I am not a political scientist. Nor a philosopher. Or anything similar. But I like to consider the state and nature of human society. Or, if “society” is too abstract, simply the behaviour of people in relation to one another—in contrast to their behaviour in relation to objects and nature.
Society is a kind of fiction. But so is everything. It’s hard to talk about things, for this reason. For some people, the idea that things are fictions isn’t even tolerable, which makes it virtually incomprehensible.
I don’t just mean abstractions like money. Or even the self—not just the idea, but the supposed instance. “I” am a fiction. As are “you”. But more than that, our bodies are fictions. Not that there isn’t anything there. But that the body is not truly a separate world unto itself, as our language otherwise suggests.
Things are not discrete. They are probabilistic. As atoms and subatomic particles are probabilistic. They change all the time. For simple particles, it is their position and motion that are uncertain.
For larger quantities of matter, it is the boundary which is uncertain. Moreover, the boundary is very porous. We know this, but we also ignore it. Our bodies take in matter and expel matter. Matter within the boundary moves around and around. Within the boundary are billions of other semi-autonomous and porous boundaries, defining what we call cells. Cells have other such malleable structures within them. Everything is changing and indeterminate.
Everything is in a constant state of transformation. Both in the physical world and the world of information. Our selves are constructs of our minds, and our minds are constructs of information, captured in the material matrix of our nervous systems. And also our gut biomes, apparently. The mind is not neatly contained in the brain. Nor is the self an infinitesimal and indestructible point within that lump of pinkish bloody meat. It is elusive.
If the body and the self are indeterminate in their defining boundary—both in space and time—then how can society be any more crystalline? In fact, it is ephemeral and gaseous, by comparison.
Society is an idea that lets us approximate and think about the combined behaviours—and beliefs—of many people. Some societies contain over a billion people. The meta-society of humanity contains eight billion people. If you choose to imagine it that way.
Society is the word we use for the sum total of relationships between all people, and even to some degree, all domesticated animals—at least, those to which we give names, identities, some degree of autonomy, and some amount of our interest and concern. Not only pets, but also wild animals, and plants. Not only living people, but imaginary ones, too, including characters from both history and fiction. Not only people we know, but also strangers whom we only know through media.
Because each of these identities commands some part of our attention and our efforts, they thus exert power over us. In nearly all cases, such power is not exerted overtly, or through physical compulsion. In contrast, we ourselves choose to recognize and obey instructions to attend to these other entities.
Most influence is not achieved by force. In many cases, it might be achieved through some function of fear. But that fear is primarily generated within the mind of the compelled. Some people do use explicit threats to achieve influence over others. Parents over children. Bosses over workers. Rich people over poor people. Members of one culture over another. In general, some form of dominant identity over another.
But the power these people have is mostly fictional. It is the product of many other people willfully and voluntarily acquiescing to the needs, demands, and expectations of others with whom they have a direct relationship, altogether forming a web of dependencies. It is this web that we call society.
Of course not all power is fictional. There are real kinds of power. But they are not positively coercive, as in the case of one person threatening another with a weapon. They are exactly the opposite: the power of withholding. It is not the harm someone can cause that is usually the source of power, but the harm that someone can prevent, but might choose to permit.
A child is under the parents’ sway precisely because the parents have social power, which they can choose to share with the child, or withhold. They have knowledge. They have opportunity. But more importantly, the child is biologically and neurologically in their parents’ thrall, because of biological evolution. The power of a parent, or anyone else, is in their ability to share what they have. They may use this power selflessly, by giving without asking. Or they may use every technique in their repertoir to persuade another person to give up whatever they will spare in exchange.
The power that we exert over one another is the ability to satisfy one another’s desires. Or more precisely, the ability to persuade others that we can satisfy their desires. Those with the most power are the ones who have been the most persuasive. While threats of violence can be persuasive, they are amongst the least effective.
No celebrity has to threaten violence against their fans. No, they offer instead the promise of continued satisfaction of desire: for joy—or pleasure—from beauty, or the conjuring of a dream, either for a few minutes, hours, days, or a lifetime. In that dream, the audience believes that they are someone else, someone better, someone loved, loveable, attractive, enviable—that they themselves have somehow gained a power similar to the one the performer has over them.
Power comes from the promise, the expectation, or the dream of sharing in power. Of course, there are different kinds of power. Some are insubstantial. Others are more empirical and practical. Beauty—or glamour; or even more specifically, the ability to create or embody them–is a sort of half-real thing. The human mind ranks things based on a perception of an intrinsic property of goodness. This is inferred from certain physical qualities, as well as by association with physical—or at least sensory—products. A person can be intrinsically joyful. Or they can be a source of joy.
A writer generates words. A musician generates sounds. We can find pleasure and joy in these and many other art forms. The artist need not be physically attractive in a traditional sense. (And note that physical attractiveness is another semi-empirical quality. As often observed, it is subjective to the beholder, although there are often consistent and predictible aspects.) But the ability to generate beautiful (again, subjective) works, which satisfy some desire in the audience, are attributed to the artist, who gains a glamourous aspect, which then gives them power.
The most bizarre form of power is money. People with money have power in proportion to their money, relative to the average person’s quantity of money. But only because people desire money. And they only desire money because other people desire money. And those people only desire money because other people desire money, and will accept it in exchange for useful things. The power of money is completely fantastical. But, as it is also completely taken for granted, and accepted as effectively real, it has become real, and virtually impossible to resist.
However, money is not real. Real power is that which allows us to survive and reproduce. Real power is found in knowledge and skill: the ability to navigate and get what we need from the world. Enjoyment is valuable, but its absence is not life-threatening. Fundamental real powers are those which keep us alive. Power is the ability to acquire good food, clean water, and protection from the elements. That is the source of the power that parents have over their children. The young, especially while still small, absolutely cannot acquire what they need without help from adults. This is never more obvious than in the relationships of wild animals, which are free from the confusing influence of language and imaginary culture.
Society, however—that is, the network of relationships between individuals—has grown so large and complex, and the chains of interconnections so long, that we can no longer tell the difference between real and fictional power—money, popularity, nobility, holiness. We treat these imaginary qualities as if they were just as real as the ability to grow or hunt food, treat injuries and heal illness, or build shelter and create clothes. In fact, those who have real abilities and do real work are now at nearly the bottom of society. Only the truly unfortunate, the homeless and unemployed, are seen as lower. What an irony!
Humans have, fantastically, inverted the pyramid of values, putting survival skills last. Why is that?
I suspect it is the vexing nature of markets: supply and demand.
I suppose I lied a little when I said that we have put the most important at the least position. The fact is that few people actually truly know how to produce food or build shelter. In those industries, the knowledge is distributed amongst many different people, each with different and complementary specialties. Picking fruit is not growing food. Tilling the soil (with a machine, no less) is not growing food. Nor planting, or tending, or fertilizing. These tasks are simplified such that virtually anyone can learn them in a short time. Such power is easily transferred, and of low value.
The rarest skill, and the most admired, is the ability to generate an aura of glamour, and the fantasy that such power has been shared. In exchange for exposure to that glamour, less glamourous people will gladly hand over money, or anything else.
The appearance of the ability to make money is a kind of glamour. The appearance of the ability to coordinate and lead people, or to envision and shape the future, or to predict it, and various other abstract and inscrutable abilities, create an aura of glamour, to which people dramatically respond. Simply wearing a uniform associated with power and responsibiity creates an aura of glamour that people find irresistible. We are sensitive to symbols. Especially symbols that have achieved a near-universal cultural status and significance.
In short, human beings are superstitious. Power is the ability to manipulate superstition.