Truth about power is banal and depressing

Affable

From what I can gather from my observations of politics and power the truth about power is rather banal and depressing. Specifically, I mean that it does not involved moral courage, and that moral courage often gets you in more trouble and makes you more hated. It's more like 1 part meanness, 1 part respectability, one part sycophancy and not offending the wrong people, 1 part vicarious, 1 part riding the back of the beast(Blairs quote re Murdoch) and following trends.


It's really just like a more sophisticated version of the school playground.

Views?

Offalycool

That’s a very Machiavellian view IMO, though he would have said political greatness requires courage. I would tend to favour the view of Hannah Arendt who forwards an argument something like this:

Modern societies often confuse power and violence. Violence is not power. The modern state claims the absolute right to use violence via the ‘social contract’; violence may be used on behalf of the people. However, power is action (Always political) by people collectively, and violence paralyses action. So in effect, violence paralyses power.

Often when a state has lost the consent of the people, it will resort to violence against its own people as a last resort, because it finds it irresistible to use the means it possesses (monopoly on violence) to prolong the regime. However, this is a fatal error, as violence can only paralyse action and therefore real power for so long. If the state removes the power from the people, the people are left with no recourse but to resort to violence themselves, and the state will be destroyed. Once this happens, power is restored to the people. Power is collective action of people, but it requires a genuine political space to be expressed.

Of course what passes for (some) politicians today would not be politics in Arendt's eye.

nyarlothothep

I tend to agree about it being a sophisticated playground, albeit a much nastier stupid playground where a lack of long term vision is endemic. Then again we participate in a system that keeps them in place. I guess its down to cognitive differences, some people like authority, some tolerate corruption and so forth. It will be interesting to see how this century plays out but all I can say is that the world is not a safe happy place, not with millions dying of starvation, illegal wars and barbarism and these require people to participate in them, but I see this as the historical legacy of less civilized times. One day I hope that as a species we can lift ourselves out of the circumstances we find ourselves in currently, but it will be a long and very hard battle. I think what lies at the core of this is independent thought which isn't really encouraged. Its all part of our evolution. Maybe we'll evolve into less intelligent creatures, or just become extinct. Maybe there'll still be an american flag on the moon for some future "humanity" to discover.

DadaKopf

I was having this conversation last week. I've just returned from a holiday in South-East Asia. While I feel uncomfortable about it, like a good tourist I visited the Cambodian 'Killing Fields' and 'S-21' torture prison and the Viet Cong tunnels.

So I was thinking about power, politics, despotism and genocide. A thought I've had for a long time is that the faces of evil, evil people - those who use and abuse power, destroy lives - are utterly banal.

Years ago, as I was learning in college about the breaking apart of Yugoslavia as it happened, I remember constantly referring to Milosevic as the 'most boring man alive'. His wife must have been the most boring man alive. John Simpson's unforgettable BBC news footage of Ceaucescu's apartment after he was shot by revolutions told of a bland, boring man leaving behind bland, vulgar decor. I got a similar sense from what I learned of Pol Pot and the Khymer Rouge. Ho Chi Minh not so much.

I'd even consider our illustrious Bertie in this camp. Someone who lives for power and influence but has little else.

These are hollow, banal people. And I think Affable is right that from the point of view of the people who manipulate others to violence, banality does (and from the perspective of trying to justify terrible things) IMHO play a part.