Power-Poor

You have heard of someone who is land-poor or house-poor.  They  have a great, big shiny asset, the kind that fulfills every dream of riches, but the owner neither feels rich nor always lives rich because the mortgage and maintenance eat up all their income.

Almost all the stately homes of England are open to the public or even owned by the public and its not because the British aristocracy is just that generous.  Maybe a bit, but mostly because the stately homes were stately millstones about their necks.

Blenheim Palace — the seat of what was one of Britain’s richest and most successful families — open to the public to help pay costs

Same with power.  All power costs something to maintain and someone can be objectively quite powerful but not feel it because almost all their power goes to maintaining their power.

In the New Testament  there is a centurion who gives us a very vivid image of power.   “I say go, and he goest.”  To the one going, its pretty obvious that the centurion is very powerful.  It may not feel the same way to the centurion.  He more or less *has* to tell the soldier where to go or he quickly loses the ability and its not exciting to give the soldier his orders.  It doesn’t feel like power.  It feels like responsibility.  Even delegation is hard and in some ways requires more effort than just doing it yourself or micromanaging.

So with power as with wealth, we might say that how it feels depends not on the total amount but how much you have left to use when all your obligations and debts and maintenance costs are accounted for.  Delta power or net power.

(Stick with us on this one until the end, the end is where they payout is).

A bishop has a lot of power, even outsiders can see this, but actual LDS people don’t think of bishops as powerful because we are acutely aware that everything they have got and more goes to making the ward work.  Their net power is pretty low.

With money, everyone is aware that there is a difference between wealth and income, between net and gross, between asset value and cash flow.  These are not sophisticated concepts.  But with most thinking about power, we don’t even rise to that level.

The Net Power concept can be pretty illuminating.

Unrighteous Dominion

We all know the scripture.  Someone gets placed in a position of a little authority, they abuse it, and amen to their authority.  (D&C 121, my poppets).

The first part of this sequence is being given power.  It is not natural, not grown, it is stepping into some borrowed authority.

Of course the person wants to experience that power, they want to taste it, but it turns out there is very little net power there.  The ends for which the authority was conferred on the person use up all or almost all the conferred authority.  But if the person abuses the authority, now they do have net power.  By converting the authority to their own purposes, they get to experience having net power.  Power at their disposal.  But of course the authority then gets withdrawn and the person’s net power and gross power go to zero.

We can generalize this.  Someone acquires power in some way but the net power is very small because of the maintenance costs, obligations, and debts incurred.  But that doesn’t feel powerful.  So the person goes on a spending spree, as it were, enjoying the power by ignoring the maintenance costs.  So the power gets eroded, becomes fragile, and then pops.  Zero net power, zero gross power.

One of God’s titles is Endless or Everlasting.  We see in D&C 19 that there is quite a bit of mystical significance tied to that.

I think unrighteous dominion is an example.  Unrighteous dominion literally means dominion that does not last.  Righteous dominion is endless dominion.

Net Power gets Consumed

In principle, just as with money, one could acquire power and capability and just… do nothing.  You could maintain a large pool of net power.

But this rarely happens and maybe cannot ever happens.  I don’t have a complete theory of why it rarely happens, but some of the reasons are obvious.

1. Unused power doesn’t feel real to you.  The only way you know you have power, the only way you experience yourself as having power, is using it.  So you do.  \
2. Human psychology being what it is, unused power becomes theoretical and then ends.  The kings of England for example went from having a lot of power to having a lot of power that they never used to having a lot of theoretical power but it would be a crisis if they tried to  use to not having power.  In our running comparison between power and money, think of a country that decides to save some of its tax receipts in a vault.  Economists tell us, and their reasons are sound, that this isn’t really savings.  What has actually happened is that the money has practically ceased to exist.

3. Power is ultimately about human capability.  Even the kind of power we think of that involves ordering people around requires human capability on the part of the person giving orders.  It’s not as simple as just saying something.  This capability degrades if not kept in practice.

4. It takes an exercise of power to not use power.  Not using power is harder than using it.

In practice, the only way to preserve power may be to dedicate it to things that you can easily drop if you  have to.  It can’t just sit there.  Think of a military that when not in war spends its time doing military exercises.  Think of a country that maintains a reserve labor force by having most women be homemakers.  You can’t just warehouse extra workers for emergencies.

The fact  that net power gets consumed is why you feel busy all the time.  This is not just a metaphor.  Your time and capability are power and you end up using them.

The Net Power concept is why adversity and crises can feel so liberating.  Your time and capability get radically constrained and you have to do deep triage on all your commitments.  But as you weather the crisis, your power levels return toward normal but you don’t have the same amount of commitments you had before.  Your net power has temporarily gone way up.  You will probably end up using it all again and a lot of it in the same way as before, but you first have this moment of net power where you are deciding how to use your power again, and it is exhilarating.  If we are honest with ourselves, sometimes even the crisis itself can feel exhilarating because renegotiating all your commitments means you have at least briefly net power again.  You see the same thing when you hit a budget crunch and then get out of it, or when  you have an economic recession followed by a recovery.

P.S. Our tendency to have no net power is probably a trap.  Some level of excess capability probably helps you maintain power over the long run and in particular to grow it.

The Net Power Conundrum is Why Psychopaths and  the Crazy Ambitious Rise to the Top

The problem that only net power feels like power for most people is probably why psychopaths and the crazy ambitious rise to the top.  For psychopaths (I’m using the term non-scientifically) telling people what to do is fun.  For them, the fact that almost all their power gets consumed in maintaining it is not really a problem, because power maintenance is so fulfilling for them.  Is someone really  house-poor if they just love love love their house and get a massive kick out of home repairs?  The crazy ambitious are the same way in that for them gross power is psychologically satisfying.  They just want that number to be big.  So getting on top is really appealing to them because its not the net that matters, its the gross.   I think being satisfied by gross power is literally the definition of what makes someone crazy ambitious.

Time and Eternity Solves This

You are busy.  You  have a lot to do, you are consumed with keeping everything going.  You don’t feel powerful.  But suppose you took some time every day to remember why you chose to do this stuff in the first place.  Mentally, you went back to the moment of choice and affirmed it.  Wouldn’t you feel less like you were in a straitjacket and more like you were a being of agency and power?  I think it would, at least a bit.

In time, what you are is someone who acquires a bit of net power and then promptly uses it on something and goes right back to having little net power.  Your average is near zero.  But from the perspective of eternity its all one.  “All things before our face.”  From the perspective of eternity, that moment of choice and net power never ends and the afterwords where you are executing the choice is more a celebration or an actualization of your power than it is a diminution of it.  You, as you are right now, from the perspective of eternity, are a young god striding forth in the blaze of your glory.

P.S.  It’s a hard concept to briefly explain.  More here.  Or here for a real deep dive.

Love Solves This

Most importantly, love solves this.

The only way non-psychopaths can enjoy gross power is through love.

This is trivially true.  If you love your company and what it does, running it is no burden even if that particular kind of power feels more like responsibility than pleasure to you.  If you love your ward, you can be a bishop.

But it can go deeper than that.

If net power is a valid concept, can there also be power investments?  Multiplicative power?  Compounding power interest?  Power venture capitalists?

Why, yes, there can be.  The normal secular modes of power are either to capture existing power or else to create power by better organizing the rest.  Making other people more powerful is sometimes a necessary expedient for the powerful, but always a dangerous one and usually only temporary.    The Persian monarch boasted he was King of Kings because he had put kings under his feet.

Christ’s boast is different and his approach is revolutionary.  He is the King of Kings because makes those under him into kings.   He raises them up.

In this approach,  the ruler grows his own power by making his subjects more powerful.  This does not threaten him, because they love him, because he loves them.  Because he  loves them their increase in power doesn’t only add to his power to the extent it enhances his ability to achieve his own objectives.  Their well-being and strength is one of his objectives and so their power is his power 1:1.

No secular power has done it but the nation that pulls it off will create a social revolution as profound as the agricultural or the industrial and will settle the stars.  And the Lord will welcome them into the eternities.

Because when you use your power on behalf of people you love, when maintaining your power requires helping poeple that you also happen to love, none of it is gross, it is all net, none of it wasted, everything you do is what you want to do.

MORE

I accidentally have been creating a series.  This is the third in the series.

Power and Love

Satan’s Choice