Seeking Power
There are three inescapable facts about power in our society and the average man’s relationship to it:
Power Is Widely Believed To Be Immoral: It’s a cultural maxim that power corrupts. It controls, dominates and causes pain. Seeking power is not the legitimate pursuit of a good man.
Power Is Mostly Inaccessible: One man, or even large groups of men can’t exercise power in society without significant pushback. In consumer democracies such as ours, to touch power at all, you have to petition proxies, like the media and bureaucracy.
Power Is Hopelessly Diffuse: While power is continually concentrated to fewer people and within larger organizations, their power must serve an increasingly fractured constituency. As a result there are millions upon millions of others with the same level of access to power as you, all hoping it will flow their individual way.
These facts combine to create a whole society of men who are cut off from power - the ability to move and influence the world around them. In our powerless state we reach out to touch the hem of distant political, economic and cultural drama because… well what else can we do? How else can we influence the world around us if our awareness of what all that power is doing isn’t locked in?
Our radical individuality, bound tightly inside of a mass society, offers us no other alternatives to approach or gain power besides endless “monitoring of the situation”.
Robert Nisbet1 in his book “The Quest For Community”, describes how this dynamic actively drains us of power and contributes to our isolation:
“…everything that removes a group from the performance of or involvement in its own government can hardly help but weaken [it]. People do not come together in significant and lasting associations merely to be together. They come together to do something that cannot easily be done [alone]. But when external absorption of power threatens to remove the basis of community, what else but the social horde and alienation can be the result?”
In other words, the powers of governments, corporations and bureaucracies are all wielded in ways that by definition must weaken and isolate us as people, families, neighborhoods, churches and communities.
And so, even if the right guys come along and capture all the macro engines of power and win so thoroughly that the Super Bowl Halftime Show is exactly what you could wish, you would still find yourself, your family, your church, and your kids “out of power”; And more critically, you would not be in a better position2 to gain power on that hypothetical day than you are today.
What then is the legitimate path to power for the average man? Is there one?
Codes of Authority
Nisbet referred to power vested in a social order as “codes of authority”. These codes are the bonds of family, friendship, obligation, loyalty, and of local hierarchies running small-scale institutions fulfilling shared purposes and reducing dependence upon state power. Concrete examples of codes of authority are:
belonging to a church that proscribes certain behaviors on Sundays.
parents teaching children family history.
grandparents providing child care.
friends solving a dispute without involving the law.
neighbors agreeing to discipline, raise or share duties for each other’s children.
development of privately-run alternative educational and vocational programs.
Codes of authority contain authority, (of course,) and impose some measure of duty and obligation, according to the purpose they serve. But far from limiting our freedom, living under these codes of authority keeps us free from the excesses of large scale power and as Nisbet put it, from “the social horde and alienation”.
When living under authority that arises out of shared contexts with neighbors, fellow churchgoers, or across generations of your family, power is no longer immoral but right and purposeful. Power is no longer inaccessible, because it is held by you or by those who have a duty and obligation to you; whether by rite, relation, loyalty or honor. Power is no longer hopelessly diffuse, but directed toward accomplishing what you care about most.
(This isn’t to suggest that battles over large scale power and influence are unimportant or that codes of authority can win them alone. Rather, what is true is no matter what is happening on the macro level, 1) codes of authority are desperately needed, 2) there are many problems only codes of authority can solve and 3) the creation of codes of authority are not conditional upon seizing the macro levers of power, as we might suppose.)
Stewardship vs Scale
One way to think about codes of authority vs mass power is in the difference between stewardship and scale.
Stewardship is personal responsibility. Scale is an impersonal scope.
Stewardship is dependent upon the integrity of the person. Scale is dependent upon the integrity of the process.
Stewardship reveals character. Scale reveals inefficiencies.
Stewardship is subject to codes of authority we create and live by. Scale is subject to the policies we are given.
In the past I’ve made the (common) argument that no one wants community because community means sacrificing your choices. But perhaps even deeper down than that, we are uncomfortable with community because we are uncomfortable with stewardship: we prefer scale to butt in and wash our hands of responsibility and offer us a place to hide.
Ambiguity
Every big company job I ever applied for had the following “qualification" in their job descriptions: is comfortable with ambiguity. Big bureaucracies thrive in ambiguity and in layers of abstraction. But people typically don’t. We thrive when roles and relationships are defined.
Children thrive when parents and other adults offer them a coherent identity. Teenagers thrive when they earn passage into adulthood. Young adults thrive when they have pathways to economic and social success. Older adults thrive by continuing this cycle. Everyone thrives when their relationships bring them meaning.
Given this, what exactly would it look like for you to “live under codes of authority”? How would your life change and what kind of power would you expect to gain? The answers are both boring and profound:
What if instead of watching a pro football game, you organized a consistent father/son’s neighborhood football game? You may not be any good at the game, but being bound by the rules and honor of the group, you and your son gain the powers of sweat, victory, defeat, injury, experience, camaraderie and effort.
What if instead of consuming media during meal time, you had neighbors over for dinner? What if at this dinner you sang, you played music, you told stories? What if you did this enough, with enough neighbors that you gained an understanding of their problems? And they of yours? This has the potential to unlock the powers of conflict resolution, communal help, shared norms and an alternative to dregs of pop culture.
What if you joined a church which had high expectations on your time and behavior and submitted to the authority of well-meaning but imperfect priests and church leaders? What if you involved yourself in the lives of your co-religionists and invited them to be involved in yours? What if you ask them to help you and hold you accountable? Here you unlock the powers of shared identity, transcendent meaning, challenging your limitations, patience, love and a practical, proven example of a moral life to offer the next generation.
Professional situation monitors may scoff at these suggestions, because they are plain, boring and require time to pay off. Which is why few actually do them and why you’d derive genuine power from them.
As you walk down these paths, you will find that you are no longer wholly cut off from projecting your values, goals and plans into the world around you. And that your relationships can solve more and more of your problems. And then, armed with your newfound power, you and your family are no longer so dependent on quieting the convulsions of a troubled mass society.
If I was you, I’d seek as much of that kind of power as I could.
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A 20th century American sociologist and conservative thinker. Very under appreciated on the right.
This isn’t to say that politics and the like have no purpose at all or can’t be at times be very useful but that large scale power can not solve the issues of identity, meaning, community and purpose that afflict us today, no matter how favorable a President or Congress or mass culture is at any given time.
I recently wrote a piece about restoring community, and drew heavily on Nisbet; indeed, very underappreciated. I've just read your book "Only the Weird Will Survive" -- in which you also bring Nisbet -- and loved it. I intend to write a bilingual review on it some time this semester.