God like a Mad Surfer

Last year I invented one of the many major concepts for which I will shortly be world famous, school children will be forced to memorize reams of my turgid prose while they draw a mustache on my picture in their textbook,* and then won’t you be sorry.

Seriously, all vainglory aside, it really is an important insight and whoever thought of it first (probably not me) deserves the thanks of a grateful nation.

I am referring to the insight that there is Gross Power (gross freedom) and Net Power (net freedom). Delta Power, in other words.

Someone with a great deal of power/freedom/agency/capability doesn’t feel it when all of it is already committed. Presidents don’t get gray hairs because of the heady Dionysian rush of untrammeled authority. The more they can do, the more they have to do. Exercising a great deal of gross power or gross freedom isn’t what we think of when we think of power or freedom. Instead, we basically only *feel* powerful and free when we have acquired some new power and freedom and haven’t committed it fully to anything yet. The glorious sense of freedom comes only in the transition.

I first stumbled across the idea while wondering how the Nephites could cycle so rapidly between prosperity and poverty. But I really flesh it out in a post called Power Poor, where I poke into a lot of the implications and flesh out the idea.

Warning: what follows is analytical and abstract and terse. I find it thrilling but not everyone will and that’s no reflection on them.

Here’s two more implications:

The first is into the fall and the atonement. If one of the components of joy is that sense of freedom and power (net power in our terminology) then full joy wasn’t possible in the Garden. Everything was already named. It only remained to tend the garden. Maintenance. Stagnation.

Something had to give in order for Adam and Eve to experience freedom. The Fall was hard and probably mostly miserable, but it also had moments of joy they couldn’t have experienced otherwise. That the Fall destroyed a great deal of gross power in order to create some net power isn’t to the contrary. We see the same phenomenon in our own lives and all around us. Some disaster simplifies all your commitments and while its mostly tragic you also feel guilty moments of liberation because you are free to allocate some of what is left again. It may be sinful, or possibly transgressive, to *deliberately* destroy gross power in order to experience some net power, but this seems to fit the Fall narrative also. But unfortunately consequences are what they are and net power is mostly found in the transition, so once the Fall happens you are kinda stuck again, except at a much lower level of gross power. You have exchanged a gilded prison for an iron one. UNLESS someone comes along with much greater power who assumes a lot of the liabilities your paltry power is devoted to dealing with, so you now have delta power to up your gross power. Once that has happened, the same person could then offer to relieve another burden, and so on. We could call this Atonement and Repentance. (I have a tickle in my brain that says Jehovah God becoming Christ Mortal was a radical step down in gross power which may have had interesting net power effects, but its no more than a tickle at the moment).

The second implication is this: if the net power idea applies to God in some way, then for God to fully experience Godhood, He would have to continually be creating new surplus and new possibilities while “cashing out” old ones. The more the greater.

>And as one earth shall pass away, and the heavens thereof even so shall another come; and there is no end to my works, neither to my words.

-thus Moses 1:38

I have this vision of the ocean of space and time and possibility and God like a mad surfer riding the wave of endless change.

*Jokes on them, I have instructed my my official portraitist to put me down with glasses, a mustache, and a Van Dyke goatee. Where’s your doodling now, my chucks?