To be Dominant is Good, if You Hearken unto God

O the vainness, and the frailties, and the foolishness of men! When they are learned they think they are wise, and they hearken not unto the counsel of God, for they set it aside, supposing they know of themselves, wherefore, their wisdom is foolishness and it profiteth them not. And they shall perish.

29 But to be learned is good if they hearken unto the counsels of God.

-thus Jacob, 2 Nephi 9:29.  That scripture wasn’t even mentioned in the lesson manual, but its what everyone wanted to talk about.  That says a lot about where we are at these days.

They generalized it to include the rich and the famous and generally everyone who has high status in worldly terms.

The conclusion of the discussion was that the problem with the learned and the clever and the successful wasn’t that they  had too much learning or smarts or success for their own good.  It was that they had too little.

If you excel most people around you on some dimension, it is easy to feel that you are good enough by comparison.  But the comparison is wrong.  You don’t need to be smart enough to be smarter than most.  You don’t need to be learned enough to know more than  most.  Or rich enough or successful enough.  Other people aren’t your competition.  Your competition is reality.

You need to be smart and learned and rich and successful enough to ensure your happiness and welfare and the happiness and welfare of those that you love for time and all eternity against all mishap and disaster.  Seen in those terms, how could you possibly think you can do without God’s advice?

Most worldly definitions of success are too small and mediocre.  They aren’t ambitious enough.  They only work by handwaving huge swaths of everything as impossible to achieve and therefore not worth talking about.  It is the people who have arrived who are the mostly likely to suffer from the soft bigotry of low expectations, for themselves.

In an incredibly pulpy book I just read–but well-written withal–I came across the following analogy.  A  mentor and a student are on a beach.  The student is young but incredibly bright and diligent.  He has devoured books.  And he is offended that his  mentor just called him ignorant.  The mentor pinches a single grain of sand.  “This is what you know,” the mentor says.  Then the mentor scoops up a generous heaping handful of sand.  “This is what I know.”  Then the mentor throws the sand and gestures to the beach.  “This is what there is to know.”

Wordly success is like a local optimum.  You know that having a good view is important, and you keep getting a better view the higher you climb.  In fact, you have the best possible view  where you are at and you ignore the idiots who tell you to go farther north, because you know that means going back down.  But in fact you are on the wrong hill.  The true view is much better from the peak, and the only way for you to ascend is to come back down.

Power

Which brings me to power.   Power is a key divine attribute.  But it also seems to be a particularly dangerous one.

After Sunday School it popped into my head that maybe the problem with people and power isn’t too much power, but too little.

D&C 121:39 is one of the most famous verses in scripture about power.   Yes, about power.  Authority and dominion are not special words that mean what we want them to mean to avoid challenging truths.  If you want to experience the full rawness and paradox of the revelation, replace “dominion” with “dominance.”  “Unrighteous dominance.”  “Thy dominance shall be an everlasting dominance, and without compulsory means it shall flow unto forever and ever.”

Here is the verse.

We have learned by sad experience that it is the nature and disposition of almost all men, as soon as they get a little authority, as they suppose, they will immediately begin to exercise unrighteous dominion.

As soon as they get a little authority . . .  I had always assumed that was just style, making the point by saying that even people who had just acquired authority, and even only a little bit of it, still exercised unrighteous dominion.  What if it isn’t just style, what if it is a real pattern that Joseph Smith  noticed?  What if small amounts of power and recently acquired power are more dangerous?

Think about wealth.  It is a stereotype that the nouveau riche are the ones who have it most go to their head.  Or learning.  We know from experience that when you first learn a concept is when you are likely to be immoderately excited about it and want to apply it to everything.  Without a good sense for the concept’s limits.  “Beware the man of one book.”

My relationship with  my wife has taken a step up in the last year.   Thinking it over, I noticed two paradoxical things.  First, I have been more authoritative, taking more responsibility, acting more in charge than before.  Second, I  have treated her as more of an equal, a peer, a partner than before.  It sounds paradoxical but so it is.  Without meaning to, it seems I have ended up at the place the Proclamation describes.

My authority doesn’t bother her because I treat her as an equal.  Treating her as an equal means more to her because I am an authority.

We’ll see where this ends up.