The Paradox of Power

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The paradox of power explains a lot about our species’ current discontents. That may be so for every species that evolved as individuals, rather than in hives or collectives like ants, bees and termites.

Individual organisms compete individually for food, territory, sexual partners, and clan or tribal leadership. They fight; they can even kill. So fighting in the form of real, physical combat is part of our species’ biological evolution.

Yet evolution also keeps that combat from becoming too extreme. If individuals mostly fight to the death, a species can slowly extinguish itself with mortal combat. That’s why, in most mammalian species, battles between males for mates seem more like rituals than the do-or-die combat of prey versus predator. Stags and bulls, for example, could use their sharp horns to gore each other’s vital organs, but they don’t. They just bang, push and shove to determine dominance, in a ritual struggle as circumscribed as a boxing match.

Relative to many other species on our planet, we humans are small, weak and slow. We lack size, weight, and innate weapons like sharp horns, teeth and claws. But as we began to cooperate, we developed tools and weapons far more formidable. We also developed a thing called “civilization,” which reduces violent competition and increases cooperation among us by giving us rules and order.

Our civilization is not instinctual like the “hive mind” of ants, bees and termites. Instead, it’s voluntary and conscious. It’s a product of our social evolution in law and custom. So it can can change and develop much faster than our biological evolution. It can grow as we learn from experience.

The “social contract” that created civilization forced us to abandon some of our urge to fight and to dominate. What we got in return was the power collectively to dominate all other species on our small planet. That’s the paradox of power: we gained global dominance as a species by suppressing much of our urge to dominate other members of our own species as individuals.

But civilization is not hard-wired in us like our blood lust, anger and rage. So the lines between the two sides of the paradox of power can and do shift. When that happens, civilization can retrogress.

The mother of all retrogressions, of course, is war. For millennia, we saw war as reason for “legitimate” killing, an “exception” to the social contract. War can also lead to genocide, which slows evolution by narrowing the gene pool and social diversity.

Today, our weapons have the power to slow or stop our species’ evolution. In the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, they came within minutes of probable species’ self-extinction. So we’re trying to suppress war as part of our “social contract,” our global civilization. The various nuclear-test-ban treaties, the bilateral disarmament treaties of the US with the Soviets and now Russia, the UN, the WTO and the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are all parts of that effort. Unfortunately, we humans got serious about this effort only during the last century, and its ultimate success or failure is still a matter of conjecture.

After war, the second most powerful cause of civilization retrogressing is its effect on the individual’s power. For each individual, civilization is a straitjacket. It forces us to use our training and our conscious minds to control our natural, biological-evolutionary tendency to fight and dominate others.

These constraints of civilization have to act in the moment, tamping down everything from road rage to males’ desire to take an attractive female by force. In contrast, civilization’s benefits always lie in the future. Civilization thus demands the same delayed gratification in everyday life as in reducing global warming: valuing future consequences, perceived by Reason, over immediate power and passions. Neither effort is going especially well today.

That’s the paradox of power. Virtually any human living in a modern city can ride a subway farther and faster (and with less effort and attention) than an ancient Roman centurion could charge on his sturdy chariot drawn by a mighty team of horses. But the tradeoff is reading the signs and obeying all those nagging orders to stay behind the yellow line.

Riding a subway, you don’t quite get the same rush of mastery, dominance and “freedom” as the centurion on his chariot behind thundering hooves. Yet millions go farther and faster that way, every day. We accept the same tradeoff in New York City, Washington, D.C., Paris, London, Tokyo and Moscow.

So what does all this have to do with the state of global politics today? Plenty. People’s urge to fight and dominate is strongest when they are unhappy. They get most unhappy when something threatens their survival.

Isn’t that precisely the case with Trump’s most intransigent voters? They had happy, tranquil middle-class lives, with a suburban house, two cars, kids in college, annual vacations, and a powerboat or RV in the back yard. Now their jobs are gone, and with them their marriages, homes, factories, towns and prosperity. Their kids have fled to the coasts or into drugs. They are angry as hell, and understandably so. Hence Trump.

We humans didn’t evolve fighting abstractions. We evolved fighting other clans and tribes for territory, food and mates. So in order to break their social contract and accept Trump as their champion, his legions must have concrete enemies.

The enemies don’t have actually to be at fault. All they have to have is plausible guilt. Trump’s lies and demagoguery do the rest. And so we have immigrants (especially Hispanics and dark-skinned people), Muslims, globalist Democrats, and the elite generally, including “establishment” figures like Hillary Clinton, taking the heat. Journalists who try to tell us what’s going on become “enemies of the people.”

There’s yet another twist to the story, which explains why so many “normal” or “mainstream” Republicans have gone to bat for Trump. The straitjacket of civilization particularly galls business people, who are used to having lots of personal power in their everyday work. Part of the attraction of business as a career is becoming a king or queen, or at least a duke or duchess, every day when you walk through the door.

For decades the GOP has nurtured the myth of Ayn Rand’s John Galt. According to that myth, an entrepreneur, by dint of his or her intelligence, skill, foresight and hard work, becomes a billionaire all alone. The social contract, with all its laws, regulations and public hearings, only holds him or her back. So the more you weaken the social contract, the more you help business people use their skills, take their personal risks, realize their personal dreams, and grow the economy.

Today this simplistic story is the GOP’s core myth. It’s why even serious Republicans want to drown government in a bathtub. And millions of people believe it who will never own a business or come close to being rich. Polls show, for example, that Americans believe 38% of Republicans make over $250,000 a year, while the actual figure is 2%. (No, that’s not a typo.)

This myth is so powerful and durable precisely because it’s not a product of Reason. It arises out of our instinctual lust for personal, individual power and dominance, which is perennially at war with our civilization. It resolves the power paradox in favor of individual mastery and dominance. It’s as close to being hard-wired by biological evolution as any political ideology. That’s why it’s been so effective politically, attracting and holding millions of people who will never be bosses no matter what they do.

This week proof sprang from an unlikely source: the first African-American billionaire. Robert Johnson got rich by building and selling Black Entertainment Television. Not long ago he met with Trump, who offered him a job. When asked why he had refused, Johnson mentioned neither his race nor his record as a lifelong Democrat. Instead, he cited his life as a businessman: “As an entrepreneur trying to work in a government structure where you got to go through 15 different layers of decision-making to get what you want done doesn’t fit my mold[.]”

Ayn Rand herself could not have better shown how the paradox of power drives Republican thinking and why it makes most business people “mainstream” Republicans. The same instinct also explains why “mainstream” Republicans who abhor Trump’s lying, bigotry, insults and cheating follow him anyway. Not only is Trump a striking, if repellent, figure of a powerful man—a living caricature of a leader. He also fits right into the Republican myth of personal, individual power—even as against civilization—being the driver of progress. In that worldview, Republicans and Trump are the real “progressives,” just like John Galt in Ayn Rand’s durable myth.

All this suggests how hard it will be to win over the folk who wear red “MAGA” caps and would follow Trump into Hell. For them, it’s not about social programs, nuances of policy, Reason or decency. It’ not even about who could really bring back good jobs. It’s about who can be despairing workers’ most feared champion in their quest for personal and tribal power and dominance, after the social contract, global civilization and the elite left them hanging out to dry.

Their very loyalty to Trump demonstrates and reinforces their inner abandonment of civilization and readiness to fight. So appeals to Reason, with better health insurance and more rational trade policy, are unlikely to reach them. They are in full combat mode.

To the extent Trump’s lies and insults seem to increase his social dominance, they only boost his attractiveness as a leader. If you doubt that, consider just two things. First, ask yourself what, if any, specific policies, laws or regulations out of Trump’s nearly three years in office have helped bring back jobs and the formerly good lives of Trump’s angry supporters? (Hint: bashing China and praising El-Sisi, Erdoğan, Kim, MBS and Putin don’t create a single onshore job.) Second, watch any Trump rally and assess how much he relies on policy (or even cause and effect) versus playing the social-dominance game.

So who can lure away Trump’s legions? Probably someone with the social-dominance skills of a fraternity president, not a president of the United States.

That’s precisely the skill that George W. Bush used to defeat John Kerry. And that’s the self-evident object of almost all the lies, false self-aggrandizement, nicknames and insults that Trump dishes out every day. To the people who follow him, these things are all signs of social dominance. In their despair, they crave a powerful champion reminiscent of the dominant alpha male of our biological-evolutionary past, however much their intellect and decency may nag at their unconscious minds.

The social dominance game may seem unpresidential, even puerile. But Trump plays it in virtually every rally and Tweet. He won the White House in large measure by doing so. The junior Bush played much the same game repeatedly (although less outrageously) to become and stay president of the United States. The game is not rational, but instinctual. It has precursors hard-wired by our human evolution—the tribal leadership of a dominant alpha male.

Combat between the alpha male and the losing beta male, or occasional physical chastisement of errant females, was hardly the ape analogue of decency or chivalry. Yet even today, there are times, like the present, when it really works.

So a Democratic challenger must know or learn how to play this game in order to meet Trump on his own ground. Appeals to programs, statistics and Reason, let alone kindness and decency, will not likely work with Trump’s followers, who have already resolved the power paradox in favor of the strong individual.

This doesn’t require Democrats to stoop to Trump’s level and mimic his lies, insults, bragging and general nastiness. Doing that would risk losing a substantial part of the majority, which views the power paradox the other way, favoring civilization.

But a winning Democrat at least should know how to parry Trump’s lies, insults, bragging and general nastiness, without seeming weak or appealing to the norms of civilization, in which Trump’s followers have lost faith. A winner need not go “toe to toe” with Trump using the same repellent tactics; but he or she must be able to knock Trump down, maybe without him even noticing, with emotional ju-jitsu.

A successful rival must take Trump and his followers aback, at least occasionally, by winning the social-dominance game in real time, whether in debates or on social media. He or she can do that with humor, as Reagan did (“There you go again!”) or with a pointed observation like Lloyd Bentsen’s to Dan Quayle (“I knew Jack Kennedy, and you’re no Jack Kennedy!”).

The riposte needn’t stoop to Trump’s level, but it must get through to those who do. It’s a skill that has always had value in politics, but the succession of Dubya and Trump have made it a modern sine qua non. Just ask Jeb Bush or John Kasich.

Of course playing and winning the social dominance game has little to do with policy or progress, or with real modern life for that matter. But facts are facts and Trump is real. No Democrat today can hope to pull many of his rank-and-file loyalists away without having and using that skill.

If you put this lens in your bifocals, it’s hard to see any Democratic candidate today who can do the job. Tulsi Gabbard tried in attacking Pete Buttigieg during the last debate, but her attempt was so awkward and rough that it probably backfired. Maybe Buttigieg himself, with skills learned defending our nation, might do a better job.

Anyway, voters who are buying what Trump sells every day are not going to be satisfied with statistics, projections and plans, whether on offer by Warren or anyone else. That conclusion stands independently of Trump’s incessant tarring of Warren and Sanders alike as “socialists”—a combination of social-dominance scorn and more pedestrian political demagoguery.

Perhaps the Dems can win the presidency just by attracting and motivating their own base with unprecedented enthusiasm. That’s one branch of conventional wisdom. Maybe they can win just by holding their ground and keeping Trump’s base from growing. Maybe, as Mark Shields seems to believe [Set the timer at 4:35.], they can win by giving decency and squeaky cleanness another chance .

But if they want to win both ways—by motivating their own base and eroding Trump’s—the Democrats are going to have to look harder for a candidate skilled at playing the fraternity-style social-dominance game. Our species’ biological-evolutionary instinct to follow the dominant leader is not about to disappear anytime soon.

Footnote: A demagogue’s choice of enemies doesn’t even have to make historical or logical sense. Trump hardly ever mentions the capitalists who sold our workers’ jobs to China for profit. He hardly ever mentions the bankers who, by causing the Crash of 2008 and procuring their own bailout, created the perfect economic storm, which finished off many Midwest factories and their workers. He doesn’t mention these culprits because he can increase his own political power and dominance by downplaying the real responsibility of the social class to which he aspires and the powerful people who support him with money and ideology.

Endnote: Careful readers will have noted references in this post to the dominant alpha male from our biological-evolutionary past. What do those references portend for female candidates like Warren?

For starters, females face a steeper uphill climb than do males. But you already knew that.

The two most dominant female leaders from recent history have been Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Angela Merkel in Germany. Both nations are known, if not remarkable, for their high level of civilization and decency and their general tendency toward clear thinking (today’s Brexit fever excluded).

A century ago, both nations stood at the apex of human civilization. After the last century’s unpleasantness, Germany is back in that position again, a global leader in middle-sized-firm (Mittelstand) industry, disarming, fighting global warming, accepting refugees, and honestly appraising past sins.

Women may have a better chance to become supreme leaders in societies like these, which rely more on Reason and less on instinct. But Margaret Thatcher also had something else. She was renowned for marching into meetings and establishing her dominance by asserting “I’m the boss!” or words to that effect. Just like Trump, she was quick to fire underlings who crossed her or made mistakes.

If you compare how appeals to pure Reason fare in modern Britain and Germany, on the one hand, and in our nation on the other, you may come to the conclusion that Thatcher’s approach would work better here. If so, Warren had better start playing the social-dominance game soon, lest she and her marvelous plans for curing our ills get left behind on instinct, not merit.

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