by Naim, Moises
Chapter 4 shows in detail how the big changes in our lives have created new challenges that make it more difficult to set up and defend the barriers to power that keep rivals at bay. These changes stem from three revolutionary transformations that define our time: the More revolution, which is characterized by increases in everything from the number of countries to population size, standards of living, literacy rates, and quantity of products on the market; the Mobility revolution, which has set people, goods, money, ideas, and values moving at hitherto unimagined rates toward every corner of the planet (including those that were once remote and inaccessible); and the Mentality revolution, which reflects the major changes in mindsets, expectations, and aspirations that have accompanied these shifts.
Some aspects of these three revolutions will be familiar to the reader, but what is not familiar, and has not been examined in depth, is how each of them is making power easier to get and harder to use or keep. Chapter 4 shows exactly how these profound and simultaneous revolutions are pushing down the barriers to power and increasing the difficulty of wielding it effectively. The result has been to severely hamper large, centralized modern organizations whose sizeable assets no longer guarantee dominance and in some cases may even have become disadvantages. Indeed, the circumstances under which different forms of power are expressed—including coercion, obligation, persuasion, and inducement—have changed in ways that limit to some degree, or roll back altogether, the advantages of size.
THE DECAY OF POWER: IS IT NEW? IS IT TRUE? SO WHAT?
The changes we’ll explore have benefited innovators and new entrants in many fields—including, unfortunately, pirates, terrorists, insurgents, hackers, traffickers, counterfeiters, and cyber-criminals.15 They have produced opportunities for pro-democracy activists—as well as for fringe political parties with narrow or extreme agendas—and opened alternative paths to political influence that bypass or break down the formal and rigid internal structure of the political establishment, both in democratic countries and in repressive ones. Few could have anticipated that, when a small band of Malaysian activists decided in the summer of 2011 to “occupy” Dataran square in Kuala Lumpur, thus emulating the Indignados (“the indignant ones”) camping in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, a similar movement would spring up to occupy Wall Street and spark similar initiatives in 2,600 cities around the world.
Although the concrete political changes produced by the “Occupy” movements have thus far been meager, their impact is worthy of notice. As noted 1960s chronicler Todd Gitlin observed, “The sort of sea changes in public conversation that took three years to develop during the long-gone sixties—about brutal war, unsatisfying affluence, debased politics, and the suppressed democratic promise—took three weeks in 2011.”16 In terms of speed, impact, and new forms of horizontal organization, the Occupy movements also revealed the erosion of the monopoly that traditional political parties once had over the channels through which members of society transmitted their grievances, hopes, and demands. In the Middle East, the Arab Spring that began in 2010 does not show any signs of abating and is instead continuing to spread—with reverberations felt by authoritarian regimes the world over.
And as noted earlier, much the same is happening in the business world. Small and obscure companies from countries with barely opened markets have been able to leapfrog and sometimes take over massive global enterprises and prestige brands built over decades by grand captains of industry.
In geopolitics, small players—whether “minor” countries or nonstate entities—have acquired new opportunities to veto, interfere in, redirect, and generally stymie the concerted efforts of “big powers” and multilateral organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF). To name just a few instances: Poland’s vetoing of the EU’s low-carbon policy, the attempts by Turkey and Brazil to derail the big powers’ negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, Wikileaks’ disclosure of US diplomatic secrets, the Gates Foundation’s contesting of the World Health Organization leadership in the fight against malaria, and spoilers of various stripes and sizes in global negotiations on trade, climate change, and numerous other issues.
These newly and increasingly relevant “small players” are vastly different from one another, as are the fields they compete in. But they have in common the fact that they no longer require size, scope, history, or entrenched tradition to make their mark. They represent the rise of a new kind of power—call it micropower—that previously had little scope for success. Today, this book argues, what is changing the world has less to do with the competition between megaplayers than with the rise of micropowers and their ability to challenge the megaplayers.
The decay of power does not mean the extinction of those megaplayers. Big government, big armies, big business, and big universities will be constrained and confined as never before, but they will certainly stay relevant and their actions and decisions will carry great weight. But not as much as before. Not as much as they would like. And not as much as they expected. And though it may seem to be an unalloyed good that the powerful are less powerful than before (after all, power corrupts, doesn’t it?), their demotion can also generate instability, disorder, and paralysis in the face of complex problems.
The coming chapters will also show how the decay of power has accelerated, despite such seemingly contradictory trends as the “big is back” and “too big to fail” bailouts at the end of the last decade, the constant increases in the military budgets of the United States and China, and the growing disparities in income and wealth throughout the world. Indeed, the decay of power is a more important and far-reaching issue than the superficial trends and developments that currently clog debates among policymakers and analysts.
In particular, this book takes aim at two of the big conventional conversations about power. One is the fixation with the Internet as the explanation for changes in power, especially in politics and business. The other is the obsession with the changing of the guard in geopolitics, whereby the decline of some nations (particularly the United States) and the rise of others (notably China) is presented as the dominant world-transforming trend of our time.
The decay of power is not driven by the Internet specifically or by information technology more generally. The Internet and other tools are undeniably transforming politics, activism, business, and, of course, power. But too often, this fundamental role is exaggerated and misunderstood. New information technologies are tools—and to have an impact, tools need users, who in turn need goals, direction, and motivation. Facebook, Twitter, and text messages were fundamental in empowering the protesters in the Arab Spring. But the protesters and the circumstances that motivated them to take to the streets are driven by circumstances at home and abroad that have nothing to do with the new information tools at their disposal. Millions of people participated in the demonstrations that brought down Hosni Mubarak in Egypt—but at its peak, the Facebook page credited with helping to spur protests there had only 350,000 members. Indeed, a recent study of Twitter traffic during the Egyptian and Libyan uprisings found that more than 75 percent of people who clicked on embedded Twitter links related to those struggles were from outside the Arab world.17 Another study, by the US Institute of Peace, which also examined patterns of Twitter use during the Arab Spring, concluded that new media “did not appear to play a significant role in either in-country collective action or regional diffusion” of the uprising.18
First and foremost among the drivers of protest was the demographic reality of young people in countries like Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria—people who are healthier and better-educated than ever before but also unemployed and deeply frustrated. Moreover, the same information technologies that empower average citizens have ushered in new avenues for surveillance, repression, and corporate control—helping Iran, for example, identify and imprison participants in its stillborn “Green Revolution.” It would be wrongheaded either to deny the critical role played by information technologies, especially social media,
in the changes we are witnessing or to explain them only as the result of the widespread adoption of these technologies.
THE DECAY OF POWER IS ALSO NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH ANY OF the “fashionable” power shifts that analysts and commentators have dissected ever since the decline of America and the rise of China became axiomatic as the key geopolitical transformation of our era—one celebrated, decried, or cautioned against, with various degrees of nuance, depending on the author’s point of view. Assessing the concomitant decline of Europe and rise of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) bloc and “the rest” has become the great parlor game among professional and amateur globe-twirlers. But while rivalries among nations are in flux (they always have been), the fixation with who is declining and who is rising is a grand and perilous distraction. This is a distraction because each new batch of winners is making an unpleasant discovery: namely, that those who hold power in the future will find their latitude constrained and their effectiveness limited in ways that they probably did not anticipate and that their predecessors did not experience.
Moreover, the cumulative effect of these changes has accelerated the corrosion of moral authority and legitimacy writ large. The well-documented decline of trust in the professions and in public institutions is one manifestation of that trend. Not only are society’s leaders seen as more vulnerable, but those over whom they once held uncontested sway are more aware of different possibilities and more attuned to their own personal fulfillment. Today, we ask not what we can do for our country but what our country, employer, fast-food purveyor, or favorite airline can do for us.
Failure to look beyond the battles of the moment and see the larger decay of power carries a great cost. It contributes to confusion and prevents progress on the key and complex issues that demand our urgent attention, from the contagion of financial crises, unemployment, and poverty to resource depletion and climate change. We live in a time when, paradoxically, we are more aware of these issues and understand them better than ever before, yet we seem unable to tackle them decisively and effectively. The decay of power is the reason why.
BUT WHAT IS POWER?
A book about power requires a definition of power—and, just as important, a reason to take on this primordial yet in some ways most elusive of topics.
Power has focused behavior and driven competition since the dawn of society. For Aristotle, power along with wealth and friendships were the three components that added up to a person’s happiness. The premise that humans naturally seek power at a personal level, and that rulers seek to consolidate and expand their realm, is a matter of near-consensus in philosophy. In the sixteenth century Niccolo Machiavelli wrote in The Prince, his primer on statecraft, that the acquisition of territory and political control “is in truth very natural and common, and men always do so when they can.”19 In the seventeenth century, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes took the issue a step further in Leviathan, his classic treatise on human nature and society: “I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only after death,” Hobbes wrote.20 Two and a half centuries later, in 1885, Friedrich Nietzsche would write, in the voice of the heroic title character of Thus Spake Zarathustra: “Wherever I found a living thing, there found I Will to Power; and even in the will of the servant found I the will to be master.”21
This is not to say that human life boils down to power alone. Surely love, sex, faith, and other urges and emotions also have their part to play. But just as surely, power is a quest that has forever motivated people. And just as it has always done, power structures society and helps govern relationships and orchestrate the interactions between people and within and among communities and nations. Power plays out in every field in which we contend, compete, or organize: international politics and war, domestic politics, business, scientific inquiry, religion, social action such as philanthropy and activism, and social and cultural relations of all kinds. Arguably, power also plays out in our most intimate love and family relations, as well as in our language and even through our dreams. Those last dimensions are beyond the focus of this book, but that does not mean they have been insulated from the trends that I seek to explain.
The approach here is practical. The aim is to understand what it takes to get power, to keep it, and to lose it. This requires a working definition, and here is one: Power is the ability to direct or prevent the current or future actions of other groups and individuals. Or, put differently, power is what we exercise over others that leads them to behave in ways they would not otherwise have behaved.
This practical way of looking at power is neither new nor controversial. Although power is an inherently complex topic, many of the practical definitions that social scientists have used are similar to the one spelled out here. For instance, my approach echoes a classic and much-referenced paper written in 1957 by the political scientist Robert Dahl, “The Concept of Power.” In Dahl’s phrasing: “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do.” Different ways of exercising power, and different expressions of power such as influence, persuasion, coercion, and authority—which the next chapter will address—occur within this context: one party getting or failing to get the other to act in a certain way.22
Power may well be an essential motivation that all of us carry in our inner being, as the philosophers tell us; but as a force in action, it is inherently relational. It is not enough to measure power using proxies, such as who has the largest army, the richest treasury, the biggest population, or the most abundant resources. No one walks around with a fixed and quantifiable amount of power, because in reality any person or institution’s power varies from situation to situation. For power to operate requires an interaction or exchange between two or more parties: master and servant, ruler and citizen, boss and employee, parent and child, teacher and student, or a complex combination of individuals, parties, armies, companies, institutions, even nations. Just as the players move from situation to situation, the ability of each one to direct or prevent the actions of the others—in other words, their power—also shifts. The less the players and their attributes change, the more stable the particular distribution of power becomes. But when the number, identity, motivations, abilities, and attributes of the players change, the power distribution will change as well.
This is not just an abstract point. What I mean is that power has a social function. Its role is not just to enforce domination or to create winners and losers: it also organizes communities, societies, marketplaces, and the world. Hobbes explained this well. Because the urge for power is primal, he argued, it follows that humans are inherently conflictual and competitive. Left to express that nature without the presence of power to inhibit and direct them, they would fight until there was nothing left to fight for. But if they obeyed a “common power,” they could put their efforts toward building society, not destroying it. “During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war,” Hobbes wrote, “and such a war as is of every man against every man.”23
THE DECAY OF POWER: WHAT’S AT STAKE?
The fall of barriers to power is opening the door to new players of the kind that have transformed chess—and, as the chapters ahead will detail, are now transforming other major fields of human competition.
Those new players are the micropowers mentioned earlier. Their power is of a new kind: not the massive, overwhelming, and often coercive power of large and expert organizations but the counterpower that comes from being able to oppose and constrain what those big players can do.
It is a power that comes from innovation and initiative, yes, but also from the newly expanded scope for techniques like vetoes, foot-dragging, diversions, and interference. The classic tactics of the wartime insurgent are now available and effective in many other fields. This means that they can open new horizons not just to progressive innovators but also to
extremists, separatists, and people who are not committed to the general good. And the profusion of all these players, as is already evident and accelerating, should raise some very grave concerns about what stands to happen if the decay of power continues ignored and unchecked.
We all know that too much concentration of power results in social harm, not least in those realms that ostensibly focus on doing good—witness the scandals that have afflicted the Catholic Church. And what happens when power is radically scattered, diffuse, and decayed? The philosophers already knew the answer: chaos and anarchy. The war of all against all that Hobbes anticipated is the antithesis of social well-being. And the decay of power risks producing just this scenario. A world where players have enough power to block everyone else’s initiatives but no one has the power to impose its preferred course of action is a world where decisions are not taken, taken too late, or watered down to the point of ineffectiveness. Without the predictability and stability that come with generally accepted rules and authorities, even the most free-spirited creators of art, music, and literature will lack the ability to lead fulfilling lives, beginning with the ability to subsist in some consistent, systematic way off the fruits of their own labor (i.e., with some form of intellectual property protection). Decades of knowledge and experience accumulated by political parties, corporations, churches, militaries, and cultural institutions face the threat of dissipation. And the more slippery power becomes, the more our lives become governed by short-term incentives and fears, and the less we can chart our actions and plan for the future.
