The Politics Of Personal Power (Part One)
The Eye of Power is meant to help us maximize our personal power. Most of that is a function of the choices we make. Some is a function of the society around us. Because of that, our choices about our political system and the leaders we entrust with authority have a significant impact upon the choices available to us. In this two-part series, we'll look at eight precepts that help us with those choices.
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The Politics Of Personal Power (Part One)
We face an upcoming election. If you are reading this after early November, don't worry. There will be another election coming soon enough. What we discuss will still apply. Regardless, election season has come to stretch our patience no matter our political bent. The ads and contested races are mostly distorted takedowns of the opponent. There are so many of them. My mute button during football and baseball games gets quite the workout.
One of the things that annoys me the most about these ads aside from their mindlessness is their relentlessness. Professional political campaigns don't seek to inspire and attract so much as they spend energy to frighten and cajole. It's insulting. Why do they do it? They do it because it works. The reasons behind that are topics for another day. One of the biggest problems in American culture is the political rift between the two major parties. We are so polarized now that we often can't even have calm, reasoned discussions about public policy.
Too often, relationships suffer and are even destroyed, which is tragic enough without also noting the many ways our public policy suffers, which multiplies the damage. The situation is not tenable. It will change one way or another. Historically, when societies are in this position, the path to reconciliation is not a smooth one. Under such conditions, what can we as individuals do?
I invite you to consider another way to ask this question. What public policy builds our personal power? What public policy erodes it? This is a question I have thought about for a long time, and I don't have exact answers because there aren't any. Why is that? It's because everything we do or every choice we make is a tradeoff. We give up one set of advantages and disadvantages when we choose another.
Everything we do or every choice we make is a tradeoff. We give up one set of advantages and disadvantages when we choose another.
With that caveat, I will perhaps not so humbly offer eight precepts and positions to consider if we are to maximize personal power and agency. These are attitudes and values that place weight on certain policy decisions over others. Some translate directly. You can tell whether it is a part of a party platform. Others are structural. They are either part of the Constitution or they are derived from it.
The first four are specific actions we can take as individuals. That's where our power begins. The second four are attitudes we can look for in leaders and the objectives we wish to see reflected in lawmaking and policy. We will cover the first four, the actions we can take to increase our personal power. In part two, we will examine the second four, which help us refine the lens through which we view candidates and hopefully better integrate our decisions at the polls.
Political power precept number one, free yourself from ideological possession. This is a juicy one. I could and likely will at some point do an episode on this alone. What does the phrase ideological possession even mean? If you have listened to this show before, you have likely heard me talk about how we use models to navigate through the world, and ideology is a model. It's a set of observations and beliefs that form our attitudes and actions. Like all models, ideology describes aspects of the world. It is not the world.
When we are ideologically possessed, we forget that unavoidable fact. We make a classic mistake and think that what we believe is reality itself. It is not. This is a trap that anyone can and almost always will fall into. It's difficult to avoid because it takes less energy and feels much more secure to rely on our model than it does to consider each new experience and notion afresh.
Avoiding ideological possession takes work because we are under constant assault. The powers that be through the messages they use to bombard us and the policies they codify into law reinforce ideologies that serve their ends. A common feature of those ends is increasing their authoritative power. If it costs us our personal power, that's a sacrifice they are willing to make.
It doesn't matter what side of the fight you are on or what the particulars of your ideology are. We are all subject to the trap. When we fall into it, we lose power because we lose our objectivity and even our ability to think through complicated matters. Like what happens in bigotry, we want the convenient blanket answer. Unfortunately, that's not reality, and if we use models that don't comport with reality, we bleed our power as we suffer from bigger blind spots and become deaf to facts that don't comport with our chosen ideology. People who desire power over others love it when that happens.
Freeing ourselves of ideological possession takes courage because when people are within its grasp, they are not free to be their genuine selves. They become capable of doing things like condemning good people to injustice or even suffering that otherwise they would never do. The courage we need to free ourselves can be best understood by the classic Hans Christian Andersen story, The Emperor's New Clothes. If you are not familiar, check it out. The boy was alone in seeing and declaring the truth because he was innocent of the consequences of going against the social grain. He didn't know the risk he was taking. We do. Yet to be free, we must be willing to take such risks.
Personal Power: Freeing ourselves of ideological possession takes courage, because when people are within its grasp, they are not free to be their genuine selves.
How do we know when we are ideologically possessed? When our emotions run so hot that we can't even listen to another point of view, that's a pretty good indicator. If you find your feelings bubbling up as you listen to me or anybody else for that matter, there's good reason to pay attention to those. While you keep listening, ask yourself what they are about. Take a close look at them. If your emotions short-circuit your rationale, you are bleeding your personal power critically.
Political power precept number two, vote with your dollars as well as your ballots. The incessant political ads are paid for by special interests and campaign contributions. Much of the political power in modern America is not codified into law. Rather, it's comprised of pressure exerted by coalitions. Marketers, both political and otherwise, use ever-advancing artificial intelligence to track and project consumer behavior. In this environment, politics becomes a struggle over beliefs and the behaviors that result.
Once we successfully free ourselves from ideological possession, we gain the ability to discern their game. Once we do that, we can choose the things we expose ourselves to. We can cancel some subscriptions and join others. We cannot always avoid giving our money to institutions that we see do not support the empowerment of individuals. We need not mindlessly vote R or D. Rather, we may communicate and insist upon specific reform proposals to candidates and representatives we perceive will lead in a positive direction.
Political power precept number three is to insist upon the original function of the fourth estate. What is the fourth estate? Why is it a thing? It's a function of human nature. In any society, we have a basic tradeoff to consider. Humans are not advanced enough to operate without governance because there is selfishness and myopia in every human heart and mind. Governance is needed to provide lawfulness and order upon which advanced societies may be built.
Humans are not advanced enough to operate without governance because there is selfishness and myopia in every human heart and mind.
The fundamental problem here is that the people in government have the same selfishness and myopia as everyone else. How do we protect the governed from this aspect of the governors? A big component is the light of transparency. We watch what they do closely. When advantage is taken from the privilege of power, the first defense is the detection and the pressure of widely sharing the wrongdoing.
This is the role of the fourth estate. It's an old idea going back five centuries to England where the three centers of power, the common people, the nobility, and the clergy, began to be watched by an emergent news reporting function enabled by the advent of the technology of movable type delivered by Gutenberg's printing press in Germany in 1450. Ever since, especially beginning with the acknowledgment of the role during the formation of the US Constitution, the fourth estate refers to a free press that serves as a watchdog for the people in power.
The global organizations that dominate the press are closely tied to those people because of corporatism and no small dose of ideological possession among its practitioners. As a result, they are largely shirking their basic responsibility. The effect is mitigated to some degree by the democratization of the means of production in media. After all, I'm speaking to you now on a show that's widely available and answerable to no one outside of our constituency.
There are millions like me, many far more established with a much wider reach. What we as individuals can do to maximize our power is to put pressure upon those who serve state interests over those of the general good and in so doing become part of the system that needs to be a watchdog by avoiding them. This is akin to political power precept number two, voting with our dollars.
Political power precept number four, act with respect for all people as individuals. This is similar to political power precept number one in that we must use models to understand the world and make errors when we forget we are doing so. In the case of people, we fall into a trap when we use demographics in our decision making though in aggregate, our model may be accurate enough to be useful. There's always a spectrum across which individual members of any group vary.
When we take an average or a median characteristic and apply it to any one person, we may be right but there's a great if not greater likelihood that we are wrong. When we are wrong, and we make assumptions about other people, what they are like, what they want, and how they will respond, our effectiveness in the interaction, or whatever our desired outcome suffers, and we bleed our power.
Personal Power: When we take an average or a median characteristic and apply it to any one person, we may be right, but there's a great, if not greater, likelihood that we are wrong.
A correlated notion is codified into the founding documents of the United States of America. It provided the foundation upon which it continues to function as a sanctuary for oppressed people around the world. Though under serious strain from more collectivist ideologies, respect for the individual remains a characteristic of an American viewpoint, not just for people who happen to be born within its borders but for people across the globe who share the precept of respect for the individual over whatever group affiliation may be identified.
The effect of respect for individuals, meaning that we grant them the same favor we would request for ourselves, is not simply increased effectiveness. It also makes our mind less hospitable for ugly human proclivities such as the bigotry that arises from innate fear of the outsider and the unfamiliar. This is a crucial condition to build any system of organization upon a foundation of trust, and trust is a requirement in a high-functioning organization, which is by definition more powerful. We simply get more done with the trust born of mutual respect.
Those are the precepts we can strengthen to contribute to increasing the personal power not only for ourselves but for everyone else too. The next four precepts turn more to the kinds of representatives we would like to see in a position to move policy in a direction that will further nurture our individual power and potential. We know we all want that. Let's go.