The Joy in Being A Cause

What's power and how do we get it? (part one)

I recently humiliated myself in front of a room of strangers. At the moment, when I get overtired I become crap at making good decisions, without realising. So when the host of this folk night asked the room (full of talented musicians) if anyone would like to perform, my hand inexplicably shot up. Only about 2 lines into Joe Hill did I realise, with my voice shaking uncontrollably and my sweat-soaked hands slipping up and down the fretboard, that I couldn’t in fact play this song well enough for public consumption. I gracelessly stopped halfway through, begged the people’s forgiveness (which I received), and sat out the rest of the night, stunned by my own behaviour.

I equate being able to speak (or even sing) in a large group of people as a kind of power. Certain groups create the conditions for everyone to feel the necessary combination of safety, confidence and ultimately, meaning, for this power to emerge. Certain groups don’t. This group did.

And it feels worth sharing because we’re at a point -socially, politically, civilisationally- where we need to think about the conditions for power. The farce of Trump 1 followed by the tragedy of Trump 2, along with the blood-chilling rise of the AfD and Reform demand a serious bit of reflection.

Power is a word with many meanings in different settings. This is its allure and its confusion. It’s the capacity to act, to change things, to direct events. It’s also a force that crushes. And like its electromagnetic version, it is a current that animates. This doesn’t make it neutral. Varying sources of power have different consequences for the world. There’s the power of the sun and then there’s the power of bullies, bosses and dictators. One is artificially hoarded and depends on fear and scarcity, while the other is potentially infinite.

Feminist organisers who distinguish ‘power with’ from ‘power over’ are getting at this. Power over is what we’re used to, it’s coercion and control. Power with is something else. It’s a potentially infinite power, produced together: “feminist power is exercised with others, collectively and collaboratively”. A democratic social movement organisation, or the effect of a theatre piece. Infectious laughter, or the dancefloor more of your friends are arriving at. Power is “the human ability not just to act, but to act in concert” (Arendt).

This is everyday power as its experienced by people an small groups. Then there’s power between groups, institutions, states and so on. How does power work similarly or differently at these different levels? And what do we need to learn about this to stop fascism, and build social infrastructure to allow us and seven generations worth of children to live meaningful lives?

For now, because it is usually the best place to, let’s start with our everyday experience: in your life, when do you feel a sense of ‘power with’ others?

I see a generative, collaborative power emerging when quiet people speak up, when a difficult situation is met with vulnerability and when people hold contradictions publicly. I see it when consideration of the larger whole shapes people’s decisions, and when fear, shame and the possibility of failure are not enough to hold people back.

It is a kind of calm confidence many miles from that fleeting swaggering confidence that we’re used to. There’s the jerky, unpredictable confidence -a flighty response to insecurity- and there’s confidence born of real safety, trust and belonging.

In a group, this is the confidence that allows people to speak honestly, share useful information, help others develop skills, or feel fine about failing (to sing a song well for example) publicly. When someone steps up, it inspires other people to do so; there are regular pauses and genuine questions; and there is trust that individuals and the group can achieve something meaningful. These are glimpses of freedom that add to rather than subtract from other people’s.

I have been lucky to be in groups where power like this circulates and regenerates. And I’m desperate to understand the conditions it requires. I have also been in groups of good folks where power is hoarded, crushed or simply fumbled in the end zone. And it’s getting a little late in the day to be repeating these mistakes. A quick, non-exhaustive taxonomy of some of these:

The Boring Death by Grandiosity

Usually led by men, this one’s interrupting, de-railing, crowding out and boring to death. It’s not real confidence, but a deep opposite. It ranges from intimidating, to frustrating, to pitiable. It’s statements in the question time and an inability to accept uncertainty. It’s what Terry Real identifies as one of the main reactions to low self-esteem: grandiosity. It can be glaring and loud and it can be embedded and subtle.

The No Group

Then there’s power lost to unchecked fear. In a world where the possible is thwarted by the bureaucratic, hope by failure, and action by oppression, the field of confidence generated in a group can be fragile. Sometimes everyone contributes to it dissolving. Sometimes the fears of one or two people overwhelm the group. A “no” energy takes hold. (This is separate to empowering questioning. A useful but uncomfortable question might feel like power lost in the moment, but might be an investment in the power of the group in the future.)

The Misty Mountain Top

When it isn’t clear who can say what and when, groups don’t work well. Humbler people hold their useful ideas and grandiose people do not hold their boring ones. A foundational text in the art of emancipatory groups is Jo Freeman’s The Tyranny of Structurelessness. When -for whatever noble horizontalist intentions- a group’s workings are chaotic or mystified, power will be hoarded out of habit, she says.

The Power is Always Bad Group

This one’s the baddest of moods where total paranoia about the intentions of others can reign. Yotam Marom explains how it broke Occupy Wall Street: “But the truth is, it wasn’t the state, or the cold, or the media. The real problem underneath it all was a deep ambivalence about power. In fact, all of the things that made Occupy Wall Street brilliant had this paradox built into them, this politic of powerlessness woven deep inside, like a bad gene or a self-destruct mechanism.” Recently echoed by Ash Sarkar on the obstacles of building a genuine mass movement: “we make powerlessness into a virtue”. The pain underneath this: if I cannot control the outside world I will control this one; if we’re never going to win out there, I’m going to win in here. Scarred by betrayal, a reflex of hypervigilance. Why would anyone do anything other than out of a desire for power and control?

You will have your own additions to this taxonomy. There are certainly many more I’ve missed about all the ways that systematically marginalised groups have that translated down. All of it shrinks the chances of us experiencing “the joy in being a cause”, as Donald Winnicott called it. Winnicott, a child psychologist who was ever attentive to the conditions for growth or stagnation in young people, complaining about a heavy-handed colleague, wrote: “One felt that if he were growing a daffodil, he would think he was making the daffodil out of a bulb instead of enabling the bulb to develop into a daffodil by good enough nurture.”* Which I think is more than just a cutesy example.

There are studies aplenty on how being with nature promotes prosocial behaviour. But Winnicot’s anecdote points to something else too. The skills and attitudes needed for growing strong plants mirrors those needed for growing powerful social movements.

For example, there’s something similar about the need to accept failure. (Things die.) To nurture. (Try punishing a leggy seedling.) To cultivate. (Life can’t be forced, or rushed, out of the ground.) Theres something about humility and the mystery. (Nothing knows everything. Everything is unpredictable. Let’s see if we can’t find the wisest path together.) Resilience. (There’s luck and good facilitation, but there are no shortcuts. To weather drought and storms, manmade or otherwise, your soil better be thick with webs of relationship.) And about understanding the relationship between individuals and communities. (There’s collaboration, codependence, and companion planting but there is no substitution for the inner life force that all growing things depend on.)

In Greek mythology, Antaeus was the world’s best wrestler. Son of Poseidon (god of the sea) and Gaia (god of the earth), he was undefeated in his power. Hercules, new kid on the block, swaggering son of Zeus, proving himself on his trials, beat him only by figuring out that his strength was his connection to the ground. Lifting him off the land, his power drained out of him, and Hercules crushed him to death. It’s a useful story for us.

So what does this experience of power and powerlessness in groups and the way that it is or isn’t nurtured, mean for our chances of reclaiming the future from the oligarch class? How do small groups of people combine to change the world? Can we really ‘change the world without taking power’? More on that next time.

* I found this Winnicott quote in Sue Stuart-Smith’s The Well Gardened Mind. It is an absolutely perfect mixture of theory, practice and philosophy of how gardening is tied to our development as thriving humans.