The Power Motive

 

THE POWER MOTIVE

Christopher Ebbe, Ph.D.    9-13

 

ABSTRACT:  The human motive to gain power is explored, including origins, nature of those who use power, and effects in different areas of our lives.

KEY WORDS:  power, motivation

From birth to death, human beings are engaged in trying to influence other human beings, because as social creatures, one of the primary determinants of our quality of life is how others respond to us and treat us.  Some of these influence efforts are physical, involving rewarding and punishing, and others involve conveying emotions and inner states through verbal or nonverbal communication.  Some people seek to be liked or loved by others as a platform for influence, and some utilize power to influence others.  Some seek status as a base for having influence, since others generally assign higher status to and respond more positively and deferentially to those with greater amounts of admired qualities, such as pleasing appearance, wealth, age, physical size and strength, power, and being “the best” at something.

Power is the potential to affect or change something--oneself, others, or some aspect of the environment.  Power can remain potential (unactualized, having an effect simply because the potential is known to those whom the person with power wishes to control), or it can be used overtly in an attempt to create the desired change.  All human beings seek the powers needed to get along socially (such as verbal communication and self-assertion) and the powers needed to survive in the environment (the power or capability to earn a living, build a house, hunt game successfully, etc.).  “Having power” refers to having the potential (presumably sufficient power) to do or cause certain things, and “exercising power” is the overt use of that power. 

Psychologists speak more about “control” than about “power,” but these are synonymous.  There is no control without power, and power creates control (getting what one specifically wants), both when it is a potential and when it is exercised.  For some human beings, having power becomes a highly salient or primary motive, and this often results in significant harm to or problems for others. 

Power and control are key concepts for personality investigation and treatment.  Alfred Adler based his theory of personality and pathology on the “will to power.”  The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer organized his philosophical system around “will,” which can be understood as desire and which leads immediately to efforts to control others and the environment in order to get what one wants.

Sometimes we exercise power directly upon the world ourselves, as in fighting or altering the physical environment.  A few people seek greater power over themselves (greater control of themselves), for the sake of a better psychological state, often through religious, spiritual, or psychological regimens, but the focus of the power concerns of most of us is on other people and how they might block our efforts to get what we want.  With regard to other people, the purpose of having or utilizing power or control mechanisms is to influence the other person to do what one wants him or her to do.  Naturally we would prefer to have sufficient power to cause them not to block our efforts, so power “over” others naturally becomes a goal.

We see the social mechanisms of power most often in terms of leverage, including blackmail, extortion, hostage taking, fear induction, and threat (whether implied or overt).  Governance examples would be “controlling” enough votes in a matter to get one’s way or forcing a political opponent to withdraw or amend a motion made through threats of damaging actions (exposing a sin, firing a relative, introducing a competing motion, etc.).  This sort of leverage is exercised in politics, in our families, and everywhere else that social relations exist. 

Every individual has some leverage, through their potential reactions to the behavior of others (a baby cries; an adolescent threatens to run away or makes it clear that he will do something regardless of what parents say; a wife waits to get her husband’s agreement on something until after enjoyable sex; a wife or husband uses “the silent treatment” on the other), but some have much more leverage than others.  Families vary in whether the father or mother has more leverage (such as control of the money versus the capacity to withdraw love or sex).  A fair amount of power in families is of the “having power” (potential) type, with members doing or not doing things because they have learned of the probable consequences, but we sometimes find the need to “teach someone a lesson” by exercising some degree of our potential power.

“Having power” does no harm (or good) to others, except for whatever effects on others result from the awareness of those others that the individual has that power.  We do not like to be “in the power” of others, because it restricts our options, but it is in the exercise of power (rather than the “having of power”) that most ethical and moral issues arise, since most people seem to think that if power is only potential, then no “crime” has been committed, and they view themselves as having a choice in cases of someone having potential power with respect to them (even if that is a choice between undesirable options).  (Ethical issues are those related to how we treat others, while moral issues are those relating to what is “right” and “wrong.”)

“Power differentials,” with their presumptions of potential harm to those with less power, are clearly present in any relationship between a person with more status and a person with less status, as in teacher-student, pastor-parishioner, and parent-child relationships, and power is also an issue in relations between men and women.  The physical size and strength advantages of men, their supposed tendency to anger and physical expressions of anger, and their control of family income (in some families) enhance the power of men in relationships, and women naturally try to even up the power balance by using their greater emotional perspicacity, their roles as givers of nurturance and love, and whatever capacity they have to withhold sex in the particular relationship. 

 
Problems of Power
The person with power may cause harm to others when he or she ignores ethical and moral concerns in exercising power to achieve a goal (as when a person with power bribes or blackmails public officials into approving a building project that requires destruction of an existing neighborhood of homes, even though it results in new and nicer homes, albeit more expensive, or when person A with power in a family keeps other family members from helping family member B with a problem, with the implied threat of harm of one sort or another, even though the others would like to help member B).  If power is exercised on the environment, such as in the building of a great dam, it may be of benefit to many but harmful to some. 

The basic ethical issue with power is that a person having power or using power is trying to get what he wants at a cost to others.  Others oppose his having or using power because if he exercises his power or succeeds, they will be disadvantaged or harmed.  There is no discussion of win-win strategies, since most power-oriented persons perceive this as a zero-sum game (only one person can win).  If a person sought what he wanted without using the leverages of power, others would not be so inclined to oppose him.  So, a focus on power logically and inevitably implies an atmosphere of contention and loss, and the more people who are involved in uses of power, the more negative is the atmosphere.

An interesting recent book, The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene, synthesizes lessons regarding power from around the world and across the centuries.  The author contends that human life is inevitably an arena of power struggles, so that it is simply in everyone’s interest to learn how to gain and wield power.  He emphasizes the importance of gathering and maintaining one’s power by deftly keeping one’s intentions secret, keeping others off balance, keeping people dependent on one, deceiving and manipulating whenever possible, being unpredictable, avoiding being associated with the unfortunate and needy, and destroying enemies completely whenever possible.  This is a picture of a social environment with little room for love, closeness, trust, and cooperation (except to destroy a joint enemy), and I leave it to the reader to decide which kind of society he or she would prefer. 

A counterclaim that one can use power on one’s enemies but not on one’s family and therefore have love, closeness, and trust within one’s in-group is simply not credible against the psychological evidence that indicates that people do not operate with that degree of compartmentalization.  The skills and worldview needed for a life of power are quite different from the skills and worldview that are needed for a life of trust and cooperation, and I know of no examples of an individual doing both well (or even wanting to learn both well).  Even those who might wish to have both, such as Tony Soprano, fail, because it is simply not human to be able to turn these two polar attitudes off and on at will.  One inevitably ends up having and/or using power with family members as well, which inevitably leads to resentment and often to retaliation.

It is worth noting here that a certain proportion of the population responds to persons with power with admiration and obedience, whereas it is suggested above that everyone around a person with power is at risk for being harmed or disadvantaged.  Being able to control others and get one’s way is certainly appealing in itself, and we can understand why people might admire a person who can do that.  Readily obeying a person with power may stem from our having learned well to obey the more powerful as children in dealing with our parents, particularly if they used leverage and power strategies to control our behavior.  Children who believe in values of fairness and equality taught to them by their parents would certainly detest and rebel against the deceit and manipulation of a person having and using power.

A fair number of citizens vote for the more powerful-seeming candidate in an election, hoping, usually unconsciously, for a strong and beneficent parent.  Some might argue that a power-oriented leader is likely to do a better job of ensuring the survival of the group against outside threats, since she will have no qualms about hurting outsiders or insiders in order to achieve the goal, but the motive to protect the group is universal, and although they might not be as ruthless in getting to the goal as the power-oriented person, non-power-oriented leaders may do just as good a job of actually protecting the group.

Origins

The origins of power are intimately bound up with our attempts to fulfill our desires.  When we want something, getting it always involves an effect created by someone or something.  We may create the effect ourselves, as in getting a glass of water for ourselves or calming our emotions by meditating.  We may create the effect by interacting with the environment, as when we chop down a tree to get firewood.  We may create the effect by inducing someone else to do something for us, as when we get someone to pay for dinner or give us a ride.  When we envision (imagine) our capacity to accomplish these effects (and thereby fulfill our desires), we become aware of our power or lack of it, and only then does our power becomes meaningful to us.  We may then be satisfied with our power, be disappointed with our power, or wish for more power.  We “measure” the power of other individuals by the degree to which they are able to effect their desired outcomes.

People who gather or have power are likely to have little faith in their ability to induce others to cooperate with them or little faith that those others’ will cooperate or help, so that turning to the collection and use of power is an understandable  alternative and may become the preferred method of getting what they want.  They might, of course, attempt a more collaborative approach while holding their power in the background until needed.  Either way, this suggests that persons who gather or have power do not have a particularly positive “feeling” about their relationships with others and do not expect regularly to get what they want through cooperation and collaboration.

People vary in their amount and the nature of their desires, with some wanting more in life than others.  The more one wants in general, the more one might be concerned about one’s power to create the effects that one wants.

People who feel disappointment more keenly, for whatever reason--biological or conditioning, would be more emotionally affected by having insufficient power.  We might suppose that they would be more likely than average to seek power in order to avoid future disappointments (or, complementarily, to avoid or obfuscate issues of capacity altogether).

Persons who are more inclined to be anxious are more likely to worry about whether their power is sufficient, and this can lead to efforts to increase one’s power, so that one would worry less about future gratification efforts.

Some people who seek power do so because of specific life experiences in which they were severely restricted by others in their efforts to fulfill their desires, so they guard themselves against this happening again by establishing power over others.  Many of them are also seeking power to “turn the tables” and be the superior or more powerful one in the same (or analogous) relationships.

Some people who seek power enjoy having and exercising that power because it gratifies a need for revenge or gratifies a sadistic part of the personality.

Some people who seek power do so because they have been disadvantaged or in low status positions, and they wish to improve their earlier status relations.  Since goods and outcomes are assigned to some degree according to status, the fact that a person of higher status gets more means that those of lower status will get less (the “zero sum” game) and will suffer emotionally from being identified as inferior.  It may sometimes be necessary for people with status to demonstrate their power through initiating some negative effects on others, to train those others to defer to them regularly.

Uses of power are by definition selfish, since by using power one seeks to get her own way at some cost to others.  It seems likely that the more selfish a person is, the more easily she might turn to power as a means to gratifications.  It is also likely that the more selfish people there are in a group, the more power methods will be utilized.  It seems clear that the more power is utilized, the more disappointments will be experienced in the group and the more time will be spent on attempts to “win” and to reverse past losses or humiliations.

People who seek power over others must be willing to affect the lives of others negatively, since to get one’s way one must change what those other people would naturally or prefer to do.  People who have normal or above average empathy for others would rarely be willing to affect other people negatively on purpose, and people who seek power usually are not affected much by others having negative outcomes in their lives.  People with power will exert all the power at their disposal to keep their power, if necessary, since to lose power would threaten their self-esteem or their security concerning getting what they want.

Usually power is exercised over those we are in some sort of relationship with, because we need their cooperation to get what we want, but a few people engage in sending anonymous letters, mass killing, or computer hacking, for example, because in doing so they feel (in fantasy) that they have power over others.  In real life, of course, this means that they generally don’t feel powerful and probably resent others who they feel have power over them or who have rejected them.  Power, then, can be sought and exercised in order to gain or bolster self-esteem, if a person has felt deprived, powerless, or mistreated.

In summary, persons who develop and seek to develop power over others (1) may do so simply to get more for themselves, either because they have been deprived earlier or they have been blocked from gratification by others in their past; (2) probably have little faith in their ability to get what they want through cooperation and collaboration; (3) may worry more than most people about getting what they want; (4) may be more sensitive to disappointment, (5) may bolster or seek self-esteem through power if they have felt powerless or mistreated; (6) may seek to be superior to or have power over individuals who have had power over them in the past; (7) may gratify revenge or sadistic desires through exercising power over others; and (8) must be willing to make the lives of those they exercise power over worse.

Pathological Power

Seeking power and using power over others is in one sense “natural” to human beings, but it can be considered pathological or excessive if (1) it is used to gain material benefits or self-esteem and by that use inflicts negative outcomes on others (either directly on individuals, or indirectly on masses of people) that are significantly worse than the negative outcomes that most people experience in their daily lives; or (2) is used to purposely harm or inflict negative outcomes on others to gain superiority or revenge or to gratify sadistic needs (whether or not that use of power also produces material gain or gratifications for the powerful person).

What To Do If You Have Less Power Than Others

If you have less power than someone else who is using his power in ways that negatively influence you (like restricting you from doing what you would like to do in a situation so that he can do or get what he wants), you can (1) accept the situation, (2) call his bluff, (3) gain more power yourself for future encounters, or (4) convince the more powerful person that he can do better by not using his power over you.  If you accept the situation, you are acknowledging that the best thing for you at the moment is to accept the superior power of the other person and do what he wants.  There is no shame in this, if in doing that you are really choosing what is best for you.  Some people, though, are greatly bothered by “giving in” because they resent being “in the power” of another, which is usually based in earlier experiences of being openly humiliated by persons with greater power.  The humiliated individual may benefit significantly by figuring out how not to continue to be affected by those past humiliations, either through gaining greater self-esteem (so that in his own eyes, someone having more power doesn’t threaten his self-worth), talking about the problem with trusted others, or getting therapeutic help.

The solution of gaining more power for yourself so that you won’t have to give in to the power of another may be a possibility, but it has its own problems.  Competing in power usually leads to more overt exercises of power by everyone and therefore potentially to more total harm to you and the other person, and if you want more power so that you can use it in general in your life, then you become one of those persons who is resented by others and who purposely causes negative outcomes for those around her to get her way.

Calling the other person’s bluff challenges the power of the other person and may well lead to the exercise of what would otherwise be potential power, by for example, actually telling your secret to others, if that has been the threat that gave him power, or by buying your company and firing you, so before you call the bluff, you should prepare to be hurt.  Decide how you will live with the exposed secret.  See if you can vitiate the self-esteem threat by adopting more psychologically healthy attitudes and beliefs yourself (e.g., maybe you could be proud of being gay).  Consider revealing the secret yourself before he does but in a way that minimizes the harm done.  Decide how you will cope with the loss of job or whatever else another’s exercise of power might do to you.  Depending on the threat behind the potential power, getting it over with may be a good choice, so that it is no longer a threat controlling your life.

A final option is to convince the person with power that he will benefit more by following a course other than using his power on you.  This would involve thinking even better than the powerful person about how to get he wants, possibly including pointing out the negative effects on him of using his power.

Moderating Pathological Power

Employing power implies that there will be winners and losers.  It is certainly true that each person has somewhat different immediate goals, and it is often true that not everyone can have exactly what he or she wants at the same time.  Employing power is one way of determining who will get what he wants and who will not, but there are other forms of social interaction that can be used, such as efforts to assess the needs of all involved and to search jointly for routes to meeting as many needs as possible in each situation, viewing it as a “sharing” situation rather than an “either-or” issue.  If non-power methods are used, then exactly who benefits can be rotated among the group over time and different circumstances to ensure that everyone feels like he is getting a fair outcome.

The abuses of power depend on having little concern about causing others harm in order to get what one wants, so gathering and using power is “natural” to such people, and the only real “cure” for them would be to start caring more about others and their lives.  Developing greater empathy for others would be very helpful in this regard, but it would usually not occur to a power-oriented person that empathy is desirable (except perhaps in the sense of being able to better figure out what will induce people to do what one wants or to part with their money).  Occasionally a personal tragedy will shock a power-oriented person into realizing what he has been missing out on in life (a fairly frequent movie theme), but this would only happen for a person who had previously had some caring capacity that he had later ruthlessly repressed, probably in order not to be hurt further.  Power-oriented persons who were also or who had become full-fledged psychopaths or sociopaths would probably not be swayed to change by tragedies.

Non-power-oriented persons would be well advised not to get close to or depend on power-oriented persons, because no one around those persons will be immune from having power exercised on them.  When this occurs, as noted above, one response is to do what is wanted without fighting about it, and this can be workable if one can detach oneself from any humiliation that is implied by acquiescing.  Using the option of convincing the powerful person to alter course prevents the immediate harm to oneself, but remaining in that relationship with the powerful person only delays the harm that is almost sure to come at some point.  The only responses that can hope to preserve self-respect or change one’s situation are to call the power-oriented person’s bluff or leave (or threaten to leave) the situation.  This is easier if one has prepared oneself to value self-respect far more than public embarrassment.

Non-power-oriented persons can, to some degree, protect themselves from having power used against them by minimizing actions about which they could later be blackmailed, but power-oriented persons can usually find some leverage that could embarrass one or some illegal legal chicanery to use as leverage. 

If an important goal is to minimize abuses of power, non-power-oriented persons would be wise to vote only for persons for public office or corporate advisory boards who have the least amount of power motive, but until we require public disclosure of power motives, that may be hard to judge!

Finally, non-power-oriented persons can minimize future harmful uses of power in general by being successful themselves at apportioning gratifications and adequately getting what they want through adaptive cooperation and collaboration.  Others can then imitate these methods and get better themselves at non-power-oriented methods, and the greater the percentage of persons there are in a society successfully using non-power-oriented methods, the less “normal” and perhaps less acceptable using power-oriented methods will become.

 

 

Greene, Robert (1998).  The 48 Laws of Power.  New York:  Viking Penguin.

 

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