Thursday 28 Mar 2024
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This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on October 5, 2020 - October 11, 2020

Why is everyone obsessed with power?

In his book, Anatomy of Power, former US ambassador to India and Harvard professor John Kenneth Galbraith defined three types of power: compensatory (buying of power), condign (forcing submission) and conditioned (power of persuasion). In short, power can be bought, forced or influenced through ideology or religion.

Galbraith also identified the sources of power through personality or charismatic leadership; property in the form of land, resources and knowledge; or organisation. Individual power has always been amplified through organisations, such as leadership in multinational firms, civil societies (today, foundations or non-governmental institutions, political parties or military, religion and media/educational channels). But it takes individual traits such as charisma, morality, manipulativeness and wisdom to lead other people.

In contrast, the Chinese legalist philosopher Han Feizi (c.233 BC) identified power from three sources: law or method, process or technology, and finally, will or force. He understood that political power comes from the position of the king to influence the behaviour of his court, which can be achieved through persuasion, incentives (greed or fear) and, of course, threats of force. Power can be manipulated through writing the laws, changing the process or institution, or through sheer personal will.

Power is not only relative but relational. Robinson Crusoe may own the island he is on, but he is powerless alone because there is no one to order around. Power does not operate in a vacuum, but also abhors a vacuum. If Crusoe is not able to defend himself, then any newcomer will be able to seize the island and enslave him. If one cedes power, someone else gets it.

Philosophically, power can be derived from possession of physical matter, such as land, natural resources (oil, energy). But power also comes from mental assets (knowledge, technology, processes and institutions), plus the art of persuasion through charisma, physical force, religion, ideology, advertising and social media.

Land on its own is not power, but since land can produce food, water or energy (oil, gas or coal), then historically, landowners had real power. But with the Industrial Revolution, the source of power is now fossil fuel, which is why every power fights over the Middle East as the biggest source of fossil energy. If it was only a desert, few would care.

Money plays a part because physical assets can be converted into money and vice versa.

You need money to fund political activities, but politics must control money or it will be controlled by money. The US has one huge advantage over its rivals because of the reserve currency status of the US dollar, which enables the country to print money to finance its deficits.

Last but not least, information and technology are sources of power, because those with superior technology and information can control their rivals. The strategy game is key, because if you have better artificial intelligence and big data, you can manipulate your followers’ behaviour. If people follow fixed strategies (such as being always rational), they can be read easily and beaten through better strategies.

Han Feizi made the shrewd observation that a king must never reveal his own preferences, because if he does so, he will be manipulated by his ministers and underlings. Political power comes from uncertainty in the exercise of power, because the other parties cannot predict and then control you. Power is a strategy play. This explains why disinformation, misinformation and spying play such important roles in warfare and corporate competition.

The story of people, planet and politics can now be explained in terms of money, information and power. The planetary cosmos operates on energy that acts on matter. Earth receives energy from the sun and its movement is also influenced by gravity. Plants convert sunlight into body mass that stores energy. The moon influences the tides and fish behaviour. Animals eat plants and other animals to recharge the energy they need to hunt and reproduce. When plants and animals die, they become, over time, fossil fuel.

Man was the weakest of animals, but because Homo Sapiens were clever, they learnt to convert wood into fire, use water to irrigate food crops, tame animals for food, and then create weapons to control other human beings. Through science and politics, man first learnt to control nature and then other people.

Just as the alpha ape or lion in a pack has more food and priority before others in order to be the strongest to hunt and defend the group, power has hierarchy and is never equal. When the alpha is young and strong, it can take on any rivals, but when it ages, it learns to balance power through strategy and wiles, namely through politics, diplomacy or brute force.

Better still, different interactions with different players produce innovation and new combinations or permutations of power that puts the alpha one step ahead of the opposition. The sophisticated derivation of money or financial innovation is part of that power play.

The human brain is a complex system comprising 100 billion neurons that controls billions of cells. There are now 7.8 billion human beings interacting with each other, with at least half through the Internet. A human being is a complex adaptive system (CAS) interacting with many more complex adaptive systems. It would be arrogant to assume that such interactions can be reduced to simple linear equations.

If the universe is undergoing a Big Bang because it grows in time and space, then human beings in the planet are also growing and becoming more complex and diverse over time. To think that everything can be reduced into a simple abstraction or one Theory of Everything is fallacious. Man uses power to control his environment and future.

We can now explain the US-China geopolitical rivalry as a multi-dimensional competition between rivals through technology, politics and, perhaps, even war. It does not have to be a zero-sum game of one winner, one loser. Power can corrupt and destroy, but power can also do good. There is therefore always positive power and negative power that interact with each other to bring forth outcomes that we find difficult to predict.

You notice that we are using philosophy, physics, biology, politics, money and technology as an inter-disciplinary tool to explain what is happening today. The world is a systemic whole and cannot be explained from one perspective alone.

People with religious inclinations attribute the final outcome to God, whereas those who believe in the market calls it the Invisible Hand. Humility demands that we try to use multi-disciplines to explain complex phenomena. The move from order to disorder may appear chaotic, but there is a pattern in chaos which scientists are only beginning to understand.

Beauty is both simple and complex at the same time. And so is power — to be admired and to be feared.


Tan Sri Andrew Sheng writes on global issues from an Asian perspective

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