You Don’t “Have” Power. You Make It.
Power in real time
If you have power but never use it, do you really have it? Is power a quantitative resource that can be had in greater or lesser amounts? Is it a qualitative approach to resource use? Or is it something else entirely?
If you think power is a quantitative resource – something that can be had – then you would probably assess a person’s power by measuring their income, wealth, inheritance, investments, and material assets. You’d likely measure these financial resources in conjunction with social resources that influence them. These would include quantities like the number of inherited social connections, attractiveness (as defined by today’s mainstream opinion), number and social prestige of credentials, physical similarity to the cultural group in political power, and the amount of social prestige afforded to one’s occupation. Under the quantitative view, the total amount of these resources works well as an estimate of power.
Even if a resource is not very tangible (like relative mainstream attractiveness), it can still be quantified through population statistics or some other means and therefore attributed to someone in a way that suggests they have it. What makes something quantitative is not its materiality or tangibility, but its static position in moving time. Quantifying is a sophisticated form of counting. Only things that can be specified today can be counted today.1
If you conceptualize power as a qualitative approach to resource use, then you likely estimate a person’s power by examining the ways in which they talk to other people, handle problems, direct their attention, control their emotions, learn new things, and prioritize their various roles. These approaches are ways of using the resources of vocabularies, skills, drives, feelings, focuses, and spaces, respectively, over time. What primarily distinguishes qualitative type things from quantitative type things is that they require time. They exist transtemporally, or across multiple moments in time. You can’t talk to other people or suppress a feeling if you’re frozen in time.
Unlike quantitative resources, which tend to be material and social, qualitative approaches tend to be cultural. Culture guides the way resources are used by teaching conceptual strategies for living that orchestrate attention and action over time to fulfill key goals. A person’s culture influences their understanding of what things exist today and how those existing things can and should be engaged.
The problem with assessing power in terms of just quantitative resources or qualitative approaches is that, in actuality, the two are inextricably interconnected in real time. Is a millionaire who is spending vast sums to sustain her drug addiction more powerful than a poor person who is spending his money wisely? It’s hard to say. If we just looked at quantitative resources, we would miss the millionaire’s self-limiting addiction. However, if we only used qualitative approaches, we would miss the poor person’s self-limiting poverty.
It’s more useful to think of power holistically. Since a person’s power is exerted through their actions, and action is a general name for specific ways of expending specific resources,2 power should be defined as a function of resources and approaches, in which each side of the equation is weighted equally. In real lifetimes, quantitative resources are inextricably interconnected with qualitative approaches. The way things are used is totally bound up with how resourceful those things turn out to actually be.
The opportunities and constraints of the resources and the opportunities and constraints of the user co-create each other. What kind of quantitative resource a gun is to you in a fight depends significantly on your qualitative knowledge about what guns are and how to engage with them. If you have no concept of “gun,” or no knowledge of ways to weaponize the object other than to use it as a bludgeon, then you are effectively as powerful as a clone of you that has a gun-shaped piece of metal rather than a real gun.
There are three important takeaways from this.
The first takeaway is that you can’t and shouldn’t assume that simply having more quantitative resources will increase your power. Although they are certainly part of the equation, how resourceful such things will actually turn out to be depends on your cultural knowledge of how to use them. Many lottery winners are ruined by the drastic financial disruption their “winning” entails.
The second takeaway is that, since people are always doing things, the power landscape is always shifting and therefore fundamentally ambiguous. It’s always different by the time the next moment comes around. The millionaire spending all her money on her drug addiction may be about to overdose or choose sobriety, we don’t and can’t know. The trajectory of her power is indeterminate because her impending action updates the trajectory. Not even she can know for sure what she will do next.
The third takeaway is that the way an action affects the trajectory of power is invariably a cultural judgment. Since impending actions are produced the way they are through a confluence of culture and material, and assessing the power of a past action is itself an action, the judgments we make about power are themselves culturally influenced exertions of power. In other words, actions are resource expenditures expended in culturally-specific ways, and judging “that’s very powerful” is itself an action because it marshals the resources of knowledge and speech in a cultured way. People, especially those who explicitly claim to speak for the powerless, usually talk about “power” in a way designed to increase their own personal power in life.
Power isn’t had because it isn’t simply a measurable quantifiable resource. Rather, power is made because it is exercised in life through impending actions. You can have all the material resources in the world and still squander them pathetically.
If someone asks you, “Can you please count everything?” You would respond, “Everything of what?” You can’t count everything unless everything represents a set of specifiable things. And if they asked you, “Can you please count all the flurps?” You would respond, “What do you mean by flurps? I can’t count things that I can’t specify. I may as well be counting nothing!” If time represents the flux of what is happening now/next, then it is an indivisible whole. What else is an indivisible whole?
Technically, actions are specific ways of expending specific resources in specific environments, but the environmental component adds too much complexity for the purposes of this post.