Influence vs Power
Winning friends by influencing people
[Letter #005]
Good morning, son.
Your mother is about to enter her second trimester with the fetus that we hope will become you. Her symptoms shift from day to day, better or worse, but we’re hoping that they’ll become better still as we progress over the next few weeks. We’ve taken to calling the little one “Tiny Bear,” since we won’t give him your name until he’s born. At that point, we’ll know that he’s you. Plus, we’re still trying to decide your name.
Today, I want to discuss something with you that is important to me. It’s something that I think far too many people misunderstand. To me, it’s quite simple, but I think society would rather discourage such ideas. Certainly, doing so would benefit the folks in charge.
What is on my mind is the difference between influence and power. Dictionaries can either clarify or obscure, depending how you use them, but they provide a good starting point for these sorts of discussions, so we’ll refer to one to get our baseline. According to Dictionary.com:
Influence — the action or process of producing effects on the actions, behavior, opinions, etc., of another or others.
Power — the possession of control or command over people.
There is a long list of definitions for “power,” but I chose this one because I’m specifically interested in “power over,” rather than, say, “power plants” or “three to the third power.” There are also many overlapping definitions between these two words and indeed, some would even say that they’re synonyms. However, I think there’s a case to be made that discernment between the two is useful. Let’s take a look at “influence.”
Influence can be simply thought of as pressure to have an effect. A doctor, for example, has an influence on your health when she advises you to eat less sugar and exercise more often. You could ignore her if you like, but she probably knows what she’s talking about on this subject. A salesperson can influence you to purchase this model car over that one. He may or may not have your best interests in mind, and it’s up to you to figure that out.
Of the choice between influence and power, it’s influence that I prefer in nearly all circumstances, for a very particular reason: it doesn’t require violence. We’ll come back to this later in the letter.
A philosopher that I like has a good bit in one of his essays about this sort of thing, but– erm. I should take a quick aside to explain something.
People aren’t perfect. They aren’t gods, they aren’t paragons, and they aren’t saints. These are fictions that other people made up to give us role models to aspire to. No one actually is as these role models are supposed to have been. This is why the phrase goes “never meet your heroes.” In person, they’re assholes, imperfect and ugly, disappointing and pretentious. Rare is the case when that’s not immediately obvious, but it’s always true in one way or another. Everyone will let you down eventually. If and when I’ve let you down, son, I humbly apologize.
A friend once told me when I was young, “If you can find a way to forgive everyone you ever meet of three character flaws, you’ll end up getting along with almost everyone.” Which is to say, if the flaw doesn’t appear to be actively harming others, try to look past it to see the good.
In this case, the philosopher I’m about to cite is Mikhail Bakunin. He was an anarchist thinker back in the days of Marx, and these two didn’t get along. They argued with each other bitterly, although they kept the fighting to mere words. One thing they agreed on, however, was their blatant antisemitism. It seems like they could have more-or-less civil discussions all night long about politics, economy, religion, or whatever else took their interest, but when it came to jews, they just lost it. It was a fashionable thing to do in Europe before the World Wars, but it’s certainly disgusting from today’s perspective.
This is why I suggest that you take the good and do your best to ignore the bad. Bakunin had a lot of good things to say, if you just ignore literally everything he ever mentioned about jews.
Lots of people were like that. Martin Luther King Jr, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Thomas Jefferson, and Winston Churchill were, apart from their positive contributions to humanity, known to– cheat on his wife, “sleep with” underage girls, enslave and rape black people, and drink himself into a stupor to the point that he required a stand-in actor to deliver his radio speeches, respectively. People suck, everyone sucks, but sometimes they do or say something useful.
So, here’s what Bakunin has to say regarding “authority”:
Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor the savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism censure. I do not content myself with consulting authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognize no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such an individual, I have no absolute faith in any person.
– Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State, pub. 1882
In my view, Bakunin is here describing influence. His essay was part of a lengthy discourse during his age concerning authority, who has it, what it means, and whether or not (or how) to use it. He’s yielding “authority” to people who know more about specialized subjects than he ever will, but he specifically points out that he has the ability to simply ignore them at any time if he feels that their influence is inappropriate. More to the point, he’s spelling out that these “authorities” on various subjects do not actually have power over him.
Power implies control. It implies the ability to force things to be or behave in whatever way the powerful one sees fit. The concept of power extends well beyond a suggestion, an advice, or even a persuasion. Power is compulsion. It’s mandatory. It’s thy will be done. There is a simple reason why this is the case, and that simple reason is always present where power exists. I mentioned it earlier.
Power is violence.
I suppose to be more accurate, power only results from the use or threat of violence. To say that one thing is another thing can be problematic, so to avoid pedantry, I should be more careful. This is to say, there is no such thing as power over anyone without use or threat of violence.
I’m not sure how things will look when you read this, son, but I imagine that there will still be a lot of people exercising power over one another then as there are now. These days, the government claims the monopoly on violence. They claim that they’re the only ones allowed to do the violence, and anyone else caught using the violence will be violently opposed. They do this through the military around the globe and through law enforcement here in the country.
As things have been up until the present, you’d have a law made by the government. It can say whatever they want it to say. There are practically no limits on their ability to write into law anything they wish. There are some roadblocks here and there, but enough money will make anything legal.
If you disobey the law, a police officer will attempt to enforce the law by perhaps fining you. If you refuse to pay the fine, the officer will attempt to physically force you into a cage in order to punish you. This punishment is supposed to “correct” your behavior, which means that you would henceforth submit to the powerful. If your transgression against authority is egregious enough, you will be placed in a “correctional facility,” which is the modern euphemism for a prison. Some day, I’ll tell you about my experiences with that peculiar institution.
If you refuse to be put into a cage, the officer will attempt to end your life. This is considered in my day to be normal and practical, as there must be no actual resistance to authority, and there is nothing more final than summary capital punishment. Officers are self-styled executioners, and there are no figures in “authority” who will consistently refute that declaration. Thus, it is so.
At any point along the process of punishment, the officer can and will employ physical violence to inflict as much pain as he believes he can get away with, up to and including execution. This is done to demonstrate the officer’s personal power over you as well as the state’s. Should the officer actually terminate a life, he will be rewarded with leisure time away from work along with his usual paycheck.
I’d rather think about something else…
You know, I’ve read before about indigenous American groups that had a particular practice I found appealing. I readily admit that my education on indigenous American peoples is woefully inadequate, and the many different names and cultures swirl in my mind, so please forgive that I do not recall which group acted this way or if there were many. But, when a leader wanted to go to war, he had to actually persuade others to go with him. He couldn’t force them to go if they disagreed. In fact, if he felt so strongly about going to war, and yet he could convince no one to go along with him, he would simply have to go it alone or otherwise give up the fight.
That’s how I honestly think every endeavor should be done. Everywhere, every time. You come up with a plan, you try to convince others to help, and you do it alone if you have to. That’s exercising influence alone. There is no exercise of power there. No threat of violence whatsoever. People can do whatever they wish to do. No one controls them. They live in true liberty. Hopefully, by the time you read this letter, I’ll have looked up which societies practiced this and taught it to you.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have something more like what we in “Western civilization” have always done. There will be people “in power,” who will force others to fight in wars either through sheer violent coercion or by cutting off resources. If people don’t have access to food, especially the food that they themselves helped to produce, then that’s still forcing them through the violence of starvation. The powerful person might not be smashing them with a club, but the pain they’re inflicting by withholding food is just as powerful, if not actually moreso.
When you remove power from the equation and rely only on influencing others, you end up with a more horizontal structure of society. People are essentially equal because no one has to fear domination or punishment from anyone else. It would be the actual iteration of the way that Americans have always pretended the U.S. to be: freedom, liberty, equality, screeching eagles, etc.
A power-dominated society is a vertical structure where people below are subject to the will and punishments of those above. If they don’t comply, they’ll endure pain until they do. Power ends up putting people into a “pecking order,” which is of course the chicken’s concept of hierarchy built on violence. I feel like there’s some commentary within that idea alone. A chicken’s hierarchy…
Incidentally, that’s the only way that our capitalist system works today. People “below” have to do whatever the people “above” want, or else they are punished by having their resources withheld. They end up homeless, starving, or lacking medical care. But, I’ll probably go more into that another day.
Anyway, I’m getting off track. Let me try to summarize. Influence is a normal social interaction that humans have used since even before we were modern homo sapiens. We try to convince others to help us. Ape alone, weak. Apes together, strong.
Power is forcing compliance by use or threat of violence. Violence has its place in the world, absolutely. There is a time and a place for it. But, the time and place should not be in establishing and exercising power.
There is a paradox that deserves far deeper discussion than what this letter will be capable of. Namely, that violence should only be used to resist or prevent greater violence. That’s closely related to the paradox of tolerance: the only philosophy intolerable in society is that which is itself intolerant to other philosophies. Anyway, this is all more complicated than what I can address here.
Until next time, I love you very, very much, son. I hope that this letter finds you in the best of possible situations.
Your father,
Papa Bear
[Author’s note: This is a series of letters that I intend to print to paper and deliver to my son, probably around the year 2040. You are more than welcome to read along. The links in the article are only for you, the reader, and will include citations, jokes, asides, and links to books or other items. If you happen to purchase anything through such a link, I’ll get a small commission. Every little bit helps, right?]
