First off, a caveat.  This isn’t a bit about speaking truth to powerful people or catching out the evil intents of large organizations.  Yeah, there are those kinds of lies flooding out from the powerful, but it’s kind of like shooting ducks in a barrel or going over already well plowed ground.  This is about the lies that power whispers to those who wield it. You’ll find some familiar themes to that other narrative, but that’s only because power has so beguiled the powerful that they repeat what it tells them without much critical filter. 

So the lies that power tells those who wield it.  Hey you in the back, quit sidling for the exits. No, I don’t want to hear how powerless you are and how this can’t apply to you.  That’s the first lie power tries.  Almost a kind of test and if you fall for that one, power moves on because all power cares about is power. Not grace, not love, not beauty, not justice not fairness, just power. It wants vectors that will pull it out of its scabbard and whirl it around. That first lie, that some people have power and others don’t, is one of the ways power prepares the ground for its various assaults on common sense and decency. What better way to fight resistance than to convince your targets that resistance is futile and they might as well go along with power’s plan.  Easier and more civilized (whatever the hell that means) for everybody. Don’t listen to that lie.  Everyone, every single person, you, me, the new born baby, and the senile old guy all have some power.  Yeah, maybe not enough to do every little thing we can imagine, not even enough to prevent the all too common horrors that being alive entails, but we each have some power. And if you deny your own power than you aren’t managing it.  And if you’re not managing whatever power you have, that power is managing and manipulating you. 

Power is something that every person should think about and consider if they have any care about their impact on the world or the world’s impact on them.  A bit of refresher may be in order here as this is part two of my discussions on power and peacemaking. In the first of the series, I posited three kinds of power, physical, positional, and transcendent, noting that the first two tend to flow outward and the last tends to flow inward. The types of power also have different levels of fidelity from intent to outcome, which is where the morality of power gets all tangled up and the relationship of power to peacemaking gets fraught as well.  If you missed that piece, Peacemaking and Power is available on The Wondering Pathfinder blog.

Back to the lies power tells.  That first one, that you are powerless, is often built by confusing the lack of one kind of power, say physical power or positional power, with a lack of any kind of power over self or others. Most people have enough physical power to walk away.  Situationally that may not be an option in the face of a greater physical power, but not possessing overwhelming physical power in a situation is not the same thing as have no power at all. Both physical and positional power are most susceptible to and dependent on outside manipulation and so can be made to seem lacking. Transcendent power, directed inward to the self, is less susceptible to manipulation and can often be a starting point for recovery of the things power would strip from us in order to enslave us to its will. In the most powerless situation, it is always worthwhile to look beyond the power one doesn’t have to the power one does have, insufficient as it may seem.  My personal experience is that a quest for finding my own sources of power often reframes a hopeless situation as the sources of power I most readily tap flow from different sources than the powers which threaten to overwhelm me. 

Great!  I’ve found some power! And immediately the lying chatter from power begins anew. The second lie that power will tell you if you fight your way through the first one, is that the power you’ve found is all you’ll ever need to address the given situation. If you just feed that power enough, build it up, make it strong enough, you can use it to sweep away all opposition and emerge triumphant. It doesn’t take a lot of looking around to understand that walking down that feed-me path of power may well lead you to be triumphant… in a wasteland of collateral damage. This reality is one of the most challenging for those who would use power for peacemaking. There is no sufficient volume of violence to ensure peace. This is a tough one because we do crave grace and love and peace and will do almost anything to try and secure it for us and the ones we love. But history is littered with instances of the failure of some better weapon, some more powerful rocket, some stronger bank or smarter technology, littered with their failure to deliver on the seductive second promise of power that, given enough of it, all will be well. Hell, the current headlines of black people dying at the hands of peacekeeping authorities, or the dead and dying in Israel and Gaza are plain enough texts on the poor fidelity of power’s promise to just handle it if fed enough. To honor our intentions, whatever they are, we must alloy power with reflection, grace and love and not put all our faith in that one false God. Remember if we’re not managing power and its appetites, it’s managing us.

The third lie that power tells us when we pick it up, is that all will be lost if we ever lay it down. The more we deal with power, the more sophisticated the lies become and this one is pretty subtle because it doesn’t take much imagination for someone having an impact to imagine the outcome if they just walk away. Especially in that first dopamine rush of effectiveness, power is eager to sidle up to us and whisper in our ear, “See, how good is this? You could do so much more like this if you just feed me.”  Yeah, there’s a recurring theme there. Power is pretty single-minded. Whatever your intent when you pick it up, its intent is unchanged and focused. In the Matrix series, Neo askes what a powerful man wants and is told they want what all powerful men want.  More power. This addictive urge to increase must be managed to build or maintain fidelity of outcome to intent when wielding power.  At best the feeding of power becomes a distraction.  At worst, it consumes all our energy and perverts our efforts, laying waste to our integrity. In peacemaking, the use of power must be proportionate to the moral value of the outcome including all the collateral damage that the use of power always, yes always, entails.  

This is the catch-22 for Israel in Gaza right now. They must never forget or allow us to forget the horrors of the holocaust. They must struggle to create space on the face of the planet where the holocaust cannot be birthed again. And, Lordy, listening to public statements from Hamas about destroying Israel, it sounds like that beast is trying for a comeback.  But in responding to Hamas, Israel can’t propagate another kind of holocaust, can’t listen to the second and third lies of power that a little more power will solve the problem and if that power isn’t used, all is lost. 

But wait a second. The same catch-22 exists for Hamas. If one continues to listen to Hamas beyond the horrific, childish insistence on eliminating Israel, one hears the exact same message as Israel’s “Never Forget” message. A Hamas official justified the October 7 violence by citing a fear that the world was forgetting about the real plight of the Palestinian people. Hamas, like Israel, has fallen for the second and third lies of power.  A little more and all will be lost if they don’t use the power/violence they have.  

If we pick up power without adequate discipline, reflection and sacrifice, we are destined to become the things we most hate. I’m not smart enough to articulate a plan for a way forward for the combatants, but I’m pretty sure it is not through a process of beating the shit out of each other.  Remember, if you’re not managing power and its collateral damage, it’s managing you. 

There, that’s three of the most common lies that power will tell us when we try to pick it up along with some illustrations of how it works.  To paraphrase an old saying, Power will try to corrupt you.  Absolute power will absolutely corrupt you. If we want to bring peace to the world, to be graceful and loving of all peoples and all creation, we must be willing to be in the places where peace and grace and love are lacking.  We must be willing to see clearly, no matter how frightening, the sources of the suffering, even when we hold some of that source in our very own hands. We must be willing to alloy our power with insight and love and grace and, yes, sacrifice. Always remember.  If we’re not managing our power, it’s off doing its own thing and signing our names to outcome.