it is not surprising that jordan and i had different perspectives on power. i came from a peaceful and unfettered background, and i had encountered south africa for the first time in 1991, one year after the hopeful transitional negotiations had started and several years after the hopeless, violent clashes between the government and the opposition in the 1970s and 1980s. jordan is black, which in apartheid south africa means he grew up as a second-class person. he had spent decades in exile working for the african national congress and had only just returned to the country to engage directly in these tough negotiations. power looks different to people who have to struggle for it.
now i realized what i had been hearing: power has two sides. the generative side of power is the power-to that paul tillich refers to as the drive to self-realization. the degenerative, shadow side is power-over-the stealing or suppression of the self-realization of another. tillich recognizes both sides: "power actualizes itself through force and compulsion. but power is neither the one nor the other. it is being, actualizing itself over non-being. it uses and abuses compulsion in order to overcome this threat. it uses and abuses force in order to actualize itself. but it is neither the one nor the other."[16] power-over abuses force and compulsion to suppress or oppress or dominate another.
like pallo jordan, my wife dorothy is black and grew up in south africa and was involved for years in the anti-apartheid struggle. when later we visited guatemala together, she noticed something that i didn't. the position of aboriginal people there reminded her of blacks in south africa: they were treated as if they were invisible. not to see another person, or to see her or him as a nonperson, is the extreme manifestation of power-over.
the most common understanding of power is as power-over. when stephen lukes, a professor of politics and sociology at new york university, wrote his classic 1974 book power: a radical view, he equated power with domination. but thirty years later, in the second edition, lukes revised his view: "it was a mistake to define power by saying that 'a exercises power over b when a affects b in a manner contrary to b's interests.' power as domination is only one species of power."[17] power-over is a subset of power-to.
degenerative power-over arises out of generative power-to. when i am exercising my power-to and i feel myself bumping up against you exercising yours, and if in this conflict i have the capacity to prevail over you, then i can easily turn to exercising power over you. my drive to realize myself slips easily into valuing my self-realization above yours, and then into believing arrogantly that i am more deserving of self-realization, and then into advancing my self-realization even if it impedes yours.
many whites in south africa valued their self-realization above that of others, and they deployed an ideology-apart-heid-to justify their behavior. we can see analogous dynamics across races or ethnic groups or classes or genders in every society. thus, the seductively beautiful face of power-to morphs, as in a horror movie, into the viciously terrible face of power-over.
once i had seen the two sides of power starkly in south africa, i could recognize them more easily elsewhere. after i left shell, i consulted to several companies and business associations in houston, texas. i found the business culture of houston unusual and fascinating. the businesspeople there were unconstrained in their enthusiasm for independent, unregulated, entrepreneurial power-to. the can-do property developers i met owned private companies with names like "john smith interests," which i understood to represent an unabashed celebration of the advancing of an individual's own interests and power.
these same businesspeople were also enthusiastic in their support for voluntary philanthropy and civic engagement. they were more aware than people i had met elsewhere of their role in the evolution of their social reality. houston had grown from being the twenty-first largest city in the united states in 1940 to fourth largest in 1990. it had become what it was not by accident, but as the result of the intentional decisions made by people such as themselves, and they felt a responsibility to continue this public work. the ideology of houston businesspeople promoted individual self-realization in alignment with collective self-realization.
in this community, the very epitome of power-to was ken lay, the founder and chairman of enron, the $100 billion natural gas, electricity, and telecommunications company. enron had been named "america's most innovative company" by fortune magazine six years in a row, and lay was admired as an entrepreneurial genius. at shell, young staff who considered themselves to be sophisticated strategists were in awe of enron's deal making. the company was one of houston's biggest employers and charitable donors, and it had sponsored a popular new downtown stadium. when lay visited our houston workshops, the other business leaders treated him like a god. lay symbolized the virtues of the free marketeer whose unfettered power-to produced both private wealth and public good.
in 2001, i chaired a business leaders' dialogue at the aspen institute in colorado. among the participants, who included international corporate, government, trade union, and nonprofit leaders, lay was the star whom everyone wanted to meet. by this time, stories about enron's malfeasance were beginning to circulate. the most prominent accusation against enron was that it had illegally manipulated california's electricity market, and california attorney general bill lockyer was calling for lay to be prosecuted.
lay's way of participating in our meeting was striking. he moved in and out of the sessions, which we had all agreed not to do and which no one else did. he seemed to hold himself apart from or above the group. he was the only dissenter from the group's conclusion that corporate social responsibility should be enforced rather than left voluntary. the only time he participated passionately was when, with righteous indignation, he told the story about lockyer having threatened him by saying, "i would love to personally escort lay to an 8-by-10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, 'hi, my name is spike, honey.'"[18]
during these sessions, only one other participant, a trade unionist, ever challenged lay. everyone else conspicuously deferred to him. i thought that if lay was so powerful and wealthy, he deserved to be looked up to, and also that if i was polite to him, i might benefit from his largesse.
one year after the aspen institute meeting, enron declared bankruptcy, and five years after, lay was found guilty of ten charges of fraud and conspiracy. the company's collapse wiped out more than $60 billion in shareholder investment and 6,000 employee jobs, and led to the dissolution of arthur andersen, its auditor.
exercising creative, entrepreneurial, profitable power-to is not hard if you pretend, and are allowed to pretend, that you live in an unregulated terra nullius. but lay and his enron colleagues did not live in such an empty world, and in defrauding millions of people, they severely undermined those people's power-to. lay's emphatic rejection of rules that govern the collective, as manifested in his disinterest (enabled by our deference) in the small matter of our meeting's ground rules and the larger matter of u.s. law, illustrated his disconnected, degenerative power-over.
the irresponsible power-over exercised by enron executives foreshadowed the global financial collapse of 2008. business journalist mark haines was flummoxed when the crisis broke: "we assume that the individual pursuing his or her own best interest will result in the maximum benefit for society as a whole-and that certainly has to be questioned now."[19] the understanding that i had imbibed in london twenty years earlier-that a system driven by the power-to of the parts would produce a beneficial result for the whole-was tragically incomplete and inadequate. before this became apparent, however, i was to have other experiences that led me to my current understanding of degenerative power.
when, after mont fleur, i had started working on different tough challenges in different countries-power-over manifesting in inequity and inequality-i carried with me a certain confidence that i came from a country, canada, that had successfully overcome its own such challenges. so in 2003 i was taken aback to find myself in a conference room at the department of justice in ottawa, ontario, listening to a group of leaders of government, business, and aboriginal (native or first nations) organizations talk about their encounters with the realities of aboriginal people in canada.
as we went around the table and heard each person's story-of extraordinarily high levels of poverty, addiction, and suicide; decades of abuse by "well-intentioned" governments and churches; conflicts over the extraction of oil and other natural resources; thousands of stuck land and treaty disputes-it became obvious to me that i did not come from a country that had successfully overcome such challenges. my colleague ursula versteegen says that our most important learnings come not simply when we see the world anew, but specifically when we see ourselves-and our role in creating the world-anew.[20] on that day i saw that i was part of a society that was exercising a terrible power-over.
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