Power

Power is the ability to do things. Like all other values, we derive the concept of power from our perceptions, and it exists solely in our mind.

Power always comes through another perceived purpose and is the total combination of several elements:

  • Present purposes, usually through things we can manipulate directly or gain through others’ means.
  • Future purposes, based on our predictions, for ourselves.
  • Things we predict other people might have a purpose for.
  • Story adaptation, which alters the image of something to imply any of the previous things have more or less power.

Power is completely relative. For example, money is highly valuable only because everyone else finds it valuable, but is useless if nobody else found value in it. Horse manure, on the other hand, is only valuable to specific people, but critical to the purposes those people possess.

Without love, the only useful thing any person’s purpose can ever do is to acquire and maintain more power. Because power always references something else, all power is directed toward a love for something.

Power’s Basis

Some power is given to us by others (e.g., social class) and other power is earned (e.g., understanding). Society gives us most of our power, usually without our awareness or consent. It can come from family/group reputation or reality, but also comes through aspects of our personality and genetics before we’re even aware of what our decisions would yield.

We tend to say something has “value” when we interpret it has power. That value is from its ability to fulfill purposes for ourselves or others. If something is “universally valuable”, it’s because it satisfies a human universal.

Power is usually expressed and interpreted through symbolic associations, and is a huge component of gaining influence (which is its own type of power).

Money is tangible, but most power isn’t. We can’t discern precisely how much power others have, so we tend to build a framework in our minds to estimate it:

  1. We guess how much power we have to accomplish our purposes.
  2. We observe and trust the image of others’ power to discern their power compared to ours.
  3. Then, we make decisions based on a complex power calculus to achieve results we want to see.
  4. After we see what happened, we correct our prediction later of others as we gain experience.

Power & Love

Without overflowing love for a thing, the direct motivation for any purpose is for power. At the end, though, there’s always a love of someone or something that drives that power.

If the greatest purpose of any action that gains power doesn’t provide someone else a benefit, that decision is evil because we’re willing to sacrifice people for a purpose that never serves anyone but ourselves. Any desire can also become evil when we lose sight of why we want it.

Unless we’re acting out of love, our causes are very easy to forget because they usually become habitual otherwise. Even the desire for safety can easily convert to evil.

Power Management

We tend to feel power when we observe results. Frequently, we’ll identify with the things that give us the most power.

Often, we have tons of power but don’t realize it because we’re unaware of it. We’ll often overlook these freedoms and privileges because we haven’t made a tangible purpose that would use them.

We are all susceptible to ridiculous mistakes, but power compounds them. With enough power, we can build a public image that will follow us for decades. If we don’t respect that power, we usually mismanage it. All attributes of virtue or evil exist in how we manage our power.

We tend to not give much respect to children because they don’t have the experience in managing power, and therefore misuse it.

As we manage power, we become more confident with it, and tend to see ourselves as more entitled to wield it. The reverse is true as well, and not managing power makes us more inclined to not manage it. The only people who don’t have power but can still comfortably work with it have other power from an unrelated domain that they’ve been able to manage.

Changing Power

Using technology, creations, and others’ labor will compound our power exponentially.

Very frequently, we trade our power from one to another (e.g., a wage is renting out time in exchange for money). That trade usually leans toward whatever we believe there’s less of that we may need (scarcity). This is all about perception, not reality, and some people abuse image to gain power.

There are many forms of power-trading, but maintaining an image is often physically the same thing as a loving person’s actions:

  • Giving gifts to others we favor can gain reputation
  • Sacrificing time with others can gain knowledge
  • Submitting or subordinating to a stronger person can gain favor

Nobody ever intentionally gives up their power without gaining an alternate power (i.e., an opportunity), love for someone else, or to protect a future loss in power (driven by fear).

We often sacrifice for future power as much as present power, which is the basis for entrepreneurship and success in the world.

Most of our decisions and purposes revolve around gaining power or not losing power (i.e., security). In modern society, most of our calculations about power revolve around our relationships with others and adopting trends.

Image is easier to curate than reality and has more social benefits, so people typically desire to gain externally-facing power over inner strengths. however, wise decision-making tends to value inner strength because it has much more long-term use.

Comparing Power

On a subconscious level, most people are constantly assessing others’ power compared to their own. The entire experience distills into a broad concept of “status”. While it’s harmless alone, most people attribute human worth to it, which is possibly the sole reason an ideal society can’t exist.

If we desire others’ power, we envy them.

People only want others to be wildly successful, up to a certain point:

  • First, many people are afraid of risks to their power, so they try to destroy perceived competition.
  • Even without that, when their opponents haven’t attained a perceived social status they believe that person should have attained, their conceit often makes them envious or jealous.
  • Very few people find satisfaction with other people outperforming them. Any non-evil satisfaction requires loving them.

Power pertaining to others’ wills is also known as “politics”. Making other people successful adds political power and making unpopular decisions decreases it.

Since it alludes to our greatest fears, the most potent form of power comes in the ability to take someone else’s life.

When people have plenty of power compared to others, they tend to be more amicable and benevolent. If they start suffering a shortage for their purposes, though, they often express tremendous evil to maintain their power proportional to their fears.

On the other end, when people have very little power compared to others, they’ll behave amicably and benevolent toward others, but only as part of the dynamic of preserving or gaining power.

Power & Money

Money is one of the easiest ways to store and trade power. We can often satisfy nearly every purpose with money. Thus, desiring money is desiring power, which leads to evil because that power has a self-seeking aspect by default.

Money is merely a medium of exchange because it has no intrinsic value. If it had intrinsic value, people would use it instead of simply exchanging it.

The power of money comes through how it’s interoperable with almost all other forms of power. If a person had an infinite supply of money that maintained spending power indefinitely, the only purpose they wouldn’t be able to overcome would be death.

Overpowering

People engage in conflicts to overpower someone else when several conditions are met at once:

  1. The attacker doesn’t care how the defender would feel.
  2. The calculated benefit of the attacker is greater by attacking than not.
  3. The attacker, if defeated, can recover from their loss.
  4. Any other possible conflicts from observers won’t leave the attacker worse off than by attacking.

Most of the time, to negotiate, the attacker will show something symbolic to convey their superior power (e.g., a weapon, language implying the defender could be destroyed). If the defender gives up without a fight then everyone experiences less pain and loss overall. This is why slavery is such a common institution and why political journalists focus on making their opponent look bad.

Vulnerability is our willingness to trust that others won’t damage our power. We tend to be less vulnerable when we’re afraid of others, especially from past trauma. The more power we have, the higher the risk of loss, and the less we trust. People tend to believe confidence is a sign of significant power because they look like they’ll recover from any loss, which means they must have more power.

Across time, there’s a type of “natural selection” of power, where the most capable in any situation overpower the less capable. This is the basis of economics and evolutionary theory, but there’s very little value to knowing it on an individual basis.

Downsides

All power has the opportunity cost of another power:

  • Emphasizing knowledge diminishes the ability to affiliate as a peer within a typical social group.
  • Being larger and stronger means slower and less mobile.
  • Speed sacrifices safety.
  • Leadership skills mean building fewer member skills.
  • Fame costs almost all privacy, and maintaining it requires constantly adopting trends.

Trying to maintain power can also create very unpleasant consequences:

  • Addiction is devoting all power to gaining a specific substance.
  • Hoarding is not seeing that past-tense power is not presently useful.
  • By withholding or gaining knowledge, we often risk reputation.
  • Every form of power is subject to diminishing return as it scales.
  • All power beyond ourselves makes us slaves to others’ results, even when we’re in positions of authority.
  • The more power you have, the more you can lose and the less aware you become of other forms of power.
  • If you’re not paying attention, managing power can sometimes backfire and harm you.

Further, almost all power has a diminishing return from continuing to amass it:

  • Gaining more money, after a point, is merely useful to gain influence beyond money.
  • Gaining knowledge is only valuable when we don’t know, and it becomes progressively less useful as we understand more.
  • Gaining a social network is useful, but also comes with tremendous risks because you’re trusting more people.

Every powerful phase has its own season. Young people are powerful in physical strength and attractiveness, older people are powerful in wisdom and cleverness, then we all pass on.

Application

Most of the ways we arbitrarily give up power is through fear of irrational things. Often, we’re afraid of unlikely events while everyday risks don’t faze us.

We can gain awareness of most power through meditation and introspection. Most psychotherapy is untangling and releasing power we had given to awful authority figures.

All forms of power, even knowledge, are limited. Since power of all types has a maintenance cost to it, we must only amass power that fulfills an existing purpose or fulfills our imagination of future purposes.

Power is somewhat randomly distributed to each of us through upbringing and personality, but we can make decisions that determine how our power shifts over time.

We often can’t predict things beyond our perceptions, so we often trade power that creates poor long-term results. We must be sure we understand the entire situation before acting to avoid giving up power.

Eventually, most people are driven by the desire or need for money, in one way or another. Without awareness of this, any group will eventually disband when the members find something else that will satisfy their purposes.

Fear of large groups (e.g., governments and corporations) are the only thing that keeps people from doing evil more often. In that absence, if people could get away with it, most people would kill each other.

Generally, people with less power and know it are far more dangerous than those who have power, mostly because they will do whatever it takes to amass more power.

People don’t want others to be more successful than they are, so most people with wisdom often try to obscure how much power they really have.

Focusing solely on one power sacrifices other qualities of the good life. The desire for additional power should point to non-power things. However, most people wish to learn it firsthand by becoming wealthy or popular first at the risk of their moral state.

Power is based on means, so it’s not possible to be the most powerful person without completely enslaving everyone else. Thus, most people specialize their focus and compete on that limited domain instead. A leader runs a bad system that abuses its power when it forgets that unknown forces may have more power.

Things like raw intellectual power or physical strength are useful forms of power, but power that enhances and magnifies other forms of power (e.g, technology, influence) is far more effective in the long-term.

Most demarcations of social class are built around how well people manage power. The poor tend to burn up their power on frivolous purposes, while the wealthy are hyper-vigilant about anything that may harm their means of control.

Battery technology and guns will never be as influential as generators and militaries because people have trust issues with giving power away. But, it’s the only way to have the most fairness, and is necessary for any type of perfect society.

Giving everyone power, such as everyone having guns, would make everyone much more respectful of each other. At least, until someone took them all.

Power reflects on purpose, so we can gain tremendous power from commonplace things: