Power, basically

Ever get the feeling, as you watch the endless series of cheesy Seventies pro wrestling bouts that now passes for political wrangling, that a whole bunch of the combatants aren't sure what the goal is anymore? Sure, they remember which tag-team they belong to, they know who's supposed to win each match in the current tour according to the script — but when the "prize" money gets paid out at the end of the night, they can't quite remember whether they and their buddies were supposed to use it to grab a gallon of booze, score some coke, send out for call girls, mail it home to their families to pay the bills or donate it to Save the Young Cute Mammals Inc.

If so, it ain't just you and me; a few of the pundits have been wondering aloud if a big partisan realignment is on the way, shaking the players into new alliances, even if some of the old names persist. One popular prediction is that the new sorting-out will be between "populists" vs. "technocrats," which sort of disheartened me because the way these groupings were defined, I'd be just as hard-pressed to choose one of them as my "own" party as I've been between our two current clown cars.

When shit starts getting this confusing, I try going back to basics. Not quite to the Descartes level — I'll take all the "I think, therefore I am" crap as given — but just strip away all the layers everybody's added to some concept (including the terminology involved and all its connotations) and look at the bare mattress below to see if I can spot whatever's been poking me in the back at night and sweep it off. So:

First, we're wrestling over power, pure and simple. Now there are many kinds of power, including the basics that every moving, growing creature has such as strength, skill, ingenuity and, to put it "basically," attractiveness. Let's just say anything is "power" if it enables you to make changes in the world around you, emphatically including your fellow creatures. Because we're a species with the capacity to communicate among ourselves, "persuasiveness" also gets added to the list. And, because (outliers aside) we're one of the social species, we've got "numerical power," too; that is, we can band together in sufficient numbers to accomplish a change that no one could pull off singly.

Last, because we can deal in abstractions, practically every human society develops the notion of saving, storing and trading various kinds of power — if it's an English-speaking society, the method of storage is called "money" — and in more sophisticated societies, members are capable of adding to their money by learning ways to manipulate the money itself, leading to a whole extra form of power; for our purposes let's just leave out the true technical terms with their connotations and simply call this "monetary power." If one way to measure a society's complexity is to see how many variations and embellishments on monetary power it has, then by this measure the 21st-century world is complex enough to induce aneurysms in the unwary.

Given all that, what shapes a society is how the power is held, and distributed, among its members. Many people hold the "nice" idea that we each have our unique abilities, talents, gifts — i.e., powers — in some way that balances out, but this idea can be proved false with practically a glance at any collection of people. Whether it's nice to acknowledge this or not, some people are simply more powerful than others in ways that matter. Doesn't matter if it's nature or nurture, the fiat of the society or the will of God, it's unalterable fact.

What is alterable is what we do about it. That's where those peculiar human abilities of persuasion power, numerical power and monetary power factor in. We make balances of power beyond what we each individually start out with, and we've done so since the days when every society was merely a small tribe, and through all the variations on "Strong Smart Man will use his brains and brawn to help us eat better if we promise to obey him and not band together to kill him" as well as all the ways we've invented to dilute or divide responsibilities when we get sick of oligarchy.

But since this isn't a sociology paper, let's skip forward to present-day America and look at how things are balanced. We've got two big tribes that between them control almost all of our politics, and for the past century or so, one tribe has been united by the belief that numerical power should always be ascendant over individuals' power ("numerical" not necessarily meaning "majority power," just the power of a group), while the other tribe champions individual power (including any additional "monetary power" those individuals have), with numerical power strictly a supporting framework. Broadly speaking, people who are confident they're above-average in individual power will be in the latter tribe, while people who gain power by membership in a group will favor the former, and each tribe believes their position conveys moral superiority (say, the "united" vs. the "successful") over the misguided/less moral others (e.g., the "whiny losers" vs. the "grasping bullies").

Take a moment to throw aside the judgmental adjectives, though, and you can make a case for either idea being "fair" or "just" ... while at the same time you can find flaws in either approach, as well as myriad inconsistencies in the ways they're put into practice. (For space reasons, I'm not going to summarize those in this post, but we can all, at minimum, list the problems with the philosophies we oppose, while the opponents are equally eager to share their own list of faults regarding our own positions.) If you're fed up enough by the flaws and inconsistencies, you can find other approaches to support. For example, if you believe fairness and justice are impossible when one party is wielding power over another, maybe you envision a situation where we all agree no power-wielding will ever happen between individuals, and each interaction between people will be an equal-sided contract. Or maybe your idea is that we all should agree to share everything equally right from the outset, with only the group as a whole having power over itself. People have been attracted to these concepts, too, the only problems being that (1) just to start such a society, each would require a unity of purpose we'd never be able to achieve among any workable number of people, and (2) each flies in the face of human nature so utterly that it could never last anyway. At least not without some outside entity to enforce the deal; and let's face it, if Earth is ever invaded by a superior alien race of benevolent Anarcho-Libertarians or Anarcho-Communists, we'd probably unite, for the first time in human history, for the war to drive them off the planet.

Whichever ways we want power to be wielded, though, we have to get together with enough like-minded people that we can set up, and enforce, the rules that enable those ways. Hence the political parties. But what happens when none of the parties is aimed in the direction we want to go? What if they can't, because the things we want contradict each other?

One basic problem with human nature is in how many of us hate to be told what to do — but love to tell other people what to do. That inconsistency is what makes us long for improbable or impossible political options; even as we recognize the people talking them up are being impractical, we'll still say to ourselves, "But, you know, they have a point." The best we'll ever be able to do, though, is find some semi-stable way to pit those opposing human traits against each other so we can work together when necessary while still not feeling so oppressed by that work at day's end that we're led to chuck the whole deal away.

And the irony is that we've got that system, if we can keep it.

But to do that, we have to be able to remember that the definition of "winning" is not necessarily "beating someone else." Hell, if Charlie Sheen could do it while all drugged up, we should be able to.