The End of Power (5 page)

This practical way of looking at power is neither new nor controversial. Although power is an inherently complex topic, many of the practical definitions that social scientists have used are similar to the one spelled out here. For instance, my approach echoes a classic and much-referenced paper written in 1957 by the political scientist Robert Dahl, “The Concept of Power.” In Dahl's phrasing: “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do.” Different ways of exercising power, and different expressions of power such as influence, persuasion, coercion, and authority—which the next chapter will address—occur within this context: one party getting or failing to get the other to act in a certain way.
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Power may well be an essential motivation that all of us carry in our inner being, as the philosophers tell us; but as a force in action, it is inherently relational. It is not enough to measure power using proxies, such as who has the largest army, the richest treasury, the biggest population, or the most abundant resources. No one walks around with a fixed and quantifiable
amount of power, because in reality any person or institution's power varies from situation to situation. For power to operate requires an interaction or exchange between two or more parties: master and servant, ruler and citizen, boss and employee, parent and child, teacher and student, or a complex combination of individuals, parties, armies, companies, institutions, even nations. Just as the players move from situation to situation, the ability of each one to direct or prevent the actions of the others—in other words, their power—also shifts. The less the players and their attributes change, the more stable the particular distribution of power becomes. But when the number, identity, motivations, abilities, and attributes of the players change, the power distribution will change as well.

This is not just an abstract point. What I mean is that power has a social function. Its role is not just to enforce domination or to create winners and losers: it also organizes communities, societies, marketplaces, and the world. Hobbes explained this well. Because the urge for power is primal, he argued, it follows that humans are inherently conflictual and competitive. Left to express that nature without the presence of power to inhibit and direct them, they would fight until there was nothing left to fight for. But if they obeyed a “common power,” they could put their efforts toward building society, not destroying it. “During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war,” Hobbes wrote, “and such a war as is of every man against every man.”
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The fall of barriers to power is opening the door to new players of the kind that have transformed chess—and, as the chapters ahead will detail, are now transforming other major fields of human competition.

Those new players are the micropowers mentioned earlier. Their power is of a new kind: not the massive, overwhelming, and often coercive power of large and expert organizations but the counterpower that comes from being able to oppose and constrain what those big players can do.

It is a power that comes from innovation and initiative, yes, but also from the newly expanded scope for techniques like vetoes, foot-dragging, diversions, and interference. The classic tactics of the wartime insurgent are now available and effective in many other fields. This means that they can open new horizons not just to progressive innovators but also to extremists, separatists, and people who are not committed to the general
good. And the profusion of all these players, as is already evident and accelerating, should raise some very grave concerns about what stands to happen if the decay of power continues ignored and unchecked.

We all know that too much concentration of power results in social harm, not least in those realms that ostensibly focus on doing good—witness the scandals that have afflicted the Catholic Church. And what happens when power is radically scattered, diffuse, and decayed? The philosophers already knew the answer: chaos and anarchy. The war of all against all that Hobbes anticipated is the antithesis of social well-being. And the decay of power risks producing just this scenario. A world where players have enough power to block everyone else's initiatives but no one has the power to impose its preferred course of action is a world where decisions are not taken, taken too late, or watered down to the point of ineffectiveness. Without the predictability and stability that come with generally accepted rules and authorities, even the most free-spirited creators of art, music, and literature will lack the ability to lead fulfilling lives, beginning with the ability to subsist in some consistent, systematic way off the fruits of their own labor (i.e., with some form of intellectual property protection). Decades of knowledge and experience accumulated by political parties, corporations, churches, militaries, and cultural institutions face the threat of dissipation. And the more slippery power becomes, the more our lives become governed by short-term incentives and fears, and the less we can chart our actions and plan for the future.

The combination of such risks can lead to alienation. Powerful institutions have been with us for so long, and the barriers to power traditionally have been so high, that we've composed the meaning of our lives—our choices about what to do, what to accept, what to challenge—within their parameters. If we become too alienated, the decay of power may turn destructive.

We urgently need to understand and address the nature and consequences of such decay. Indeed, although the aforementioned risks fall short of outright anarchy, they are clearly already interfering with our ability to address some of the great issues of our time. From climate change to nuclear proliferation, economic crises, resource depletion, pandemics, the persistent poverty of the “bottom billion,” terrorism, trafficking, cybercrime, and more, the world faces increasingly complex challenges that require the participation of ever more diverse parties and players to solve. The decay of power is an exhilarating trend in the sense that it has made
space for new ventures, new companies, and, all over the world, new voices and more opportunities. But its consequences for stability are fraught with danger. How can we continue the welcome advances of plural voices and opinions, initiative and innovation, without at the same time driving ourselves into a crippling paralysis that could undo this progress very quickly? Understanding the decay of power is the first step toward finding our way forward in a world that is being reborn.

YOUR ALARM GOES OFF AT
6:45
A.M., A HALF-HOUR EARLIER THAN
normal, because your boss insisted that you attend a meeting you think is worthless. You would have argued, but next week is your annual review, and you didn't want to jeopardize your promotion. An ad plays on your clock radio for the new Toyota Prius: “It gets the best mileage of any car in America.” You're sick of paying so much every week to fill up your tank. The Joneses next door have a Prius; why not you? Except that you don't have the money for a down payment. At breakfast with your daughter, you notice that she—despite your offer last week to allow her to listen to music on her headphones if she would eat granola instead of Cocoa Puffs—is sitting there with headphones on and eating . . . Cocoa Puffs. You and your wife argue over who will leave work early and pick up your daughter from school. You win. But you feel guilty and agree to walk the dog as a conciliatory concession. You go outside with the dog. It's raining. He refuses to move. And there's absolutely nothing you can do to budge him.

As we make the many big and small decisions that come up in daily life, as citizens, employees, consumers, investors, or members of a household or family, we must constantly bear in mind the scope—and the limits—of our own power. Whether the challenge is getting a raise or a promotion, doing our job in a certain way, pushing an elected official to vote for a bill we favor, planning a vacation with a spouse, or getting a child to eat right, we are always, consciously or not, gauging our power: assessing our capacity to get others to behave as we want. We bridle at the power of others and its irritating and inconveniencing effects: how our boss, the government, the
police, the bank, or our telephone or cable provider induces us to behave in a certain way, to do certain things, or to quit doing others. And yet we often seek power, sometimes in very self-conscious ways.

Sometimes, the exercise of power is so brutal and definitive that it has an enduring half-life. Even though Saddam Hussein and Moammar Qaddafi are gone, their victims doubtless still shudder at the mention of their names—an experience commonly shared by survivors of brutal crimes long after the perpetrators have been caught. Past or present, we
feel
the presence of power, even when it is subtly used or merely displayed.

Yet whatever the extent to which power is part of our daily lives and on our minds, it eludes our understanding. Except in extreme cases when we are crudely compelled by the menace of handcuffs, fines, demotions, shaming, beatings, or other penalties, we tend to experience power more as emotional coercion than as corporeal force. Precisely because power is primordial, elemental, in our daily lives, we rarely stop to address it analytically—to identify exactly where it resides, how it works, how far it can go, and what stops it from going further.

There is a very good reason for this: power is hard to measure. In fact, strictly speaking, it is impossible to measure. You cannot tally it up and rank it. You can rank only what appear to be its agents, sources, and manifestations. Who has the most money in the bank? Which company can buy another one, or which has the largest assets on its balance sheet? Which army has the most soldiers or tanks or fighter jets? Which political party won the most votes in the last election or controls more seats in parliament? These things can all be measured and recorded. But they do not measure power. They are only proxies. As gauges of power, they are unreliable, and even when tallied up they do not tell the whole story about how powerful someone or something is.

Still, power pervades everything from the system of nations to markets and politics—indeed, any situation in which people or organizations compete or individuals interact. Wherever competition takes place, a distribution of power exists, and it is always relevant to human experience. Though not the only motivation behind such experience, the quest for power is surely one of the most important.

So how can we usefully talk about power? If we are to understand how power is obtained, used, or lost, we need a way to discuss it that is not vague, grandiose, or misleading. Unfortunately, most of our conversations about power never actually make it past those pitfalls.

There is a way to talk productively about power. Yes, power itself is partly material and partly psychological, partly tangible and partly something that affects our imagination. As a commodity or force, power is hard to pin down and quantify. But as a
dynamic
that shapes a specific situation, it can be evaluated, and its limits and latitude assessed.

Take, for example, the ritualized group portrait of the heads of state and government who gather at a summit of the Group of Eight influential countries. Here are the president of the United States, the chancellor of Germany, the president of France, the prime minister of Japan, the prime minister of Italy, and others of their rank. Each of them is “in power.” In that respect, they are peers. And indeed, each of them has a great deal of power. Does it come from the prestige of their office, its history, and the ritual that accompanies it? From their victory in an election? From their command over a large civil service and military? From their ability to direct, with a stroke of a pen, the spending of billions of dollars raised by taxes on the labor and commerce of their citizens? Obviously, it is a mix of all these factors and others too. That is power as a force—palpable, but hard to disaggregate and quantify.

Now, with the same photo in mind, imagine the latitude and limits that these leaders enjoy or confront in different situations. What happened during the summit meeting itself? What issues were discussed, what agreements were negotiated, and, in each case, whose will prevailed? Did the American president, often labeled “the most powerful man in the world,” win every time? What coalitions formed, and who made what concessions? Then imagine each leader returning to his or her country and addressing the domestic agenda of the moment: budget cuts, labor conflicts, crime, immigration, corruption scandals, military deployments, and whatever else might be going on in that particular region. Some of these leaders command strong parliamentary majorities; others depend on fragile coalitions. Some, through their office, have great scope to rule by executive order or decree; others do not. Some enjoy great personal prestige or high approval ratings; others are beset by scandal or politically vulnerable. Their effective power—the practical translation into action of the power of their position—depends on all these circumstances and varies from issue to issue.

Even if we can't quantify power, we can be quite clear about how it
works.
Power operates in relation to others. The more accurately we define
the players and the stakes, the more sharply power comes into focus: no longer an ill-defined force, it can now be seen as an arbiter of a menu of actions, of possibilities for shaping and changing a situation, with a defined scope and real limits. And if we understand how power works, then we can understand what makes it work well, and thus sustain itself and increase; and also what makes it fail, and thus disperse, decline, or even evaporate. In a given situation, to what extent is power fettered or constrained? What ability does each player have to change the situation? By examining competition or conflict in these practical, operational terms, we can begin to understand where events are headed.