The Structure of Power

By contrast, Max Stirner rejected Being and focused on the concept of fluid character – in a world of change then character needs to be changeable too. He saw himself as the man who had freed himself from the tyranny of instinct and of fixed ideas. Slavery to instinct and desire just produces weakness in character. Man has to realise value from within himself, to give himself his own value, instead of depending upon the state or society to do it for him. Stirner is trying to formulate a description of narcissism (70 years before Freud and Jung) [4]. He is totally flexible, he is not to be defined by his thoughts. He is the creator, the owner, of his beliefs; he is not created by them. He never allows them to ossify into principles. He can use sensuality and passion without being engulfed by them. The narcissistic egotist ensures that the creator remains separate from his creations. Stirner is the Unique One, as he categorised himself, and this is a feature of narcissism [5].

Nietzsche and Stirner represent opposite approaches to the control of the will, so they form a binary. For Nietzsche the fundamental drive is the will to power. But this equally well applies to Stirner. So the will to power is the means whereby the person tries to create either a static ego or a flexible, fluid one. The will to power is the path of introjection.

Nietzsche’s view is the traditional aim of spiritual practice, the attempt to focus on an unchanging reality, and to deny validity to the world of change. This is the path to Being. But Being takes its identity from its opposition to Becoming, the process of endless change. Therefore Being is binary to Becoming, and so neither represent ultimate reality. It is just as valid to use the path of endless change as the way to attain a higher evolution as it is to use the traditional path of no change. Neither path is better than the other. Which one a person follows is purely a matter of choice and inclination.

In summary, there are two paths to power:
1). The person aims at power over the external situation: this is the desire for power. This is the path of projection.
2). The person aims at power over himself: this is the will to power. This is the path of introjection.

A person may occasionally be motivated to attain some form of power, such as exerting his authority in a relationship. But when he becomes obsessed with the desire to attain power in the form of wealth, fame, social status and other social or individualist attainments, then we can say that he is driving himself to attain them. He is being motivated by a drive. If the focus of his efforts is on social criteria, then his drive is an “external” one; if his focus is on personal development, then his drive is an “internal” one.

There are two paths to power, and so there are two forms of the drive – one is external and one is internal. In the next section I trace the emotional dynamics behind these two forms of the drive. But first I look at the desire for power.

The Desire for Power

Take the parent-child relationship. At various times the parent will show jealousy towards the child. Compare two attributes of jealousy: smothering and nagging.

3). Smothering
This is a method of controlling the child by denying that child its personal responsibilities. This affects the child’s desires and produces spoiling. Another drawback of a smothering mentality is that the person becomes demanding and possessive when under stress. This strategy of control will be used by a parent who can abundantly display his or her emotions.

4). Nagging
This is a method of controlling the child by criticising its love or respect for the parent. This affects the child’s emotional responses and helps to produce either identification with the parent or rebellion [6]. The identification is facilitated by the induction of guilt in the child; the rebellion is fuelled by pride and is the reaction against identification. A person with a nagging mentality is usually unable to show much emotion. The nagging response is due to the addition of fear to the jealousy. It is the fear that “freezes” the parent’s ability to express emotions, particularly the affectionate ones. This strategy of control will be used by a parent who has “frozen” emotions.

What these strategies suggest is that jealousy gives rise to the issue of controlling other people. But there are two aspects to control: lack of consideration for another person, and the desire to change that person. In these strategies, the mode of jealousy differs. Smothering represents the lack of consideration for someone and reflects jealousy in love mode. Whereas nagging criticisms of a person have the purpose of trying to change that person, and are a sign of weakness in the character of the fault-finder. In general, negative criticisms of a person that use an emotional bias (for example, saying to someone “You are stupid”) represent a form of personal attack, so they reflect the self-pity mode of jealousy.

The desire for power is the desire to change either other people or one’s external circumstances. Therefore the desire for power acts through jealousy (self-pity mode).

Now I consider another aspect of the desire for power. Before the advent of World War 1 and the horrors of trench warfare it was still traditional for some idealists to have a “gung ho” attitude to war – war was adventure and the testing of one’s character. This attitude reflects vanity and led me to understand that vanity makes the transition to the desire for power. Now since power also acts through jealousy, then combining the two emotions gives:
Desire for power = jealousy + vanity.

This formula is not quite complete. It is necessary to understand the attraction of power, so I look at the attitude a person has to the suffering in his life. If a person accepts suffering then his life revolves around guilt. Whereas if he reject suffering, because he find it to be degrading, then his life revolves around pride. He sees suffering to be degrading because, when pride is active, he has no moderation and no flexibility. Guilt and pride are binary to each other, so the person often oscillates between them. Neither the passive resignation to suffering nor its rejection achieves anything of permanent value. Now I understand why power has the entrancement that it has.

The desire for power is an attempt to get out of intolerable situations, where neither resignation to suffering nor the rejection of suffering is an acceptable alternative. To escape from such situations the person needs to control his relationships and enhance his sense of pride in himself. The desire for power is the attempt to control or change the social environment in such a way that it reduces the person’s internal stresses. So the desire for power uses both jealousy (in its mode of self-pity) and pride as its vehicle of expression.

Power over others is a displacement of the need to attain power over oneself. Power over others facilitates the inflation of pride in vanity mode as a means of achieving a surrogate self-respect. Therefore the vanity factor in desire for power is actually the vanity mode of pride.
Desire for power can be looked at in another way. In social situations the person uses pride to manage the weakness of self-pity within his /her jealousy.

So the final formula for desire for power, in terms of its emotional dynamics, is:
Desire for power = jealousy (self-pity mode) + pride (vanity mode).

The person does not usually change himself much in a lifetime (unless he goes into psycho-therapy). To change oneself involves facing one’s weaknesses and inadequacies. It is much nicer to try to change other people. So the desire for power is often the preferred means of relating to other people.

The Will to Power

The will to power begins the drive for personal development, such as the cultivation of holistic states of mind and/or the development of abilities in practices such as meditation and contemplation. Without it, a person can turn to the spiritual life, and be involved in it (for example, in New Age activities), but he /she will not be propelled by a consuming drive. Also, this drive is the sphere of intense creativity. The compulsion to create great art is just the will to power in disguise.

The structure of will to power needs to bear some resemblance to that of desire for power, since they are complementary aspects of one loop, the loop of projection and introjection. Stirner supplies one clue: it is the narcissistic person who attempts to derive value from within himself. Narcissism has a component of vanity, so this is the needed complement to the vanity mode of pride.

The other clue is highlighted by having an existential attitude to life. Consider an existential man: he has an intense will to power and lacks interest in social control or the exploitation of nature. He seeks freedom from both external and internal constraints. The most powerful constraints are those of social conditioning, and to destroy them he uses the most destructive emotion there is. What is this emotion? During the 1990s many of my phantasies were very destructive: people or animals were trying to kill me. It was difficult to analyse such phantasies, but eventually I understood that the core emotion energising them was envy. When envy is internalised, that is, subconsciously directed against oneself instead of consciously against other people, then it generates destructive phantasies.

Therefore the existentialist subconsciously directs his envy towards himself; he turns his envy onto his constraints and his weaknesses in order to destroy their power over him. In this way he destroys the fascination with social control. To achieve this result the existentialist uses narcissism to control his envy.

Uncontrolled envy is very dangerous. If a person directs his destructiveness externally then he causes social chaos. But if he directs his destructiveness internally (by using his narcissistic ideals) then he follows the road to freedom of mind. However, if it is not possible to overcome his weaknesses then envy and destructiveness always carry risks of mental tragedy for the lonely explorer (for example, Nietzsche collapsed into madness). How much freedom of mind it is possible to attain depends very much upon the current level of personal development, the historical situation and the degree of development of psychology theory and practice.

The formula for the will to power becomes:
Will to power = envy + narcissism (mode of vanity).

Review

The three traditional ways of handling the problem of power are:
a). Acceptance of guilt and the repudiation of power, leading to passivity and resignation to fate.
b). Acceptance of pride, leading to the desire for power and hence the intensification of jealousy.
c). The escape from society into solitude, in order to build up one’s narcissism as the source of one’s power, the will to power.

The first choice negates the person’s fundamental drive, whilst the second choice channels it through the desire for power, and the last choice channels it through the will to power. The challenge of modern times is to develop and use the will to power within society. The individual needs to sustain and mature his personal power within the arena of personal relationships, despite his burden of anxiety (caused by those relationships). This is the way of the existentialist.

Channelling Power

I consider how power affects the person. The primary polarisation for most people is usually to the issue of power (as a means of obtaining happiness). Power can be used in two ways. A person can either use it to attain social goals, or use it to focus on his individuality and creativity.

For a man, if he wants it in a social sense his motivation is jealousy and he orientates towards social control. This power is channelled through the social concepts that interest the person, the concepts that define his views of sociality. He focuses on desires that will enable him to grasp some degree of social power. Whether this power is used benevolently or otherwise depends on other factors.

If he wants to be an individual then his motivation is narcissism and he channels his power through his concept of freedom, which usually involves some degree of separation from society. Power is channelled into the development of forms of individuality and creativity. However, the person may find it very difficult to fit back into society and relationships once he has satisfied his individual needs.

These two ways are based on the loop of projection and introjection, with its two derivatives of desire for power and will to power. In a child these inclinations are likely to be mixed up due to transference and to social institutions like schools.

For the social person, power is channelled through jealousy. This is the desire for power.
For the individual person, power is channelled through narcissism. This is the will to power.

This orientation, this choice between jealousy and narcissism, determines the person’s response to power and to the way that he seeks either social attainments or self-achievements.

[³] An excellent summary of Nietzsche’s view is in Blackham, H.J. Six Existentialist Thinkers. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1952 and 1986. pages 24-25. [3]

[5]. See Stirner, Max. The Ego and His Own. Translated by Steven Byington. London, 1907. Also, The Modern Library, USA. [5]

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.	Two Paths to Power I look more closely into the way that power is structured [¹]. There is a choice of two paths, each of which is binary in form. The first path is the desire for power, which is the path of projection [²]. The second path is the will to power. To show that this is binary too, I consider the ideas of two nineteenth-century thinkers. Friedrich Nietzsche produced the view that power is needed in order to create a stable ego which can exist in a world of perpetual change. The person imposes Being (the concept of having a fixed ego) on the process of Becoming (the process of constant change). The means of doing this is the cultivation of a consistent will that clings to the same evaluations: unchanging values produce an unchanging ego. Ultimately, everything is subsumed into will and power [³].
Sub - Headings
The Desire for Power
The Will to Power
Review
Channelling Power
References