What is Power?
Aristotle and the Thoughtlessness of "Power Analysis"
In popular discourse, it’s common to refer to people as having or not having power—yet the abstraction itself, power, is rarely defined. Is power something that can be possessed? Quantified? Is it an absolute value or a relative one? Is power inherently something one exercises over others?
Power takes its name from potency, possibility, and potentiality, words formed from the Latin auxiliary verb, “posse,”—to be able to. The Greek word for power, which the Latin translates, is dynamis, from which we get dynamic. The phrase, “power dynamic” is a portmanteau formed by a redundancy.
For Aristotle, only one who has the power to do something can have the power not to do it (and vice versa). A great violinist has the power not to play; but a person who doesn’t know how to hold an instrument lacks that incapacity. The violinist at rest is still a violinist, in the mode of not playing. The non-violinist at rest isn’t really not playing, since s/he has no capacity to negate.
If you want to extend this idea, a person with rights can have her rights taken away. But a person who doesn’t have rights to begin with simply lacks rights. Her problem is not that her rights are violated but that she lacks the ability to have her rights violated.
For naturalists who believe that rights are inherent and inalienable—the distinction I make is meaningless. But for positivists and realists, for whom rights are a function of social and legal convention, there’s a critical difference between a person living in a pre-modern society and one living in a modern society that fails to live up to its expressed ideals. A person in a democratic country who is denied the ability to exercise her right to vote is in a different situation than a person in a non-democratic country who simply cannot vote. To put it cheekily, “Living in a society in which one can say ‘check your privilege’ is itself a massive privilege.”
Paradoxically, the person whose rights are violated is in a worse position than the person without rights (even though, theoretically, the person whose rights are violated can make a rational appeal, while the person without rights faces larger obstacles to recognition). Just as the violinist who finds herself on stage without a violin or with a broken violin is in a worse position than the person sitting in the audience.
Let’s accept for the sake of argument the progressive view that we must conduct a “power analysis” of every situation, and weigh the statements and actions of the powerful differently than those of the less powerful (and that we must thereby strive to achieve equality of outcome rather than procedural equality). Is this possible? The axes along which one might compare two people or two groups are far more complex than the categories afforded by sociologists. Moreover, assuming power is not reductively a social phenomenon, but also a phenomenon of the self’s relationship to itself, how can we possibly hope to know the sense of power or powerlessness that people feel.
One could argue (and many do) that feeling is irrelevant, but this, too, creates a bind, given the progressive desire to enshrine “mental health” as a category in need of recognition.
To the extent that the powerless—however defined—are treated as deserving of greater advantage than the powerful, it seems natural that many will claim and aspire to be powerless. We should expect a commensurate increase in mental health cases amongst the young (who come of age under the principle of “equity”). Since mental health is, in part, a function of what we believe, it is inaccurate to say that an uptick in those claiming to suffer from mental health issues is an expression of fraud or self-deception. Rather, it is accurate to say that a society that grants glory to the inhibited will produce members who compete, paradoxically, for the glory of being incapable of achieving glory.
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