Blog by Lukas
An old friend once looked me in the eye and, with all the seriousness he could muster, uttered words that have stayed with me to this day: “Those with power will never give it up voluntarily. It has to be taken away.”
His years in the cut-throat world of Texas ranch culture, followed by a career as a criminal defence attorney, no doubt affected his outlook. But more than anything, I experienced his words in the context of both a protective brotherly love — he didn’t want my idealism to kill my spirit through repeated disappointment — and a personal intention to shelter his own spirit. (Image from here)
Those most cynical about humanity’s prospects for overcoming our tendency toward hierarchy, domination and abuse of power may be feeling rather validated at the moment. Looking across geopolitical and domestic political spheres, so-called leaders are either acting to increase their power at the expense of those they’re purporting to serve, or trying to conserve what power they have at the expense of holding the former to account.
Status warfare has arguably never been more prominent in societies globally — whether online amongst influencers, or those clamouring for access to power however they can get it, at risk of falling prey to deranged grifters like Jeffrey Epstein (setting aside the sex offenders, who had different reasons for their proximity to him).
I captured some of my thoughts about our global leadership crisis — including the psycho-spiritual, virus-like characteristics of greed and domination — in a recent Earth Ethos blog called Graceful Leadership, and Valerie has written before about Healing Unjust Power Dynamics and Power, Force & Corruption.
The question for this piece is about the graceful relinquishing of power when it is being abused. I will say bluntly that I do not agree with my friend. I believe we DO have it in us. The question is: what brings such behaviour into being? (Image from here)
The will and indeed the capacity to accumulate power at the expense of others is self-evidently prominent in humans, as it is in many creatures in nature. I find Jordan Peterson’s melancholic references to lobster hierarchies inane in their superfluity. As Canadian neuropsychologist Donald Olding Hebb famously quipped when asked whether nature or nurture contributes more to a person’s development: “Which contributes more to the area of a rectangle — its length or its width?”
As far as I am concerned, nothing underscores humanity’s vital custodial role on the planet more than our range. We can at once exhibit the behaviours of the most hierarchical and the most cooperative lifeforms on earth — and taken as a strength, this means we can empathise with everyone. The extent to which hierarchy and uneven power distribution is necessarily abusive is interesting, but I think it is simple enough to say that abuse means taking power at the expense of others, and holding on to it similarly at the expense of others.
The rich area of enquiry, then, becomes: what are the internal conditions — our attitudes, values, ideologies, practices, ceremonies, worldviews — and external conditions — the physical world and its challenges and bounties — that affect where on the spectrum of cooperation and hierarchy we sit, both communally and individually?
In their groundbreaking book The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow argue that we should focus on the former, because that is what is within our power to change. Focusing on the determinative qualities of environment — they are heavily critical of another favourite book of mine, Guns, Germs and Steel — leaves us vulnerable to a self-perpetuating cynicism.
I do not resonate with drawing too rigid a distinction between nature and nurture; I see it as a risk factor for hierarchical and domineering thinking in its own right — just more insidiously so.
We are in relationality with the earth at all times. It shapes our behaviour as we shape it, in an eternal and infinitely complex dance.
To see it otherwise, to try and cut the object of our enquiry from its context (after all, the etymology of the word ‘science’ in Latin is to gain knowledge by cutting or splitting), is to create the conditions for human supremacy thinking over nature. And from there, it is not far to thinking we can reign supreme over each other as well.
Indigenous science teaches us to derive the heart — or perhaps the root — of our understanding in situ: meaning, in this context, that our human capacity and potential cannot be separated from our environmental context.
This might mean, in simple terms, that it is quite reasonable for humans living in a harsh environment to behave more harshly with each other. There are strong arguments, for example, that many of the roots of European culture and language come from the harsh and barren Pontic-Caspian steppes. It follows that certain harsh behaviours may be deeply rooted in Europeans for reasons that cannot simply be willed away. (Image from here)
One of my favourite examples in The Dawn of Everything is of an Amazonian tribe that maintains a flat, cooperative and more matriarchal governance structure during the sedentary agricultural wet season, then switches to a more patriarchal and unipolar structure during the dry season, when the tribe adopts a nomadic hunting lifestyle. Certain men of the tribe literally give up power each and every year!
But I think Graeber and Wengrow’s core point — that being deeply impacted by environment should not be an excuse for fixed views of human nature — is extremely useful. They provide an absolute cornucopia of examples of cultures experimenting with different governance systems, many of them defying Western mainstream norms of complexity being an unavoidable co-occurrence with hierarchy.
This means we must walk a tightrope that a more indigenous mind — seeing things like intuition, reciprocity and connectivity as a rich fountain of truth and good conduct — is best at navigating.
My answer to the question about graceful relinquishment of power is to focus on process. There may be moments when abuses must be confronted directly, even violently. But we should resist turning the struggle into an existential conflict animated by moral judgements and the urge to destroy what unsettles us.
I see our most important work as more indirect. If we become more deeply intimate with the Earth and with one another, we may create the conditions in which those who abuse power can more easily relinquish it gracefully — or, failing that, be held accountable with a kind of grace that does not reproduce more abuse.
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