The Problem with the Notion that Power is Everything

Here's a Quillette piece by a university instructor discussing the follies of the "sexual harassment" binge on campus. Because it shows that the assumptions of the regulators is that women students -- even graduate students -- are unable to deal with the power of their instructors. Really? So maybe they should stay home under the protection of Daddy.

Actually, in a way, I get it. The fact is that, for a man, agency is central to identity. But for a woman, it is fitting into the community of women, worrying about what other women are saying about her. A man is defined by his ability to step out of line, to outdare the dangers of the time. But a woman is defined by her ability to get along.

However, if any woman in an university has to be protected by a mountain of rules, because she is helpless before the toxic males in her environment then maybe we cannot mix men and women together in the public square.

Then, I was reading a piece -- can't remember where -- that took it for granted that "power" is stronger than it has ever been. And that jived with a comment by gay British writer Douglas Murray commenting on Michel Foucault, Mr. Postmodernism, and "his obsession with power and the significance of power in life."

It’s all to do with power. Power in politics, power in personal relations, power in life, power in knowledge. An d this is, of course, as I say, a perverse way of looking at all human, any human relations really.

See, if everything is power then the only thing to do is to strike back with power. And that is the assumption of the left, that the whole world should be interpreted through the binary of the powerful vs. the powerless. And that, because the left is on the side of the powerless, we should give more power to theleft.

But is it true?

Is it true that women students are helpless before the power of the university instructors? And that therefore their relations should be adminstratively regulated down to the last dotted 'i' and crossed 't'? I don't think so, because woman has in our society the power of "no." In fact women in almost all societies have the power of "no" at least since Odysseus's faithful wife Penelope had the power to say "no" to the Suitors.

And, if you check with Hegel and his Master and Slave narrative, particularly if you read the exegesis of Alexandre Kojève in his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel that all French lefties have read, you find that the Master is not exactly the master of the Slave. It's a lot more complicated than that. So we might wonder if the relationship between women and the representative Toxic Male is a little more complicated than the simple power of the patriarch.

Example? When Frederick Douglass was sent to a slave breaker the guy eventually had to admit defeat. But, he wanted to make sure that his failure was a secret between him and Douglass. Really? How could that be if the slave-owner was the complete Master of the Slave?

So, how powerful is Power? People in politics all say that this or that power, whether the Soviet Union or Big Oil, is too powerful and therefore you need to give them power to protect you from the other power. Do you see the contradiction? Give us Power, they say, so we can protect you from The Power.

What if they were lying? How would we know?

Then we get back to Jordan B. Peterson and his lobster story. The fact is that power is mediated by hierarchy. You don't fight every day against the Power. On a day-to-day basis you accept your place in the hierarchy. But from time to time you may challenge the person next upstream in the hierarchy. Your challenge may be a physical fight, mano-a-mano, or it may be a trick that floors the other guy, or it may be an appeal to say "why don't we just get along?"

Now my belief, my faith, is that most of the time humans get much more bang for the buck by trusting each other and holding back on the use of power. There are many modern examples of this, from the pricing system to the German Army's decision during and after World War I to push responsibility downwards, not because the generals were sissies, but because the lethal battlefield meant that the higher-ups simply could not supervise every detail of combat; they had to trust their underlings. Then we have the Japanese automakers and their policy that allows any worker to stop the assembly line. In other words the idea that humans are social animals and succeed through trust is not a fairy tale but real truth on the ground.

But we return, again and again, to politicians and activists and the fact that their trade is power. They need to persuade us that we need to give them more power, because Russkies, or Muslims, or Climate Change, or toxic masculinity. Of course they do, because otherwise they have no warrant to deploy political power, and then they are out of a job.

And the worst of it is that many of the reasons for giving them more power is really because their current programs have made things worse. Health care is too expensive because government is all over it. College is too expensive because government subsidizes it. So the politicians are saying that the solution is more power to the politicians and the administrators? I doubt it.

Anyway, my belief is that the dirty little secret is that, with the market economy and its Great Enrichment over the last 200 years, we really need a lot less power in this world, and the more we dismantle power and encourage and reward trust, the better for all of us.

But what the politicians and activists will do in that glorious dawn of trust and reciprocity I have no idea. Perhaps they will all commit ritual suicide. Because unless there is power, power, power: power to fight and power to project, what will the robin do then poor thing?

But never mind. Whatever happens to the politicians and activists, the world will go on.