Power Seduction

Power Seduction
It starts with a whisper.
David Amerland on the seductive essence of power and how easy it is to be drawn into the moment.

#power  

Originally shared by David Amerland

Whispers…

My driver said, “We will be arriving at the airport in about forty minutes.” I was in the back of a sound-proofed, air-conditioned car with tinted windows, being driven to catch a returning flight after a four-day stint with a client. The similarity to any other drive to get to the airport ends there. The client (who needs to remain anonymous for obvious reasons) is a royal family and my flight was taking off in ten minutes. I was supposed to have been at the airport, getting through security two hours before. Coffee stopped me. 

Now, don’t get me wrong. Addicted as I am to coffee I am a stickler for making flights. I was up early enough and at the hotel lobby with plenty of time, enough time actually to also grab a coffee at the hotel restaurant where I happened to ran into one of the client’s legal team who was also staying at the hotel. He took the opportunity to check a few things with me so we sat down. I said I had barely fifteen minutes as my car was arriving to take me to the airport, he asked my flight time, made a call. Told me everything was OK. 

We spent the next two hours, as I surreptitiously checked my watch and mentally sweated bullets, having breakfast, more coffee, and discussing legalities around social media policy and team accountability. When my driver did finally arrive, by what I was by then considering a hopelessly late time, we’d spent even more precious time casually going over some of the points I had covered in my presentation and discussions the previous days, making him wait. 

So, you’d think there I was, hopelessly late, with not a chance in hell of making it through airport security in time, in the back of a car (with diplomatic number plates) racing for the airport, except we weren’t. The car wasn’t going more than regulation speed and my driver, I gathered, was actually in touch with Control Tower via walkie talkie. In a kind of surreal experience I realized that a scheduled flight on a national carrier was being held up on account of me. 

Even more surreal, when we finally did arrive I was whisked past the long queue of people waiting to board what by now was a severely delayed flight, waved past security with a nod and shown to my seat by a special attendant. I could have, I realized, carried in my on-board luggage state secrets, bags of weed, gold bullion or pounds of semtex with total impunity. 

The reason all this is more than a mildly interesting episode in what was a relatively routine consultation lies in the closing details above. The meeting with the legal team member was unplanned. A quick cup of coffee turned to a full breakfast and a ten minute talk to over two hours covering unnecessary points. With a phone call, the world around me was bent out of shape to accommodate me. Anxiety was made to disappear and formalities became things lesser mortals (who had to wait at the airport queue 90 minutes longer) had to endure. This was power. Exercised casually (and unnecessarily) and beyond the line of sight of anyone but yours truly. 

On the flight over I mulled what had happened (my fellow passengers’ grumbles about airport delays in summer and the ridiculousness of security checks that practically stripped you down, ringing around me). I wondered whether there had been a decisive point in the tableau. A moment when I could have/should have said, “great but I need to catch my flight so let’s discuss it over email”. Everything however happened smoothly, casually, quickly with no real thought (or thinking) given to the choice that should have really been thought about (as in “should we delay the flight so we can discuss this?”). 

Power has this ability to suck you in, draw you into its embrace. It has the ability to corrupt you not in great, decisive steps but in small, casual moments until you accept its benefits, stop questioning its actions and start believing that suddenly you are important, what you do is critical and that all this means you’re worth something.   

Twenty years ago the fall of Srebrenica in Bosnia resulted in the worst massacre in “Europe since the Third Reich”. The West’s complicity in it is only now coming to light: http://goo.gl/nw1hG8. A little more recently, as the CIA’s controversial aggressive interrogation program ramped up, its own health officials questioned it only to be silenced by prominent, outside psychologists who not only defended it but lent credibility to it: http://goo.gl/bt3lSR. 

These too, were instances of the exercise of power, wielded quietly, decisively, in self-important ways away from scrutiny and oversight. Philip Zimbardo in a poignant and psychologically disturbing TED Talk argues that evil is the exercise of power to intentionally do harm, and it is power that actually makes it possible to become a bad actor in a particular context: http://goo.gl/D9YNOL. It is always the “what” rather than the “who” we should be looking at he argues. 

Three years ago in a post that sparked off some interesting discussions in G+ I unwittingly echoed Zimbardo’s findings in a piece that essentially said there are no evil people: http://goo.gl/lw1i0x. There are systems that simply make some things possible and then, just like the holding up of a scheduled flight, make them OK.  

We seem to crave authority and respond to it as part of social confluence and group norm: http://goo.gl/T6VDj. Yet it has the ability to not only corrupt us by sucking us into a relative normality of the abnormal, but it also has the capability of making us feel self-important while it does so. 

In the interconnected, open, diverse and at times self-organizing world we live in, the sense of community and authority can come through more rarefied, less top-down imposed ways. The setting changes nothing. When power is decentralized and when it is exercised by the many, as opposed by just the few, it has the incontrovertible power to corrupt as the discussion over former Reddit CEO, Ellen Pao’s departure, so clearly shows: http://goo.gl/Csl7Ti. With scant evidence Pao was subjected to a week long, broad-based, self-organized, largely decentralized and ever-escalating attack. 

As it happens the Reddit community is again the focus of another instance of abuse of power where the question of morality (ever a slippery slope if there was one) became the catalyst that led to this: http://goo.gl/8tPIWH. 

In an interesting aside that is tangentially related to all this comes the question of why do we obey the law? (https://goo.gl/fTG3Fs). There is a dynamic at work we constantly engage in that is designed to allow us to choose the path that best makes us fit into our social construct. That much is clear as is the fact that power always corrupts, irrespective of who has it, how he got it and how he then chooses to exercise it (and I am using ‘he’ here, conventionally rather than with a specific gender in mind). 

Social media has resulted in a tiny (in my opinion) shift in power, but not accountability. It has resulted in greater transparency and visibility but not change. In a piece surfaced by Leland LeCuyer  Thomas Edsall asks in the New York Times “Why Don’t the Poor Rise Up?” (http://goo.gl/5xhVUK) and concludes that it’s because they’re largely irrelevant to the conversation. In a similar piece in The Economist the answer is even more dispiriting: http://goo.gl/x2fJdy, citing the grind of daily life for those caught in the inequality trap, to even think of rising up. Both have the ring of truth to them, but that’s not the real reason change is not occurring, power is not shifting, wealth is not being actively redistributed through new public policies.  

Yes, we have more power, more transparency and the ability to do more with it. But it is also not really our job to do that. We may get together and achieve phenomenal things as we did with SOPA where there was a credible and clear threat to freedom on the internet and a clear call of action to thwart it, but something like the OWS movement is too diffuse, too broad, too global to be able to occupy our attention for very long. We have lives to lead. Jobs to do. 

Is there an answer? Are we doomed? Will we never be free from the ability of power to whisper seductively in our ear, draw us in with small conveniences and keep us hooked with feeling important? 

Peter Eigen, a former director of World Bank in Nairobi, suggests that there are ways to combat systemic power and make it accountable and it hinges on transparency: https://goo.gl/152SxY. Had the entire “I will hold your plane for you while we have this non-essential talk over breakfast and coffee” incident I was part of, been part of the public domain, known to the hundreds of people who were inconvenienced on my behalf, my guess is it would never have happened. 

Radical transparency has the ability to act as an immediate check of the worst abuses of power. It provides a sufficient form of balance to then enable us to hopefully work towards addressing the rest. Asking the difficult questions which is not our job to really ask, and demand we get answers. Focus on issues that are important but which we have no official mandate to focus on, and which we need to look at. Then, and only then, will we perhaps stand a real chance at creating the kind of world we feel proud to be part of and are really willing to live in. And in case you’re wondering I have stopped working with that client, the entire experience left me feeling uneasy about the effect of that relationship on me. 

This has been a longer Sunday Read than usual. No apologies. You should have made sure that there is sufficient amount of coffee and mountains of donuts, cookies, croissants and chocolate cake to cover such eventuality. Have an awesome Sunday, wherever you are.