“Power”

When I was a child, I heard a school assembly radio programme which has stayed with me ever since. A man (it would be back then) decided to seek the most powerful person in the world. I can’t remember the details of the exact chain except that it ended with Jesus, which it would because it was an assembly programme in the days before they had fully embraced multiculturalism. That last bit didn’t particularly impress me as I was atheist at the time, although I do also see that given a theistic setting the idea that the Sovereign or other head of state is really at the top of the pyramid might be tempered in a healthy way by their own belief in God, that of the people around them or wider society. One aspect of theism which I think is often missed by anti-theists, and I won’t harp on about this because I don’t want to put anyone off reading this, which is in any case not primarily about religion, but still, is that it can act as a brake on arrogance and narcissism if the person involved genuinely believes rather than uses it to manipulate people.

Leaving that theistic aspect aside though, the chain can be illustrated fairly simply by a concrete set of examples. The Prime Minister can do nothing without her Civil Service and the mandate of the people, and perhaps also the Police and armed forces. They are ideally only upholding the law, and the law may be controlled by lobbyists and MPs with certain interests which defers power again to large companies. These in turn are controlled by their shareholders, which could be seen as a democratic aspect of economics except that many of them don’t act rationally or are, for instance, pension schemes constrained to maximise income and can’t legally make ethical decisions. Then there are the pensioners and employees, that is, ordinary members of society, who enable this situation, but we are ourselves persuaded not just by our own lives but also by the likes of the mass media. They in turn may have agenda but are also trying to sell advertising and papers, and the advertisers are promoting the interests of their companies and so on, in such a way that power and responsibility always seem to be absent from the location, away from oneself already, in which it is supposed to be situated. The buck doesn’t stop anywhere. Power and responsibility flee from the places you expect it to be.

There’s also the question of the people who appear to be in power. Alan Sugar, for example, wouldn’t have got anywhere if he’d sold good quality products which the public didn’t understand or feel a need for, and they could to some extent be manipulated to want it but there are limits. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are either blamed or thanked for a lot, but they were in different countries and were put there by social trends as well as propaganda. Their personalities were undoubtedly important but in another sense they were just people who happened to be in the “right” places and times. The policies they pursued had a lot in common because the time had come for those policies to be realistically implementable. It’s nothing to do with who they were, and this can be seen in the fact that they were leaders in different parts of the world.

And this is the heart of the matter. If all you can do when you get elected is enact policies which someone else would have had to if they had been, surely your power is an illusion? You can propose any policy you like before you’ve been elected, but if they deviate more than a certain extent from what other candidates are proposing, they will lose you the election, and if you get elected you are likely to find yourself unable to enact the policies you propose unless they’re even closer to what we’re all used to. Therefore, even politicians are just figureheads most of the time.

This is why Donald Trump puzzled me. It seemed to me that a billionaire ostensibly working outside the political arena has more freedom and power than a billionaire president of the United States, who has to work within certain parameters and is somewhat more closely scrutinised. Presidents and other heads of state only do what their bosses in the private sector tell them to. Therefore, Trump seemed to be voluntarily surrendering power when he ran for President. I can think of two explanations for this. One is that he never intended to win and didn’t know what to do when he got there, and also didn’t consider it in advance, and the other is that he may have felt he was able to make a difference, perhaps for himself alone but still a difference, because he didn’t understand the nature of the office.

Even a dictator is constrained into behaving in a certain way. Whereas his actions may be vicious and heartless, it’s the nature of the job and whereas it may fit their character and values, they may not be able to behave in any other way and avoid being deposed or assassinated.

This is not a long or sophisticated political or philosophical post. There isn’t really that much to say about it to be honest. It’s just an explanation for why I tend to put inverted commas around the word “power”. In fact nobody has any power at all. History just throws people into particular conditions and circumstances constrain their possible actions. That’s it.