestions was that there’s a negative connotation tied to power. This negative connotion, and resulting unwillingness to examen any kind of power, is perhaps the cause of radical polarized thinking about this issue. Some will maintain that every kind of use of power is dirty, and some will see everything as a powerstruggle.
This threads works under the assumption that some kind of powerstruggle can’t be avoided. The purpose is to hold power under the light of reason, and see what you all think about the issue.
I think both extremes are not the best way to go.
A denial of power and consequent idealist forms of moralities of equality, freedom,… will I think result in power finding it’s way under the surface in more convulted, manipulative, hypocritical ways. A lack of established power will allways leave one wonder if nobody will move in to fill the void. Ideas never seem to be a solid enough base for that.
A constant power struggle is I think ultimatly to tiresome for allmost eveybody. A constant thinking in terms of power and seeing everything everybody does as a powerbid doesn’t seem to be all that accurate. Some coöperation is undeniably preferable in a lot of situations .
So what are the other options?
The view that seems to be the most obvious is not a denial of power and struggle as a whole, but only a denial of the constancy of it. Seeing powerstruggles as momentarily events where the order of power is challenged seems to me a better way of looking at it. And if the disputes are settled a new equilibrum is achieved. These periods of rest are needed, as well as the struggles for power. This is essentially hierarchy and rank.
Can we take power as being "the ability of an individual (or, for that matter, group) to take action that achieves its aims/exercises its will"? In terms of the will to life, it’s an organism’s ability to alter its environment to allow survival; for the will to power, an individual’s ability to increase its abilities. Power can therefore be physical - shaping things through strength or violence; mental - knowledge, technique, technology; interpersonal/social - psychology, politics, oration and inspiration… it’s a blanket term for those things that increase the scope of your will, rather than a unique category.
Beyond a certain level of autonomy, individual wills interact. They may have common ground, and co-operate to pool their power. Or they may conflict, and a power struggle (physical, psychological, political) will ensue. One will may accommodate to the other prior to a direct clash, either due to submissiveness or enlightenment. Or they may find some way of passing each other by and defusing the conflict.
It’s clear that not every form of power use is dirty, or you condemn people to lie passively, waiting for death. Whether you have the power to beg for food, hunt your meal or persuade your friend to treat you to a takeaway, you use the abilities and resources you have to change the default state of hunger (leading untreated to starvation and death). You could conceivably hold that power struggles are unjust/unfair, automatically giving the advantage to the person who happens to have accrued/developed/inherited more power. Or you could argue that that is just, of course, under natural law.
It seems reasonable to suggest that the base level of power in human society ultimately lies with physical coercion; all other exercises of power are carried out within the framework that the holder of the most coercive power permits. The banding together of individuals into groups, states, nations, leads to the group (let’s say state) itself being delegated the arbiter of what coercion is permitted (such as in self-defence) and the only legitimate authority that can instigate physical coercion against its members (through a police force) and others (through an army/secret service).
Coercion is the most obvious overruling of one individual’s will by power. It removes the space - and necessity - for mutual accommodation, for reasoned argument, for discussion and clarification. And while people are made unhappy by the denial of their will, they can psychologically handle this unhappiness better in most cases where accommodation and debate have taken place. So in the interests of happiness, coercion should be kept to a minimum, and only used in cases where the resulting unhappiness would be greater - to stop violent criminals, for example.
Just for clarity - not all harm is coercive in intent, but all coercion rests on the threat or practice of doing harm to an individual.
Absolutely; co-operation is not a struggle, it’s an apparently mutually beneficial arrangement for multiple individuals to combine their power to achieve their ends.