(This is a 30 minute timed write, so I am sure I am going to say something wrong. Oh well. – Owen)
If I look around me at the world, both the way it is now and how it was when I was a child, I have to conclude that people want power more than anything else — more than money, more than fame, more than love, and more than safety.
Power, for most people, is the ability to get what you want. We are all born wanting what we want, and that feature of humankind doesn’t fade with age, although we get better at hiding it. We go through adolescence dreaming of a world where we have the power to do or to be what we wish — whether it be social, sexual, physical, or any other type of thing. We may be told by the adults around us that we can be anything we want to be, but most of us hit an age where we know that’s not true. So we fantasize about what having that power would be like: whether through books, movies, music, idolizing online personalities, fantasy, super-hero stories, and so on.
There has been a lot in the news about widespread abuse of power. I was going to add “lately” to that sentence, but a moment’s reflection had me remembering that abuse of power is as old as humanity itself. If I look inward, I can see that many of the bad things I have done in my life came from the fact I had the power to do them, and chose to exercise that power (and to experience the feeling that came with it) over deciding based on either moral or ethical grounds.
In other words: you can have power without abusing it, but you cannot abuse power without having it.
The other things that is hard to escape is how double-minded and self-contradictory much of our thinking around power is. As just one example, everyday popular discourse around sex is hopelessly tangled with weird power dynamics. Popular discussions around sex workers go seamlessly back and forth between seeing these professions as empowering for the people in them to exploitative by nature, and the people who think this way seem unaware of any contradiction. That would seem to be (in part at least) because one of our favorite power dynamics plays is to pretend we are winning arguments online.
Before turning 18, I routinely fantasized about the girls around me, some older and some younger than I was. Upon turning 18, I became aware that sleeping with someone younger than I was at that time was a crime. Since I wasn’t sleeping with anyone, it was kind of a moot point, but had I been more popular with girls than I was there might have been thornier issues. As it was, my appearance and personality did more to keep me out of any potential trouble than any higher considerations might have. I am pretty sure that the “desire” part of my experience was close-to-universal; the “ability” part of my experience varies widely from person-to-person. So many older boys/young men have or had problems to deal with that I didn’t.
When I got to the point where I was sexually active, I had the experience of a young woman I was dating initiating intimacy, only to draw back from it at the point of what would have been consummation. I pulled away because I didn’t want to hurt her. However, I felt terrible and unattractive and less-than because I knew that moment would come for her someday, but she didn’t want it to be me.
She remembers and is grateful to me to this day; I still feel terrible about it. But maybe sex is intrinsically connected to power dynamics.
If you gave the adolescent version of me (or almost anyone else) the power to have what we fantasize about, the world would be in absolute chaos — which it arguably already is, and kind of for that reason. We need boundaries to power, because it is the ultimate cancer: it spreads, but contributes nothing to health of the host organism, which it ultimately kills.
