Power Is Overrated | Hacker News Reader

Power Is Overrated

nytimes.com

321 pointstlb219 comments

In order to understand why power is coveted, we need to understand human motivation. The best theory I've read on human motivation, comes from Drive. As described by scientific research, once you go beyond our primal need for food, safety and companionship, there are 3 primary factors that motivate us. Mastery, autonomy, and purpose.

Mastery is the ability to master and perfect a craft you care about. This can most likely be achieved without having power over others. No problems here.

Autonomy is exactly what is described in the article. The freedom to avoid being micromanaged. On the face of it, you don't need power over others to be autonomous either.

Purpose, however, is a lot trickier. If like the author, your purpose in life is simply to engage in the arts, you're all set. You don't need power over others, and you won't understand why anyone would want that.

But suppose your purpose in life is to save millions of lives, like what Bill Gates has done with his foundation. Or to help all Americans get universal healthcare, like what Sanders wants to do. Or to help mankind become an interplanetary species, like what Musk is aiming for.

It is near impossible to fulfill such purposes without wielding power. Either political or economic or cultural. There are some purposes, even the noble kind, which can only ever be accomplished by shoring up a lot of power.

To go one step further, a lot of people try to fulfill their life purposes through their jobs. They want to help people, and so they work at a non-profit. Or they want to further scientific progress, so they work in a research lab. Which is great, except that by becoming a cog in a powerful machine, they are surrendering their autonomy in the process. They find themselves having to choose between autonomy and purpose. Regardless of what they choose, they fantasize about having enough power so that they can have both. They dream of being rich enough to start their own non-profit, not just work in one. They dream of heading a research lab, not just being a cog in someone else's.

People like the author are in an enviable position, of having their cake and eating it too. For others with a different purpose in life, power is the only way of having the best of both worlds.

There is a certain physiological response to conquest that goes beyond satisfaction, especially in males. For example , the fans of a football team having their testosterone levels go up after a win. This translates to every sphere as some kind of reward to domination. That said, just because it's evolutionarily selected for , doesn't mean power relationships and dominaance have any kind of legitimacy or optimality. They are just as primal as our urge to kill, and should be viewed with suspicion.

what’s interesting to me is the sly admission that he exerts power as an artist through trying to change what others think, but to him, that’s a benign form of power. some (foucault, orwell, etc) would say that’s the most insidious and effective form.

unless you are truly disconnected from the world, you live in the web of power that envelops us all, certainly, some feel less burdened by it, and maybe that’s the measure of freedom that many seek.

> But suppose your purpose in life is to save millions of lives, like what Bill Gates has done with his foundation

It could just as likely be the other way around: the reason Bill Gates created the foundation was to make him have a purpose in life after leaving Microsoft. If he hadn't created the foundation, he would now just be an extremly rich nobody. Saving lives is just a nice side-effect. Power is just a tool in this case, not the goal.

Originally, Bill Gates had neither. He used the power gained by fufulling his purpose of writing software to find a higher purpose. Id imaging his sense of purpose changed as his power (and resulting responsibility!) changed.

Seems like a chicken-and-egg problem, no? Power empowers power.

The idea that you are somehow enslaved by a predefined, concrete purpose that requires you to find power is toxic and must be killed. A person is capable of matching their means with their desired ends and finding meaning while avoiding the trap of needing power. You may arrive at power or influence, but I'd argue that should never be required.

A purpose can (and should) be defined by a process, and a motivation, and a living philosophy more so than a tangible number.

(edited to clarify)

I still don't understand. How do you save millions of lives without the power to do big things?

What if saving millions of lives requires giving away that power - by empowering millions of lives to save themselves.

You send a message that sets a chain of events in motion that saves millions. A common trope in fiction, with some basis in reality(e.g. the nuclear attack warnings during the Cold War, which a few soldiers in bunkers decided to ignore).

Power just means you get to call shots and take credit. It doesn't mean that you were the most valuable player.

You can have power, and use it for good. But the toxic idea is that you must pursue power first, and that you must pursue power to fulfill some in-born, per-defined reason.

Warren Buffet did not set out to make billions of dollars of donations. He wanted to be a businessman, and ended up rich. Great, he's trying to do right by the billions he has, but could have probably had a bigger impact over the course of his lifetime by being directed at helping first and foremost.

I'm not sure that purpose is always so created. For me, it seems to arise from within. A deep, slow, emergent, understanding of purpose. I did not choose it, it came to me while I was busy with surviving. Perhaps I could choose another, perhaps I could re architect my personality. But would that ever be as authentic as the thing that first came into the light? Would it ever be as truly my own as some new construction?

We create ourselves to some extent, but also we are born. To deny that part of us which is born is a great shame.

I'm very surprised not to see "social recognition" (aka. validation) as a primary motivating factor.

i think social recognition is maybe more of a 'we expect this to develop earlier in life' sans obvious pop world examples of this being possibly a driving force. certainly social rec appears to be a layer or more above the other factors.

Everyone is under the influence of power. Most of your behavior is shaped by the power organizations and individuals have over your life. Your value judgements are shaped by them. For instance, being a useful employee, a good student, even a good spouse is defined by the people who have the power to judge, reward or punish your behavior. To want power is to go against this current and push your own values.

The why of power isn't as relevant as the how. Historically every powerful person has had a "purpose". To give some moral underpinning is a shallow veneer that excuses the actions necessary for power, since power is a full time job. If you have power then that is your purpose, since anything else would keep you from it.

Look too closely at any powerful person with a purpose and things get ugly. Whether it's FDR, Bill Gates or Walt Disney. Power comes first or not at all.

Curious if you think power and influence are synonymous. I don’t think they are, but I do think they can achieve similar things which require a collaborative effort of many, like saving millions of lives or interplanetary habitation. To me power implies some sort of DAG whereby decisions are made to move closer to a goal, whereas influence is much more arbitrary and disconnected but still creates solutions. It might me less efficient, but trade offs are unavoidable

Would power be power if it had no potential to influence? I find them synonymous.

I think it's simpler than that. Humans desire political power because there's an evolutionary advantage to being in charge of your tribe. Primates care about the politics of their tribes, so do we. No need to delve into secondary, non-specific human needs. It's a direct, intrinsic motivation.

You sound like N, stop. You basically described the will to power

Who or what is N?

Nietzsche, I'm guessing.

Apparently Nietzsche, given the mention of "will to power". But yeah, that's a confusing one.

I think they actually mean the extremist-right German "socialist" party.

We are survival machines for genes and are biologically programmed to move in the world in a fashion that our genes survive. Females desire to mate with the highest status males and males are compelled to fight each other for status in order to win the females with the best genes. It's horrible but its true.

It's only generally true, and I would say people vary too much for it to be basically true even when just talking about biological imperatives (e.g. The fact that homosexuals exist in the gene pool confound the basic biological imperative you're arguing for).

But lets take what you said as fact - the conflicting factor even here is that humans have a layer over the top of our biological programming, which results in people going against their "basic" interests quite often.

Not everyone does, but many do, and we are talking about humans on that layer - whether that goes against our instincts or not.

I would not say it confounds the issue. Just because someone is homosexual it doesn't mean they don't look for similar attributes in their parters. Would it be surprising if women that dates other women generally look for high status, while men that dates other men look for genetics (ie appearance)? There is also a few but correlating findings where if one sibling is homosexual then the others siblings have more children compared to the national average, but researchers don't really know why except that it is statistically significant.

You are right the human factor is relevant and people can go against their "basic" interests, but statistics from census data and dating sites shows quite grim numbers. Wealth (as a proxy for social status and power) is the single biggest dominating factor for men with a very sharp drop at the bottom, and appearance (as a proxy for genetics) is the single biggest dominating factor for women. It also correlated to the size of peoples social support network, stress levels, overall health, and life expectancy.

Just looking at life expectancy, wealth for men has a correlation of about 10-15 years difference. Exercise in comparison seems to only have a correlation of around 7 years difference.

>Would it be surprising if women that dates other women generally look for high status, while men that dates other men look for genetics (ie appearance)?

Absolutely fascinating question, I would not be surprised by this possibility at all. It seems quite probable.

Who would be an example of someone who you think is in charge of their tribe?

The President of the United States, the minister of your local church, the quarterback of the football team, the CEO of your company.

No, people desire power (political or not) for more than one singular reason.

Outside the realms of true global (or even country, or state level...) power, I've been driven to "power" before because I felt that my part of the community was being wronged and I had the attributes to fix it. When I fixed that wrong, I relinquished that power and went back to my place of relative obscurity (the way I like it).

Was I motivated by some basic thirst towards being the leader of my community? Nope. I was driven by anger and injustice for my community.

Are there are basic instincts at play? Probably, maybe, I don't know, but the simple point I'm making here is that you can't reduce it to evolutionary advantage of being in charge, otherwise people would never relinquish the power.

Humans are social creatures, and wildly vary in what they offer the group, and when they feel the need to.

> I relinquished that power and went back to my place

Sulla resigned the dictatorship -- as he said he would -- and that was a surprise to many.

Practically speaking, developing Autonomy requires "not having to deal with other people's shit", which is certainly an aspect of "power". More so if you want to maintain a particular quality of life, and even more so if this quality of life is abnormal.

The freedom to do what you want is entirely predicated upon those with power. It so follows that in order to truly secure the freedom to "do what you want", the only real long term viable solution is to attain power. Try telling those living under an autocracy that they should give up any hope for power and just be happy doing whatever they want. Nietzsche describes this perfectly in On the Genealogy of Morality and Beyond Good and Evil. The only way to truly be master of ones destiny is in creating the circumstances under which one will exist, not simply living at the whims of another. Those who think they are achieving true actualization through the shunning of power are simply deluded, or lucky enough that their local circumstances have provided a modicum of stability and freedom.

> The freedom to do what you want is entirely predicated upon those with power.

I don't think so. Find something you want to do and others need or want from you.

> Find something you want to do and others need or want from you

If one is truly powerless, the latter will be taken without thought to the former. This is why tights are fundamentally empowering (and lacking in autocracies).

I assume you mean rights, but tights is far more intriguing in this context.

This scenario was (sort of) depicted in a line of dialogue in the Mickey Rourke movie The Wrestler. The main character (a struggling pro wrestler) asks for more work hours at his side job, and his boss jokes “Why, did they raise the price of tights?”

You’re confusing power over other people and power over your own circumstances.

The very beginning of the article asserts that they're essentially the same. In a world with more than one person alive and interacting, it's true.

I disagree. There are many forms of power (including F*v) but what we commonly confuse is power that is the means available to accomplish a task, and political power that represents ones altitude in a social hierarchy. And though I agree with you that where two or more people gather together there will be competition over who is dominant (AKA politics) I disagree that those of higher social status can have %100 control over anyone. After we make our requisite displays of subservience to the overlords, we can still carve out a lot of freedom needed to accomplish our own goals, if we are smart and discrete about it.

The beginning of the article says the exact opposite.

Yes and its wrong

In a sparsely populated world everyone can have their own place and do what they want. In a highly populated world that's not possible. People will share space and have differing views on how things are to be arranged there.

Even (and especially) in sparsely populated worlds, people have to share space. Look at Antarctica, the desert, etc.

The two are one and the same. If you have no power over other people you can't stop them from impinging on your own circumstances.

If you can change what you want (downshift) then you can gain freedom (from the almighty $). I actually do not want a car (and I am not just telling myself that), I do not want to live in a nicer apartment (well, maybe a little). What I do want is to do what I want, I have made many major decisions based on that principal, unfortunately neglecting other factors. I learned programming because I had an idea that I thought would allow me to be my own boss, I went to grad school because it allowed more freedom than work, I learned another language b/c I thought I could move to that country and retire earlier, etc. etc. If I could go back in time I'd probably not do any of that shit, at least not the way I did. Sometimes I wish I were better at conforming, or at least wonder if I would be happier.

Depending on the context, this might mean changing whether you want food, a roof over your head, not to be in jail, not to have someone else dragging your family members off to prison for saying the wrong thing..

And some philosophies are completely OK with this. Attachment is the root of all suffering, etc. Me, I'm pretty attached to not being hungry or cold or injured, and to nothing bad happening to my friends and family, and I think that's healthy.

" not simply living at the whims of another"

We all live 'at the whims of another'.

We are inherently social creatures because we can only flourish as a group.

There is no escaping one another.

The missing bit about power is that it's self-oriented as described in the article, but in reality, power is a responsibility, a burden, not an escape.

Powerful people usually get a few nice things in return for having to do a lot, and worry about a lot, and make heavy decisions.

It's wrong for anyone to suggest that being the 'king' or 'CEO' of anything is an easy job, it's usually a brutally hard job. If those people wanted 'freedom' they'd have retired early, lived on the relative cheap.

And of course most people simply don't want that kind of power anyhow.

Power is great at lowering stress, actually. A sense of control goes a long way to alleviating it.

https://www.pnas.org/content/109/44/17903

What's interesting about this study is that they non-scientifically conclude that 'control' is the reason more powerful people are less stressed.

But the reality is, most powerful people do not have 'control' over much.

CEO's who were not founders have very little control.

The 'general' layer in the Army, my god man, it's extremely political.

The reason I suggest is a degree of psychopathy: they just don't care. They accept their status, look upon other people as ants, and are mostly concerned with gaining favour from people at their level or higher.

Secondarily, it could be because they are mostly financially secure - unless something drastic happens, they won't have to worry.

Earning only $500K/year is a different zone than $80K. You can do the golfing, skiing, travel, day spa - i.e. whatever gets you in a happy place. You have the 'second escape home' and can send your kids to college without too much worry.

There's probably multiple factors. My guess is high social status. Having high social status confers a high degree of safety, especially evolutionarily, and yields good reproductive success.

He also said that he'd require slaves.

there's a difference between power to attain freedom and the ability to carve out your own space, even in an oppressive environment. Nietzsche himself, as a wandering stateless man is a pretty good example of this.

As an individual with a limited amount of resources carving out autonomous spaces and avoiding whoever is bugging you, which is fundamentally a creative activity, is almost always more fruitful than trying to engage the powers that be in some sort of struggle to obtain the upper hand.

Hacker culture is a pretty good example of this. Cyberspace was never really about challenging authorities as much as it was about avoiding authority all together by moving into some other space that was up until that point unpoliced and opened up the possibility to create new things in an environment that wasn't full of hierarchies and established rules.

Sure, more power than what you have is overrated if you have enough power to control your own destiny. For those who don't have the privilege to fully control their own destinies, power is not overrated at all.

The older I get, the more that I see power is incredibly underrated. When you are young you think that the world is fair and that if you do the right thing, you will be fairly rewarded. When I got older I realized that power and the ability to obtain it is vastly more important in your ability to make the change you wish to see on the world.

Those with power and the ability to use it and gain more of it will always effect greater change than those who focus on doing the "right" thing.

Exactly. Power is like money or sex or oxygen: it's only important when you don't have enough of it.

>The older I get, the more that I see power is incredibly underrated. When you are young you think that the world is fair and that if you do the right thing, you will be fairly rewarded

Reminds me of just world theory. Related video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=geSfK9PzEDw

Ask any French kid about "Les Animaux Malades de la Peste"[1] (in English [2]). You need power to survive / for a better life, freedom is not enough. When times are good, be happy and forgetful. But when times turn bad (plague, war, financial crisis, family problems), it might be too late to struggle for power.

[1] https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/les-animaux-malades-de...

[2] https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/animals-sick-plague

The point of being a boss isn't just to have power over others (although I'm sure some do enjoy that) but to get more stuff you want done by delegating it. Of course a danger is eventually you don't get to do any of the stuff you want to do yourself because you are spending all your time supervising the people who are actually doing it.

> being a boss isn't just to have power over others (although I'm sure some do enjoy that) but to get more stuff you want done by delegating it

The latter, getting others to act on your behalf, is pretty much the definition of power.

I think the distinction is between using power for some other purpose, or using it for its own sake.

The other way of looking at it: The point of being a boss is to help your people get more done by organizing them and coordinating their efforts.

That's the point of view where the thing being done is a free variable; "whatever it is they're doing, my job is to help them be better at it". It makes sense at the low-tier management level, but someone somewhere has to have a goal, or the whole enterprise is a colossal waste of time and resources. This kind of thinking infecting top-executive level is IMO one of the problems with a lot of big companies.

I feel like parent comment deserves a closer read that you seem to have given it. They specifically mention organization and coordination (around a common goal).

Fair. I assumed they meant organization and coordination around whatever it is they do (i.e. goal as a free variable), but upon re-reading, I admit the parent might have meant "helping people achieve your goal", as opposed to "delegating stuff and then complaining that, because of all the supervising, you don't have time to do anything about your goal yourself".

>but someone somewhere has to have a goal, or the whole enterprise is a colossal waste of time and resources.

free economies overall perform very well without having anybody setting goals. In healthy environments productive activity can very well be emergent without any sort of dictat.

In fact long plans and visions at big companies are often exactly what makes them slow, they operate like old tankers that set course on some pre-planned direction and aren't flexible enough to switch course simply because they organise decisions top-down.

free economies overall perform very well without having anybody setting goals. In healthy environments productive activity can very well be emergent without any sort of dictat

My understanding is that internal corporate stuff tends to not be subject to the same market forces that are what make free economies work well.

Top-down decisionmaking is actually efficient, big companies are slow in spite of, not because of it. The slowness comes partly from bureaucracy, but partly arises because big companies have something to lose.

The rapid reaction of small companies only looks like movement on the macroscale. In reality, it's a series of births and deaths. They don't move much at all, but they die fast and get formed even faster compared to big ones. And that forming part usually involves individuals with goals.

In a healthy organization, that is the point. In corrupt organizations (in my experience the vast majority of organizations) the point is rising through the social hierarchy. Having more people underneath you is a status symbol so you collect them even if there is nothing for them to do for you.

Pretty much any time I hear discussion of power I think of Jesus’ famous exchange with Pilate in John 19

When the chief priests and the guards saw him they cried out, “Crucify him, crucify him!” Pilate said to them, “Take him yourselves and crucify him. I find no guilt in him.”

7 * The Jews answered, “We have a law, and according to that law he ought to die, because he made himself the Son of God.”

8 Now when Pilate heard this statement, he became even more afraid,

9 and went back into the praetorium and said to Jesus, “Where are you from?” Jesus did not answer him.

10 So Pilate said to him, “Do you not speak to me? Do you not know that I have power to release you and I have power to crucify you?”

11 Jesus answered [him], “You would have no power over me if it had not been given to you from above. For this reason the one who handed me over to you has the greater sin.”

I've contemplated this exchange a few times over the years, but I never feel like I really understand the point that Jesus is making.

Pontius pilate has the power to choose yes or no, but he also must choose yes or no, and this is enforced by the people with power over Pilate. His job to act as the justice system. The people who handed over Jesus forced pontius pilate to make that decision, but could have just as easily not done anything.

Think about it this way: suppose you know someone who smokes a lot of weed at home in an illegal state, and their neighbor rats them out, and police discover an ounce in the person's house. That person goes to jail for a month and gets a felony. Who has been more unethical: the person who snitched for adversarial reasons, or the people in the justice system which did their job enforcing the rules given to them?

This may be a trick of translation, but couldn't "The one who handed me over to you has the greater sin" refers to God (the Father)?

I'm no theologian, but I'm pretty sure the Judeo-Christian God is "perfect" and without sin so no. To sin is to go against God's will or nature. Only humans and I guess the devil can do that because of implied free will.

Once again, not a theologian.

Haha IANAT either, but they have at best a tenuous claim to authority in an discipline that's unfalsifiable.

I thought the idea is that everything is or at least was created by God, so that would include Sin. It's same as that "could God create a rock so heavy even He couldn't move it" paradox.

Anyway, to me the quote indicates Jesus's loyalty despite knowing the torture and death He's about to experience, as well as indicating Pontius Pilate's relative insignificance in the whole thing. As the parent says, PP is mostly a gear in the machine.

It probaby refers to Judas, who turned Jesus in for some silver.

Jesus: The real guilty person here is the person who turned me in, for assuming in the end it is you that we have to answer to, and not a higher power.

>I would define power as the ability to make other people do what you want

I don't think anyone agrees or uses the word 'power' that way, instead, power ought to be defined as:

>the ability to do something or act in a particular way, especially as a faculty or quality.

Getting this definition wrong confuses the author throughout the article:

>So freedom is a kind of power; but a certain kind freedom also comes with powerlessness

Okay, the definition the author provided literally stated power is the ability to make other people do what you want and freedom is the ability to do what you want. I fail to see how in that mode freedom is a kind of power. I think the author doesn't really believe their own definition.

The author goes on to question if great leaders (e.g. Alexander the Great) have freedom, comparing him to the homeless philosopher Diogenes. That's ultimately a personal question; if Freedom is indeed the ability to do what you like, you have to ask "could I do more of what I like as Alexander the Great or Diogenes?"

>Underlying the pathetic quest for all power is fear: the fear of death.

Underlying the pathetic quest for mediocrity is fear: the fear of failure. We can sit here speculating about the psychology of the average and the ambitious all day, but it provides nothing useful other than additional zings for $ECHO_CHAMBER to enjoy.

>The sanest people, I think, are those happily unafflicted with ambition

Cattle are pretty happy, sure. Expounding on the mental health of "the ambitious" (whatever that means to the author) seems pretty disingenuous and like an attempt to control the creative expressions of others.

It's frightening that people actually think this way.

> Doing what I want, and not being made to do things I don’t want to do

I'm beginning to think the complete opposite (at least to some degree). I'm terrible at making choices that make me happy whilst I'm pretty good at finding value in serendipity. Generally nowadays I'm trying to make meta-choices if that makes sense - committing to things that remove the number of options I face whilst having a reasonable chance of providing fruitful activity.

We, humans, are social animals. Which it also means that we organize in hierarchies. Ideally, these hierarchies are competence-based hierarchies; but the reality is that at times these hierarchies are hacked by a few to establish power-based hierarchies, which are not stable.

Be it a PTA, or a social group, or a team, or a start-up, or a HOA, or a government entity, from a small town to a huge country; competence-based hierarchies and hence power lead to prosperity and to the greater good, while the arrogance of a pure-power based hierarchies lead to continuous issues.

We've all seen those.

Couldn't boredom be a reason for people chasing power?

Blaise Pascal had interesting thoughts on it: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” ― Blaise Pascal, Pensées (https://amzn.to/2I6kTpv)

We have an inherent desire to engage with the world and other people, to reach out for new stimuli. Often the most interesting path is the one where you influence people and that is by nature a form of power.

Reminds me of the video that was recently posted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcBzOesw7sc This is truly a man without ambition. For me, that way of living seems like the definition of hell.

> Underlying the pathetic quest for all power is fear: the fear of death. Some billionaires are building posh survival compounds and funding Frankensteinian research programs to defeat genetic decline and death.

Where the hell did that come from? Is the author saying we shouldn't even try? Why, because trying to reverse ageing (and its consequences) is unnatural? Because corpses in a fridge are disgusting? Because our fictions are full of tyrants and supervillain trying to achieve immortality? Because there's some natural "balance" that would require the many to die so the few could be immortal?

I sense a cognitive dissonance here. As far as I can guess, most people living now will die in less than 120 years. Possibly everyone. If we do achieve significant life extension, there's a good chance it will only be accessible to rich people, at least for a time. And the longer we live, the wider inequalities may rise. That's unfair, so it's better if everyone dies, right?

Wait a minute, you'd solve inequalities by killing everyone?

I'm tired of those stabs at transhumanism that don't even try to justify themselves. Yes, many post humanists scenarios are a hell even Lovecraft couldn't comprehend. See Robin Hanson's speculations on mind uploading to get a taste. But assuming that all such scenarios are bad is a failure of the imagination, I think.

---

To the author's credit, the paragraph ends with a Woody Allen quote about "living on in [his] apartment" that is spot on. Almost contradicts what I've quoted, so I'm not sure what the author actually thinks.

A rare gem of an opinion to find on HN. There are a sea of unjustified and incomplete stabs at transhumanism and anything in that realm.

This article, and it's sentiment, reminds me a lot of the very current "zero waste" movement.

Bear with me ...

When you are sufficiently detached from every mode of production and delivery and generation (like growing food, or building houses or working in the back of a kitchen) then it's very easy to look around your (modern, remodeled, beautifully appointed, first world) kitchen and ... stop buying plastic baggies or only use reusable containers, etc.[1]

But in reality, several levels below your level of life and consumption, an enormous amount of waste is being produced just to maintain the very modern life you lead. It's really not that interesting or impactful that you cut out most of the 1% that you actually touch inside the walls of your house.

This article sounds like the same kind of self-delusion ...

After violently conquering a continent, enslaving or killing or (otherwise subjugating) the indigenous population, and maintaining a political and economic lock on more than half the world (through direct and indirect warfare, economic colonization, and otherwise), the author, who holds an equal share with all of us on whose behalf this was done, opines (possibly from that same kind of kitchen) that he can't think of any use for power over others.

In reality, an enormous amount of power and violence has been, and continues to be, wielded on the author's behalf. It's really not that interesting or impactful that he doesn't want to "boss other people around".

[1] All very positive actions and not to be impeached.

Agreed.

Privilege provides the opportunity to opine disdain for that which elevated you in the first place.

This was an incredibly well written anology. Every time I'be tried to explain this concept I struggled to share the 'many levels under you' kind of idea that we (developers) get when we talk about abstractions.

I don't see a problem with it. Even if you can't contribute much it's still better than not contributing anything.

I remember my friend arguing with my other friend that he is not responsible for what the US does as far as intervening in other countries' affairs. My friend clapped back and said are you not reaping the rewards of cheap oil and low-cost labor?

I think any chain of moral responsibility breaks down when you go to a scale like this. Is homeless person who still eats because of someone else's brutal exploitation elsewhere "reaping rewards".

Whether one is guilty or not for mass scale evil in the world becomes extraordinarily hard to calculate - and moreover, pointless to calculate and serves only as empty accusation fodder on social media.

Basically, everyone, regardless of guilty, ought to be working to make the world a better place, probably a different place. How to do that is another post - or "an exercise left to the reader".

I don’t think reaping rewards equals guilt. It just means that regardless of you wanting the rewards, you will get them. I’m not trying to say that people who have problems can’t complain since someone will always have it worse.

>chain of moral responsibility

This sounds like an issue with the limitations of the philosophical framework of cause and effect, which breaks down in complex systems. Also your comment on applying a process oriented solution, which is also the key difference between responsibility and blame that the op referred to. Responsibility is process, or action, oriented. Blame tries to invert that process.

There was an interesting discussion posted on HN the other day where rodney broke was suggesting the programming paradigm of cause and effect, of discrete input and output, was limiting.

Can't help but to see a link between these ideas, however disparate they might be.

No search results found for "Rodney Broke," can you link that discussing please?

Sorry, auto correct. Rodney Brooks.

https://www.edge.org/conversation/rodney_a_brooks-the-cul-de...

There's something that always tugs at the back of my mind about these arguments, and I think I've worked it out. It's the difference between responsibility and blame.

Say your parents went deeply into debt in an excessive and unnecessary way to raise you, but they genuinely thought they were doing the right thing, and you've found yourself needing to pay their debt off. You may or may not be responsible for the debt, but you're definitely not to blame for it. It's an imposed and somewhat unfair duty rather than the consequence of your own actions.

To me it intuitively feels like some responsibility is demanded by profiting from an outcome, while blame is only transferred by intent. A lot of arguments don't make it clear that there's a difference between the two. Your friend might be responsible for making US foreign policy less belligerent, but he's not to blame for it: his responsibility is a moral weight that's been unfairly foist upon him by other people, and it doesn't mean that he, personally, caused every death in the middle east since he was born.

I have always believed that in a democracy every citizen bears some responsibility for what the state does.

If you didn't vote then you basically supported the winner. Inaction is a kind of action when someone must win and a decision must be made.

And if you did vote and your "side" didn't win, then did you try to convince anyone? Not getting involved is a decision of some kind.

The way I see it, if you fail in that basic of responsibility (voting and trying to convince people to support your view) then you share some blame for whatever the state does. If you support what the state does or the outcome then you definitely own a share in the blame.

Percentage of blame. When young, you should be blamed less than when old, assuming you don't help fix the system you are part of (eg. feed the needy, give home to the homeless, plant trees, etc.. fix)

I find the concepts of responsibility and blame to be leaky beyond use in a lot of situations. Can you help the situation? Great, it would be wise to do so. If not, try and get yourself into a position where you can, if possible, otherwise don't worry about it. I often bring this up in the context of climate change. Are humans to blame/are they responsible? Maybe, maybe not, but if it's happening, and we can fix it, we should do the cost-benefit analysis anyways and take action if it's worth it.

Just because you benefit from something doesn't imply you are responsible for it. I benefit from some evolutionary advantages, but I am not responsible for entropy. There's a lot of noise in the world, and several layers of indirection is more than enough to mitigate some responsibility.

Yes it boils down to this. We are reaping the “ends” so we must be somewhat responsible for the “means” that got us there. That doesn’t mean each person is completely responsible, but we can’t pass the buck either.

I hope we understand that abdicating responsibility is not necessarily 'passing the buck', but potentially advocating for institutional change in a way that is congruent with your actual responsibilities in conducting the behavior of society.

That's troce true, thoughtful, and taught me 3 new words as a by-product.

Truly curious: Which ones?

Yeah, the author conflates power with ambition which is easy to do while in a peaceful, prosperous society where making just enough to live on doesn't necessarily come with serious downsides. It would be better titled "Ambition is Overrated". I think he's right that ambition is for the most part born from a desire for others' approval/admiration and fear of death. And that attitude/realization can be had in most any circumstance.

Regarding the kitchen comments, are those measures very positive and not to be impeached, or are they not that impactful? Or what do you mean by saying both? Also, your first line should read "and its sentiment".

"Regarding the kitchen comments, are those measures very positive and not to be impeached"

I don't want people to read this and think I am somehow against reducing waste or being overly critical of people striving to do so.

Reducing a single plastic bag or saving .01 kw/hours of electricity are, as I say, very positive and not to be impeached. I am not critisizing reducing waste - I am critisizing a failure to notice that the category of waste that one is reducing is a tiny, tiny fraction of the total that one is responsible for.

Whenever I watch shows like House of Cards or Narcos, the thought that I keep having is, "why? why do you want this so badly? what's the point?"

My theory is that seeking power is very evolutionarily satisfying, and it has no ceiling. This means that, even for people smart enough to see its diminishing returns as a means to actual happiness, it can provide an everlasting narrative for one's life, which can create a kind of happiness. It can fill an existential void for certain people who a) choose to ignore the question of what it's all for, and b) are sociopathic enough to not care what effect it has on others. You always have something to work towards. Satisfying existential quandaries is a highly desirable goal in itself.

Whatever powerful attribute you are aiming for (money, looks, fame, pure power), it's much easier to get more of the same than to extend to other attributes.

The CEO of Alibaba tried to make a movie, but it was crap, he didn't become a famous movie star.

Kim dot com tried DJing, he failed, he's just a rich guy as well.

Famous people can easily fail in their business as well: Jamie Oliver just closed a lot of restaurants, even though he had loads of play money and his name on them.

Of course there are exceptions, for example investing is easy if you are famous enough to personal get help from great investors.

Getting out of the drug business is difficult for the guys at the upper levels.

When being in the drug business you need to quiet to avoid burning yourself. Your partners need to keep quiet to avoid burning themselves.

But if you go legit then you can "talk" by leaking info and then your partners will get burned. They don't want that, so they will make sure you can't get out, e.g. by threatning your family.

Even if you end up with all the money you need for the rest of your life, what are you going to spend your time with? Eternal holiday isn't nice after a couple of months.

The drug job keeps people busy and gives them a purpose. That's so much more important than the money and power. Even bright dogs like Border Collies go crazy when they don't have a job.

Just because you don't understand the desire for power doesn't make it "pathetic" or a "fear response" as the author puts it. This sounds more like post-rationalization than actual introspection.

Success in large scale projects always goes to the better organized. Without a unifying, guiding plan, confusion reigns, and projects fail. And that plan needs to come from someone not only with vision, but also the ability to enlist the labor of his fellow man. In other words: power.

"Underlying the pathetic quest for all power is fear: the fear of death." - This is a very narrow point of view, and completely discounts the useful and good ways in which power is used.

"funding Frankensteinian research programs to defeat genetic decline and death." - Notice the use of loaded words to dismiss attempts at dealing with the oldest affliction known to man: aging. Even if it doesn't lead to immortality, imagine living to 80 in the body of a 20 year old! Imagine the improvement in the quality of life for everyone! We're learning how the cellular degradation process works, and how to fix it. Why would you want to disparage that? Because you want someone to blame for your ennui, and the "billionaire tycoons" and by extension anything they like makes for an easy target.

"The sanest people, I think, are those happily unafflicted with ambition — whether for power, wealth, fame or achievement — who want only to work at some useful job, to love someone and to live in a nice place with some wind chimes on the porch."

This is beginning to sound like the Communist Manifesto.

There is a difference between success and happiness.

Living longer if your happiness depends on living longer is not an improvement. We can live longer and healthier than ever before with minimal effort. Why is nobody happily enjoying that instead of desperately searching for ways to stretch out a few more years? It's because there's something fundamental they haven't found yet and they are afraid of running out of time before they do.

Nearly everything is about ego and fear of death.

Hold up. You started out making good points.

>"The sanest people, I think, are those happily unafflicted with ambition — whether for power, wealth, fame or achievement — who want only to work at some useful job, to love someone and to live in a nice place with some wind chimes on the porch."

>This is beginning to sound like the Communist Manifesto.

Then completely jumped the rails here. There are some hints of a tendency toward Marx or Leninism, but no overt push in the direction of nationalization of the means of production. Rather these statements are consistent with being the echo of a general American sentiment if you go back as little as 100-150 years ago; particularly in more agrarian areas.

The trend toward the accumulation of power/money, and being the center of the power structure; the rat race as it were, only started to become a prevailing ethos during the late 1800's, early 1900's with the first Gilded Age on the rise, and all the atrocities that came with advancement in the rat race becoming the primary multi-generational goal.

If there is a touch of Marx to be found, it's that he was the first to call out the inevitable excesses and vices of unfettered capitalism for it's own sake.

To me these statement you call out ring as an echo of the Jeffersonian Democrat. The Yeoman Farmer, cultivating the earth to grow enough for himself, and an excess with which to bolster his community. It speaks to me of industry of a different flavor. Where monolithic industries too big to fail are not allowed to exist, where information flows freely between competitors, and a corporation builds itself to the point it can do it's job without the push to diversify and building itself and it's executives into the industrialized lords of a horizontally and vertically integrated fiefdom, as widespread as legal circumstances allow.

I see the disappointed spectre of Locke, staring in horror at what has become a Hobbesian nightmare of a country. Where the Human clause is subordinated by being classed as a "resource" by the prevailing elite.

I see the desperation of the trodden upon, desperately leaning on each other to get by, swapping social capital and favors instead of wages, hoping for some change from above; a prospect stunted by the necessity to placate the gatekeepers of capital to be able to spread one's personality enough to participate in the legislative process. They look to an Executive branch, increasingly delegated to, and manipulated by the industrial monoliths that it is their sworn duty to regulate and minimize harm from; which is increasingly hamstrung in it's capacity to operate. The Justice System, the final bastion is tilted almost by design in favor of those with the capital to engage with the privileged class of the legally savvy; an increasingly difficult expertise to attain for the common man.

There is so much more in that paragraph than some Red Menace bogeyman. There is a cry for help. A shout of warning that the rolling stone of progress is starting to get a bit out of control. A keen of a society so put upon by those sitting atop the wealth of the country pushing for more, more; from a people that are faced with a choice between seemingly "feeding the machine", or leaving it to collapse under it's own weight

I haven't been very enamored of some of the views printed in the Times recently, but this one certainly resonates...

It resonates with a hell of a lot more to it than "The commies are at it again."

Could you cite the portion of the Communist Manifesto this reminds you of?

I thought this was a well written comment until you used a political boogeyman to attempt to lend credence to your opinion. You can disparage the idea of simple and unambitious lifestyles more adroitly by focusing on the philosophies at hand rather than attributing them to a comic book interpretation of a political theory.

> The sanest people, I think, are those happily unafflicted with ambition — whether for power, wealth, fame or achievement — who want only to work at some useful job, to love someone and to live in a nice place with some wind chimes on the porch.

The passage above reminded me of this:

I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbour -- such is my idea of happiness. And then, on the top of all that, you for a mate, and children perhaps -- what more can the heart of man desire?¹

1: Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness (1859)

>A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them

“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” [2]

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilla_Watson

Actually I think power is underrated and poorly understood, you have to understand how power functions to understand a lot of society. A lot of how it operates is shrouded in secrecy and deception.

How much life advice do people want to take from NYTimes journalists? Seriously, I'm sure if you met one at a party you wouldn't be prioritizing their advice over anyone else's

If you met one at a party you'd be slamming your drink so you have an excuse to exit the conversation.

I might find them interesting and engaging enough to talk to at a party. I won't speak for you.

As much as parts of the article resonate with me, what isn't addressed is that freedom from external forces doesn't necessarily include freedom from one's own impulses -- which can be as, if not more, restrictive.

True freedom not only remove external restrictions but also requires purpose beyond ones self.

The form of freedom he describes is just another form of what he's calling power, and he even admits to that in the article, when he writes: Freedom is the defensive, or pre-emptive, form of power.

I have recently come to the realization that a lot of people seek or defend "freedom" as another form of power, and that is a very egotistical definition of freedom that has a lot of the same anxiety-inducing side-effects as the most vain power-seeking behaviors. Being free doesn't mean that you can't also yield to others and get over your selfishness. We should all have times, maybe lots of them, in which we yield to others and admit that many instances of our own personal notions of "freedom" are basically a whiny temper-tantrum when we fear not getting what we want.

Why should one get over one's selfishness?

Selfishness will cause you anxiety and guilt. It will cause pain to others. It will make you a jerk.

A society of jerks inflicting pain thrives less than one where we are appropriately empathetic and charitable to others.

If you're going to argue against selfless empathy, etc. I suggest we have different axioms and this is not a discussion that will go well.

Years ago, on another discussion forum, someone was asking why he shouldn’t act like other assholes he knew, who seemed to be doing fine.

The top response to his question was:

“Because then you’ll be an asshole.”

Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

Carl Gustav Jung

He says that, but he married the richest girl in Switzerland. So, yeah, I guess watch what people do and not what they say?

Before or after the quote?

That's irrelevant; Jung is making no claim about himself there.

It's also a cheap shot, unless you have some special ability to read the inner state of another person.

He did both. Married the richest woman in Switzerland and made love with the other women. Classic.

Before perhaps 19th century, marriages had little to do with love but everything to do with social status and wealth.

I'm of the philosophy that love is a power.

An important topic that warrants a lot more discussion, but the article is a bit shallow.

Ambition is connected to power but not identical. Power is often about power over people, but not always. Some people want to be free and some don't (at least in some contexts).

Freedom is closely tied to understanding, but the world is so complex now, how can we understand? We are all like an 8-year-old king surrounded by a bunch of people who also don't really understand the world.

Freedom is also a source of identity in the US. Could it be used to bring people back together here?

"You know, 'cause like, people say money's not everything, But money, you need money to do what you wanna do, like money is power, honesty is power, truth is power, but at the same time they tell you like Ain't nothin' more important than the mula You ain't really eatin' boy, you gotta get your food up" - Donald Glover

Maybe the "Rat Race" is inevitable and is main cause for strive of power, but maybe we too narrowly define power in this discussion.

Is this writer, much like myself, a representation of what Dr Calhoun's experiment revealed as "the beautiful ones"?

"During his studies, Calhoun coined the term "behavioral sink" to describe aberrant behaviors in overcrowded population density situations and "beautiful ones" to describe passive individuals who withdrew from all social interaction." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun]

I too have little if no desire to lord over anyone. Is this passivity? Withdrawal? But what I lack in that ambition for power I magnify in my desire for autonomy. Yeah, I have my usual moments of feeble aggression which can be mistaken for a deeper and more permanent desire for power (eg. stuck on the road, impatient in a queue, wanting a prospective sale to go through etc) where I fantasize power to influence outcomes - but the moments pass just as quickly when I realise the absurdity of that sort of wish.

Autonomy OTOH is sacred for me. Absurdly, I will fight till starvation than be co-opted into someone else's creative ideals (especially when I do not agree). I'd rather go hungry than submit to power dynamics in this regard.

Loved the article.

The ability to withdraw is an expression of power in and of itself. Autonomy is the power that many (most?) are looking for. It’s just that many are incapable (or believe they are incapable) of achieving autonomy without getting others to do work for them.

Programmers try to find the best of both worlds: they try to get machines to do work for them, so that they don’t need to impose on people to do so.

There are sentiments in this article that I think will mislead people into doing nothing with their lives. For example,

> "Ambition for the more obvious and boring forms of power — political, financial — may not always be inherently evil, but it does tend to have unfortunate side effects in the form of poverty, slave labor, pogroms and unwelcome territorial advances."

This is how ambition works in a zero-sum world. It doesn't mention technology improving the lives of people. There's a related essay by Paul Graham, "How to Make Wealth" [1]. The "Wealth and Power" section is relevant.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

"With great power comes great responsibility." I heard that in Spiderman. It still resonates with me. I think it applies to any level of power. Whenever we are responsible for something, we have some power over it.

I'm responsible for my children. I have some power over them, whether I want it or not. Responsibility is skin in the game. If we aren't responsible, we will eventually be disposed of power.

When some want power, but not the responsibility, that's a red flag.

Everyone wants power but not responsibility, nobody wants to accept that their actions have consequences, they just accept them, sometimes.

Yes. I think it's important to understand the M.O. of the people who quest after power, and what types of systematic errors come along with that.

For most of history, and I suspect for a lot of future too, you could only be free if you had the power to make others not fuck with you. Even with the best intentions, if you are not powerful you will be crushed anywhere but in the fraction of developed, civilized countries which may go poof at any time.

Does anyone have a list of smart career options and career advice for people that fall in to this camp (or resources that help navigate)? It's really really hard to chart courses that don't seem to eventually bump up against the accumulate power or falter hurdle.

Humility

the author of this article fundamentally misunderstands what power is. Power is not just the ability to get other people to do what you want. Anything that allows you to achieve a desire is "power". To say "I don't want power" is like saying "I don't want to ever fulfill my goals."

Power isn’t zero sum. Through complexity, power can be manifest along new dimensions.

Power is important. The author himself writes about how he has spent X years trying to get more power/money when he can now just move to the countryside and enjoy life. And write when he wants. This is power.

Which to me, is not something an Intern would right, as you have student loans to pay, perhaps dreams to build. When you are successful and write for NY Times, or code for Google for a few years, it is easy to write "Ah, fuck this shit! I can now move to the country side and do whatever I want, but I don't do this. Will this be my last year here?", because even though you don't notice, you are very powerful. You have financial independence to do this, because you have fought very hard to go big on your career. So essentially, you have power, even if you don't write for NY Times, or if you aren't POTUS anymore. You made some big bucks or respect, that enables you do to things most people can't even dream of.

Then it looks "Overrated". What I think is Overrated is being poor and left behind. Financial independence is one of the most powerful things one can have. Sure, most of the people after they have it, they still work and run after more power and money. But having a little bit of power and money is one of the most important things in life, without that, you have no leverage in society to be free.

If after this you will chose to seek more power, that's your choice. Coming back to my initial example, if you were the intern that can barely eat lunch with your colleges and your mom is sick and need money... shoveling shit to become more power seems like a good thing.

Also when you are at that level what is asked of you and your time is much less when you are at a lower level, so the motivation to quit is less than it would be if you were not in that position.

I would differentiate between power and freedom, as the author does.

Power would be the capacity to affect other people's actions, often arising from having a position of authority over them, but can also occur in the form of influence over them (soft power).

Freedom would refer to having the means to choose our own actions with fewer or weaker external constraints.

The author has achieved some degree of financial freedom, but not much power from what I can see, beyond the limited power that his modest net worth can buy.

I'd argue those are the same things, just different amounts of it.

Maybe to avoid the ambiguity we could use the terms "political power" and "personal power."

The article uses the terms power and freedom, and explicitly defines them.

> I would define power as the ability to make other people do what you want; freedom is the ability to do what you want.

I don't think it's cool to take a common and ambiguous term like "power" and claim that it will now only refer to a single, narrow meaning. It's not constructive. Better to qualify the term in a way that everyone in the discussion knows what you are talking about.

Since we're discussing a linked article, it is perfectly reasonable for people to use the terms that have been defined early in the linked article.

The original author clearly has a point to make and providing an explicit definition of the relevant terms helps communicate them. If you want to discuss something else about "power", the comment section of this article is probably the wrong place to do so.

And strength is the currency which you can cash out as power or freedom. What you choose is up to you, but you need to be strong to get what you want.

Freedom requires power over others. You can't avoid work unless others are providing you food. You can't get shelter unless you can keep others from taking it from you.

The real confusion is living in a society where most power is hidden and records are given meaning.

Freedom requires power over yourself, and a lot of people cede that power. Including Mr $100M up there.

Mind expanding on this? I'm curious as to what you are alluding to.

This guy has a company doing $100M and I bet you his kids wish he was at home more. He talks a good talk about cashing out but he has already done enough. What is he waiting for? Theory: he doesn't know how to stop. Being a captain of industry is tied into his identity and he can't give it up. It has power over him.

One definition of addiction is when you engage in a behavior despite its deleterious effects on other aspects of your life. A lot of things we do to "feel control" are closer to that end of the spectrum than they are to healthy behavior.

People live beyond their means and their boss can make them violate their ethics simply by threatening to fire them. In many, many cases this is a bluff, and someone who's financially stable can tell their boss no, or take a risk on a new job.

Agreed completely. Most people would sure as hell feel that lack of power if someone they loved was in danger/got sick and they couldn't help them.

The reason the author's viewpoint is compelling is because it is somewhat unique. Your viewpoint is the standard one. Most people share it and that's why most people do exactly what most people do: work their tails off to try and accumulate power and money, often without thinking about why they're doing so and what they are truly working towards.

A few weeks ago I saw a startup founder speak and one of the things he talked about was work/life balance, which for him had been skewed towards work, extraordinarily so, for many years. "I've now realized," he said, "that I need to rebalance things, because the reason I'm working so hard is to be able to enjoy life and spend time with my family."

I laughed to myself, because this is someone who has built a company with $100MM in annual revenues. He could sell today and fulfill his stated ambition immediately. The reality, I suspect, is either that he's still in love with building something (a positive motivation that resonates with me) or is still trying to accumulate even more power and money (a less positive motivation that also, quite honestly, resonates with me too).

Someone like that is someone I understand. Based on your comment, you're also someone I understand. But I have met, and believe I also understand, people who are not wired like us. They truly have no power but do have a great deal of freedom. Either choice is valid, but if you look at someone who is free and insist that they are just as power-hungry as you are, that's sad - because if you can't see the choice they made, then it probably means you haven't made a choice either. And you should! Not making a conscious choice about your priorities is a great way to create a mid-life crisis. ;)

> then it probably means you haven't made a choice either.

So true. I remember a colleague once saying "Not to choose, that is also a choice."

Was that colleague Neil Peart?

I think you capture the essence fairly well.

Choice is a weird thing, it can be oddly paralyzing. My favorite example is that when I was just starting out, a good computer was very expensive (like $3,000 for a desktop, or probably closer to $7000 in today's dollars), and so when I bought one, I had researched all of the options that might fit in my budget and pruned the list down to the one or two "best" components given what I could spend on them. Flash forward 10 years and between salary growth and the cost of computers plummeting, I found I could walk into Fry's and literally put together any computer I wanted. Even the "monster" configurations that PC Gamer used to have I could buy. It was really hard for me to figure out what to buy then.

"Success" is one of those things that in my experience is always in the future, because to have achieved it for me would mean I was "done" and I'm certainly not done. As a result, as I've gone through life I've become more deliberative about how I spend my remaining time, and trying to remind myself that it is the only resource that must be spent every day, you don't get it back.

I'm not sure this is really disagreeing? It's just quibbling over what "power" means. When we say someone has or seeks power, financial independence is not what we're talking about.

There are a lot of retired folks, and this doesn't feel like power, in the sense that most people don't know or care about your opinion. (Unlike the author, who has his opinion in the New York Times.) When you buy stuff, it just feels like an ordinary transaction.

There is technically a form of power in that, but it's different.

Upper class people without the more pernicious forms of classism tend to refer to themselves as “comfortable” rather than upper class. We’ve discussed this “comfortable” phenomenon before and I think the classism is the main differentiator. If this line of Us and Them isn’t important to you then of course you wouldn’t necessarily notice when you’ve crossed it.

I agree that the author's perspective is very privileged. The terms powerless and trapped are nearly synonyms. Yet he overvalues freedom and says power is overrated.

I think a more interesting statement might be that wielding power is overrated. It seems like you could have financial and personal freedom without holding power over another individual. This is something I've tried hard to do (and I think been successful at.) Perhaps it's an illusion.

But I think what the author and others are noting is that most people who gain power then feel compelled to use it. Once you start to wield power, it seems necessary to compound it. Because power is a hierarchy with a nearly limitless ceiling. There's always a bigger fish.

I've never felt comfortable wielding power. It comes from many things: I'm skeptical of central planning. I think most evil comes from misplaced certainty. I'm over privileged and I recognize the inescapibility of unconscious bias. It goes so deep that I prefer declarative programming to imperative. I'm not even comfortable dominating my computer.

Maybe it is just a privileged form of guilt only accessible to those who have attained sufficient power for their own comfort. But my choice to abdicate conventional power and refrain from participation in some conventional power structures (corporations, etc.) has confused a lot of friends and family. Regardless of being privileged, it doesn't seem common to actively choose to avoid wielding power.

This reasoning confuses me. Your abdication of power cedes it to whoever's next in line. Maybe you are unsure of your ability to appropriately wield power, but that is only a good reason if you think you'd be worse than the next person in line. My attitude is that power-seekers are likely to be bad power-wielders, so you'd have to be a pretty bad power-wielder to make things better by abdication.

Maybe this is a matter of principles for you?

Great point. I'm not advocating for an anarchist utopia. I think Ursula Leguin's The Dispossessed lays out the problems with that pretty well.

We've probably all participated in organizations with ineffective leadership. I do think it's better to be a clear, decisive and consistent leader than a "cool" boss if you're participating in a power structure.

So it's not even a moral issue. It's just a personal one. I think it's rare for us to really ask if we enjoy holding power over others and whether those people benefit from it. Are there fruits of power (wealth, status) worth it? When does that change?

There is an imbalance of power across all demographics. If I step aside maybe the person who gets is traditionally more powerless. The question of whether I wield it better than them is hard to judge. There's a lot of nuance to when a good leader becomes a bad one. I think it's very difficult to judge our own working of power objectively. And of course power corrupts.

If there is a moral issue, it's just that I think a lot of our systemic power structures are archaic and ineffective at directing human potential. There will always be people craving and consolidating hierarchical power structures. I'd rather engage in organic, decentralized, emergent ones when I do participate.

> he can now just move to the countryside and enjoy life. And write when he wants. This is power.

Allow me to exagerate a bit. This is mostly knowledge. Minus the bit of land that you'd need to pay, making a house, growing veggies etc etc is just knowledge. It's just not modern western world education.

> Minus the bit of land that you'd need to pay, making a house

Lol guyz fuck this shit I'm gonna go to the countryside. It's so ez. Brb shitting $100k+ on some land + building a house that's up to code. Brb paying $10k+/yr in property taxes.

A guy on youtube bought a bit of forest for 20000 euros. It had two ruins and a tiny river inside. Enough to live happily with a few solar panels.

"Like gravity and acceleration, these are two forces that appear to be different but are in fact one. " AGGHHH! Had to stop reading.

It continued to be a pretty tedious article.

Lost me at “Like gravity and acceleration, these are two forces that appear to be different but are in fact one”

That's a reference to general relativity.

Yeah but freedom isn't power. You can lose yourself in possibilities

Power is very addictive to certain personalities. Give me money, any day.

Please don't send url where you have to login.

> but if a president accidentally lets slip an authentic, uncensored thought it's called a "gaffe" and costs him approval points.

That was true before Trump.

Here's a quote by Frank Underwood / House of Cards:

Money is the McMansion in Sarasota that starts falling apart after 10 years. Power is the old stone building that stands for centuries. I cannot respect someone who doesn’t see the difference

Amusingly, I find it's the other way round. Power dies with with the people who have it. Money can last for many generations, especially when put to good use.

Pondered on the same thing actually

Royal families make a good counter-point. As do political dynasties, e.g. the Kennedy and Bush families.

The Kennedy and Bush clans wield some power, true.

But nothing compared to those who control the media. (Look at the generations of families that run Hollywood.) They control the narrative, which controls the masses, which choose to empower the Bush/Kennedy/Clinton alternatives.

Bushes : Bay of Pigs, prime suspects in Kennedy's assassination (means and motive), transforming Irak from the most prosperous third-world country into a hellhole, turning a blind eye to what was brewing just before 9/11 because their best pals Ben Ladens were involved... are you sure about your statement ?

The Goldman–Sachs family have also done quite well for themselves for centuries in both wealth and power.

Do outliers matter in this context?

Assuming a non corrupted and effective judiciary/police force, money is a proxy for power.

You mean "assuming a corrupted"?

In nature, might makes right. Most societies around the world, as they advance, replace this with a less violent way to trade resources and services. If you define power as the capacity to do something (or obtain something), then money has been the solution that most societies have figured.

I specify non corrupted to exclude situations such as mafias and gangs using force instead of money to make things happen.

so, it's interesting. you can see it both ways. Money distills a certain kind of power; one of the sorts of power individuals can have within a lawful system; but... there are other kinds of power that money simply doesn't convey, at least not in a system with functional rule of law.

in societies with rule of law, money provides power in a way that is... limited. No amount of money (assuming rule of law, reasonable laws, uncorrupted law enforcement, etc..) lets you have a person killed, or even roughed up without lawful reason.

In that sense, even very small time gangsters, people who make way less money than a silicon valley engineer, have more power than a law-abiding billionaire, just 'cause they can credibly threaten to have you killed.

I mean sure, the rule of law should prevent the murder in both cases, but on a practical level, it's really a lot harder to prevent crimes in the first place than to punish them after they occur; The low-level gangster's seeming willingness to do things that could potentially cause them to spend a lot of time in jail is a kind of power in and of itself, one that is unrelated (some would say negatively correlated) with wealth.

Another interesting side to this is that you could also argue that outside of functional rule of law, money is... worth a lot less, just 'cause you have to put in a lot more effort to protect that money, if the government won't do it. Without the rule of law, if you have money but don't have the sort of power that flows from the barrel of a gun, someone will simply take the money from you using that sort of power. Sure, you can hire bodyguards, but absent rule of law, what's to stop them from just stealing your money? you need some of that other kind of power to convince your bodyguards to work for a wage rather than just stealing your money.

The whole point of the rule of law is to extend power as far as practicable, and one key way of doing this is removing the temptation for extortion. The "power to have someone killed" is inherently incompatible with the "power not to end up being killed". Generally, we care a whole lot more about the latter than the former! Even gangsters only exert that kind of power because they are operating in a venue without a stable rule of law, where gangs flourish, and this is a rational way to protect themselves.

Except it's not just money, but money put into some long-lasting, "good use" enterprise (like that stone building). Which tends to give power, even if only a passive one.

Stories of executed/imprisoned billionaires/oligarchs in China and Russia would reinforce it. Perhaps it depends on type of society and even subtype within (e.g. democrats vs republicans).

Money and power can both be squandered and wasted with little effort.

To the extent that democracy has reduced the longevity of power (compared to e.g. monarchy or theocracy) it acts much like inflation does for money—if you don’t want your asset to devalue in real terms, you need to invest it.

(Or you can hack the system and find vulnerabilities. Right now it seems like a few politicians have worked out the power equivalent of the get rich quick scam...)

>To the extent that democracy has reduced the longevity of power (compared to e.g. monarchy or theocracy)

It just gives it a new public facade every 4-5 years. Those in power remain the same...

> Those in power remain the same

This is demonstrably false, at least in American politics. The inter-generational transmission of wealth and power had a half life of, at my last reading, about 1.5 generations.

In Sweden, for instance, about 70% of information gets lost in each generation [1]. After a couple generations, the effect tends to disappear.

Expecting power dynamics to shift every 5 years is silly. People build life-long relationships. And someone good at leading when 35 is probably still good at 45.

[1] https://voxeu.org/article/drivers-wealth-persistence-across-...

It's also the reason why there is much power in money (in Western societies) - the other venues of power (such as hereditary privilege or religion or mercenaries) have been closed.

This sounded very interesting, so I looked it up. It seems that Sweden during that time seems to have had a 30-70% inheritance tax, depending on the year. That accounts for a loss of 70% of wealth pretty neatly.

https://iea.org.uk/blog/how-high-tax-sweden-abolished-its-di...

Please correct me if I missed something in my haste

The study’s data span multiple inheritance-tax regimes. The results are robust beyond the (since expired) tax.

Interesting to see those stats, but you also see the same family names in politics over and over again (Bush, Clinton, Kennedy...). I could grant that information loss for the population as a whole, and still also recognize that dynasties exist at extremes (Rothschild?).

All the "regular people" could be in a flux of wealth gain and loss, and the true upper crust could also be very good at holding on to power. Your link doesn't demonstrate the falsity of this hypothesis.

The Bush and Kennedy families are currently four-generation political dynasties, while Clinton is a single generation. That'd be a very low upper limit compared to most of history if it does turn out to be an upper limit, but of course there's no way for us to know now if the current generation will also be the final one.

You need to add the influence those families play in local (e.g. state and city) politics, how they intermarry and extend their reach, how extended family (e.g. different-surname cousins) hold political roles and help each other out into power, and so on.

Even going strictly for families:

(...) "my research has thus far identified 167 families with members elected to public office for at least three consecutive generations. Twenty-two families have had at least four consecutive generations elected to public office, while four families – Bachhuber/Doyle, Cocke, Lee and Washburn – have had at least five generations."

http://theconversation.com/family-ties-why-political-dynasti...

Thanks for this and the other links. Does make me wonder whether nepotism or brand recognition plays the bigger role. The more things are accounted for by the latter, the more I want to chalk this up to democracies getting the leaders they deserve, no more.

>This is demonstrably false, at least in American politics. The inter-generational transmission of wealth and power had a half life of, at my last reading, about 1.5 generations.

If you mean the public faces of politics (or the "who is who" in CEOs and such), sure. But you don't mean that ultra rich upper class families lose their power in 1.5 generations?

http://theconversation.com/family-ties-why-political-dynasti...

https://us.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/4137...

https://www.businessinsider.com/americas-most-influential-po...

Or internationally:

https://qz.com/694340/the-richest-families-in-florence-in-14...

I like the 'Golden Wall' analogy from 'The Discovery of Heaven' by Harry Mulisch.

Actually being in control is much harder and more expensive than just convincing people that you are in control. And for many situations, it is almost as good. This is where the 'Golden Wall' comes in. The 'Golden Wall' is the illusion of competency. It is the idea that the people on the inside of the wall are more able and better informed than the people on the outside of it. From this, it follows that the first rule of power is not about actually having any more of a handle on a situation than anyone else, but in convincing people that you do.

Money is simply liquid power.

Non-money power, as you note, can be limited because it's illiquid.

Assuming every man has a price. Most do but I wager there are a select few that don’t.

Not everyone has a price, but everyone has a breaking point. If you can't buy someone you buy someone else to cause them pain.

Money isn't power, power is power. Money can hire power, if power wants to be hired. And power can take money, if power wants to take it.

For example you can say I won't sell my land for any amount of money, and then money can do nothing. But then the government can use eminent domain to take it and you learn a little bit about power.

It's observably true that in the USA those with political power choose to sell out to those with money, but this is just an accident. In many cultures those with power choose to loot those with money and the latter can do nothing about it, because that's what power means.

> Money can hire power, if power wants to be hired.

All this means is that individuals have different currency conversions from money into power and vice versa. But in the aggregate, money is liquid power. If you've got the money, odds are good you can find someone with sufficient power that's willing to exchange.

> For example you can say I won't sell my land for any amount of money, and then money can do nothing.

Money can:

* Hire a thug to threaten to break your legs if you don't sell.

* Buy up the neighboring land, pollute the soil, drain the water, obscure the visibility, etc.

* Buy something that you would give up the land for. Private doctor for your son's rare disease. You get the idea.

Another way to look at it is that anyone who can honestly say "I won't sell my land for any amount of money" by implication already has enough money for all of the high priority things money can acquire. Being able say that itself already implies luxury.

So all you're really saying is that money won't buy someone who already has more money than you, which is pretty obvious.

> But then the government can use eminent domain to take it and you learn a little bit about power.

Except that you've taken some of your money and funded campaigns for all of the city council members so they're in your pocket and don't vote to do that. And you've bought advertising in the area to persuade citizens that they shouldn't take it.

Democracy exists fundamentally to push against the long human history of might (-> power -> money) making right. The idea of each human getting one vote is essentially an attempt to reset or flatten out the power currency economy. It's great.

But at least recently in the US, you can watch power and money reverting that back to the old way. Billions of dollars flows into campaigns every election. That money is buying something.

And Frank Underwood lived happily ever after.

The key quote:

> Ambition has led me to spend 20 years of my life in a clamorous, filthy city I cannot afford, and to devote far too much attention to the soul-shriveling business of self-promotion.

You lost me at not not enjoying Settlers of Catan :p

That was my reaction as well. How can one's judgment even be worth considering after such a confession?

Reminds me of this exchange in Game of Thrones: https://images.app.goo.gl/AfvQNHv95YhR6L4o7

...and yet nothing happened to him there...

>The wish to have power over others is altogether alien to me;

There is experimental evidence that endorphins are released, especially for males, when dominating or winning. Humans seek endorphins. If the concept is alien to you, it is not the concept that is foreign... you are the alien.

Unfortunately, to want power might be completely unreasonable thing to do, yet many people might choose to want it.

I mean, dogs still sniff around corners and mark them with piss, even though it is obvious to anyone that this activity doesn't make any sense and is completely useless.

Are you judging dogs by the standards of human behavior? It would be completely useless for a human to piss all over the place, but for a dog with orders of magnitude better sense of smell than people, that urine odor will linger and be picked up by other dogs.

A dog’s sense of smell is so good that some studies have demonstrated they can reliably detect cancer in human urine.

No. Dog is "programmed" to do it. But it objectively doesn't make sense. (It might have made sense 1000 years ago, when dogs were not domesticated.)

So it's not unreasonable to expect that some behavior of humans is completely irrational, yet they do it.

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