On Power Read online

  Bad people are powerful, and being powerful is bad.

  So let’s not be powerful, then. Let’s be meek and timid. Surely everyone will get along better as long as no one gets too powerful. Is this really the lesson above all lessons that we want to teach our children, as we prepare them for what awaits in the real world? I submit to you that it is not. We handicap ourselves by equating power with the villains in fiction.

  We do our children a disservice by teaching them to shun power. We deny them the power to seize their dreams. What good is the hero, after all, without the power to defeat the villain? What good could Superman do without his powers? How effective could Batman be without his fortune, his training, his gadgets?

  In this book, I intend to make the case for power: what it is, including and beyond money, and why it matters to everybody—even the people who claim it “corrupts.” So much of our popular mythology focuses on the negative aspects of power that we forget that gaining power is, perhaps, the only way to enable ourselves to make a difference in our lives and in the lives of others.

  So let’s be clear: power is a tool, neither good nor bad. And just because a tool can be abused does not mean that we shouldn’t use it. Airlines tell us to secure our own oxygen masks before assisting others, even our children. Why? Is it because selfishness in the face of danger is good? Of course not. It’s because this is not a moral argument, but a pragmatic one. We are no good to our children if we can’t breathe ourselves. You must be in a position of power if you are going to make a difference to those without power.

  People will rail against greed, against caring about power and money. “Some things are more important than money,” they say. But what are those things? Being kind to others? Family? Friends? So be it. But our family, our loved ones, the people we want to protect and take care of, all live in the real world. And in this real world where we all live, we must have money in order to take care of our families. You must first have money before you can give it to charity. You must have the power and the money to feed your loved ones, to help your friends. And the more money you have, the more you can give, and the better your life and the lives of your loved ones can become. The man who gives away his only dollar is a virtuous soul indeed. But compared with the rich and powerful CEO who gives away $500 million of her $5 billion, he is not making much of a difference, no matter how noble his intentions.

  The CEO may be greedier and power-obsessed. Indeed, the CEO might be a grotesque person in her personal life, selfish and vain. But at the end of the day, who fed and clothed more people with their contribution? This is not the romantic ideal we’ve grown used to. It’s not poor, powerless Aladdin defeating rich, evil Jafar. (Incidentally, Aladdin becomes rich by the end of the story, doesn’t he?) But this is reality, because in the real world, power matters. Consequences matter, not intentions. A good person without power won’t accomplish much, no matter his intentions or his virtue. Power moves mountains, when mountains need to be moved.

  The quote at the beginning of this chapter speaks to my point. For those of us who haven’t taken Philosophy 101, Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher in the 1800s with a peculiar point of view on the subject of power and its relationship to morality. Often, he was fairly cold and cruel with his criticism, and his unflinching views made a lot of people fairly queasy, and still do. He’s been interpreted, criticized, and misinterpreted countless times over the decades. But he also tried to explain the origins of what holds us back from achieving power, what is basically “the worship of weakness.” That is the idea that humility and submission are good, and that strength, materialism, and ruthlessness are evil.

  Nietzsche hypothesized that at some point in our history, the weak decided that they disliked the strong and disliked getting the short end of every stick. The old way of dealing with this would have been to find a way to become powerful, to improve yourself in order to join the ranks of the strong. Cavemen, Vikings, all our big, muscly warrior ancestors throughout early history shared this ambition. The heroes of old were not saints and charitable souls; they were Beowulf, Heracles, Gilgamesh. However, Nietzsche mused, the weak found another way to ease their own suffering: they made it unacceptable, undesirable, to be among the strong. They wanted to make the strong feel shame for enjoying their power.

  The Bible says, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24). Just because he’s rich. Nietzsche viewed ideas like this as a sort of mental and cultural coup: the weak persuading the strong to be ashamed of their strength, thus inverting the power dynamic for centuries to come. Instead of raising themselves up to become powerful, they shamed those with power into purposefully lowering themselves. They shamed power itself. This, in my view, was throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

  Now, it is of course possible for a tyrant to take his power and run with it, and abuse it. Power can be abused by anyone: good, evil, and (like most of us) somewhere in between. But that’s not what I’m talking about. We forget that Nietzsche’s arguments are by definition amoral: he himself did not believe there were such things as “moral facts.” He was simply trying to describe the world as he saw it. This book will similarly be useful to anyone who withholds moral judgment, because it is not about morality. It is about pragmatism and overcoming flawed narratives that hold us back.

  People who do great good and people who do great evil have one crucial thing in common: greatness. I am not arguing that vile human beings like Hitler are good for humanity. They are not. But the simple fact exists that power is out there for the taking. Why not grab it for the good guys? What keeps the human race evolving so that it can develop ideas like compassion, art, humility, and political correctness? As Nietzsche put it, the main driving force in human society is the “will to power.”

  Seizing power works.

  Being afraid of power, shunning power, stunts your growth.

  What gets the job done?

  Strength does.

  Power does.

  This dynamic has been playing out since prehistoric times. The caveman who was strong enough to bring home the most meat got the girl. That is still true today, I might add. The more power and money the male of the species has, the more he has access to in life, and that includes getting the girl. Not politically correct? Of course not. So what? These are concepts from the days before political correctness existed. Nature and reality don’t exist to conform to our feelings. Don’t like that I cast the caveman as strong and the cavewoman as the weak one waiting for him to bring home dinner? Instead of asking me to conform to your sensitivities, become more powerful than I am and make your vision of life dominant. Instead of criticizing those who hold views you find unacceptable, defeat them. Make your own strength and power undeniable. Might does not make right—but might makes things possible. It makes things happen, whether or not they are right. I argue that this idea, the “will to power,” is still just as useful today as it was in prehistory, albeit with less club swinging and mammoth skinning and back hair (though not in my case). However much we might like to pretend that we’ve moved past Darwin’s survival of the fittest, it is still a jungle out there. Fighting to survive, to overcome, to achieve, is still necessary. We must will ourselves to power, if we are to earn a place where we have the luxury to care about things like compassion, art, and political correctness.

  Power is an inconvenient truth, a necessity, whether we like to admit it. To throw a little more philosophy in, it is my opinion (and, really, everything in this book is my opinion) that if you can stand in front of me in clean clothes, knowing how to read, with food in your belly, and say things like, “I don’t care about money,” or “Power corrupts,” you are able to do so only because you are sheltered. Frankly, you are lucky to be standing on the backs of those with power without realizing it.

  In 1943, a psychologist named Abraham Maslow proposed a theory called the Hierarchy of Needs. The basic idea was that th
ere is an order in which people worry about things they need to survive and flourish, and he put this in the form of a pyramid. At the base of the pyramid are the “physiological needs,” the things that every one of us, from kings to beggars, needs simply to stay alive, things like air, water, food. Without these things, one can only wait until death comes. No one can accomplish anything without these needs being fulfilled. In the world we currently live in, this includes money, because you need money to buy food and to access clean water. Living off the grid is possible, of course, and some people do go out into the woods and try to live off the land. But in this scenario, if your farm fails, if you don’t catch any fish, if you fail as a hunter, you die. When your basic physical needs are not met, these are the foremost things on your mind. No other concerns can possibly exist when you are starving to death or dying of thirst, and no other goals can be met without first meeting the needs of the flesh.

  The next level of Maslow’s Hierarchy is “safety.” This is where things like shelter, medicine, physical security, and other ways to maintain health and protect from injury reside. Along with money, these things also require a society or system around you that allows you to purchase them. That’s money and power. Many in the West and especially in European countries argue that health care should be a public, socialized commodity. Whether you agree with this and whether your health care is private or public, power and money are still necessary, to pay for medicine and to fund the health care system. And, of course, there is the prehistoric concept of safety: safety from attack, from predators. This, obviously, requires physical power: the power to defend oneself, to make weapons. In modern society, this means paying your taxes so a police force can be funded and perhaps ponying up for a security system in your home. When you are fed but not safe, it is hard to think of much else. Lost in the woods, in a bad part of town, under attack, or being pursued by a predator—these are all urgent crises that dominate the mind until they are resolved. When you are not safe, safety becomes life’s goal until it is met. You are not available to worry about anything else. Once you are fed and safe, you move toward the more familiar stuff that exists in the developed world, what most people reading this book will recognize as their lives.

  The next level of the pyramid is “love and belonging.” You might call this the need for the other: someone to love, sexually or nonsexually; family; friends; a tribe of some kind. A curious thing happens when you reach this level—you can forget that this need is not as important as the other two. It is my opinion that some people at this level lack proper perspective. These are the people who will say things like, “Money is not important, only my [significant other, tribe, or family] is important.” This, to me, makes very little sense, since according to the Hierarchy of Needs, money, and the power to acquire things that cost money, is what allows for the existence of your loved ones. People who are not starving often feel the need to characterize their lives as a battle between two dueling concepts: “materialistic” concerns and what is “really important” (aka their loved ones). These people forget that there is a lot of money that goes into maintaining a spouse, a family, a tribe.

  This, by my interpretation, is where what Nietzsche calls the “inversion of values” has led in the modern era. Instead of thinking of wealth and power as the very means to keep our family alive, we say that these two ideas are mutually exclusive. The dad who works too much is a cliché in many films, especially in holiday movies around Christmastime. I don’t think I need to name all of these movies in order for this to sound familiar. (Elf, with Will Ferrell, is one of them, but they are countless.) These stories end with the dad learning a valuable lesson and telling his work buddies, or his boss, to shove it: “Instead of doing this very important work, I’m going to spend this time with my family.” Throw in some line from the kids like, “We don’t need expensive gifts, Papa, we just need you,” and the morality tale is complete. This is totally ridiculous. The job in question, and the work it requires, is the most important thing that a father can do for his kids. However, this fact won’t be clear until the first two levels in the hierarchy are compromised by something like, for example, a cancer diagnosis. Spending time with the family is a very kind thing for a father to do. But working through the holidays so that, when illness strikes, the father has all the resources and power at his disposal to get the best doctors and the best medicine is the better approach, and should be viewed as such. I don’t know about you, but I want to make sure the people I love not only feel good and loved, but are first and foremost healthy, safe, fed, clothed, and housed. The only reasonable response to “Dad, you work too much” should be “No, I work exactly hard enough to give you life.”

  The next level of Maslow’s pyramid is characterized by self-esteem and self-respect. We find the same amnesia here as well. You’ll often hear people complain about “working a dead-end job,” that their job has nothing to do with their passion and is “just for money.” My response to that often is: “Well, yeah.” Because that money feeds you. And yet someone with clothes on their back, a home, and food in their belly will actually complain that their job doesn’t engage them, doesn’t excite them, or isn’t making them feel good about themselves. Their boss is mean to them when they shirk their responsibilities. The work is hard. They feel inferior to people who do better than they do, who make more money, who accomplish more. They desire fame, fortune, and success, and ironically some fall into depression and develop inferiority complexes because of these desires. They begin to resent those who are better off, and they resent the system around them that creates their difficulties, their unfair setbacks. People then say the problem is that these people care about the wrong things, like money, power, and success. Instead of working harder and raising oneself up to achieve these goals, these people fall into self-pity, criticizing those better off as “a-holes,” “my awful boss,” etc. If you widen this perspective a little by, say, dropping someone off in the middle of a place where they have no access to food, water, and shelter, we would probably find that these concerns disappear almost immediately.

  Everything is relative. The person who has no job, no access to income at all, would happily trade places with the person who complains that their boss is “mean” or that they feel “unfulfilled.” But most people lack this macro perspective and get caught up in what makes them feel comfortable or uncomfortable in the moment. Instead of self-motivating by dwelling on the power they already possess, how far they’ve come, and how lucky they are to be fed and safe, they choose to sulk and dwell on how much better off others are. This prevents them from seizing further power for themselves.

  The final and highest stage on the pyramid is “self-actualization,” which is, essentially, reaching your full potential. Especially in creative industries like writing or music, you’ll hear advice like: “Don’t do it for money. Don’t sell out. Better to be a starving artist.” This is another false dichotomy—for art or for money—meaning that the former is goodness and the latter is crass materialism. I’ve heard this for decades in my industry from many of my peers. They could not comprehend why I would want to do commercials, to sell merchandise, to capitalize on what I helped to create with KISS. “Aren’t you selling out?” they would ask. This view is self-limiting. It’s a perversion of what self-actualization actually means, which is the fulfillment of one’s full potential. Self-actualization is so often looked at as something in opposition to the baser needs of the pyramid. But self-actualization cannot be accomplished unless those baser needs have been fulfilled, and fulfilled many times over. In layman’s terms: You won’t have time to worry about being a good artist if you have no clean water to drink. You won’t have time to worry about artistic dignity if you’re dying of hunger. You’ll be too busy worrying about survival.

  Power is essential for guaranteeing that your most basic needs will never be violated. Worrying about your “artistic integrity” and worrying about being “too materialistic”—these are luxuries. These con
cerns would be absolutely absurd if you didn’t first have food, water, shelter, medicine, safety, and money. In other words: gaining power, desiring money, and gathering as much of both as you can has nothing to do with your integrity as an artist. People who warn you about “selling out” need a reality check. Instead of complaining about those with power and wealth selling out, they should focus on improving their own lives. Don’t look to see what’s on someone else’s plate. It’s a waste of time. Don’t look over your shoulder to see who else is running the race. Just be the best you can be. And then be better.

  Worrying about power and money makes you realistic, it makes you a human being with human needs, and it makes you smart. By all means, pursue your dreams, but feed yourself first, and feed your loved ones, lest you forget that you are merely lucky to have champagne problems like “selling out” and “artistic anxiety.” Please. If you have the opportunity to sell out, that means you’ve accomplished something. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again:

  You’re damn right I sold out. I sell out every night.

  So, now: You want power? You want money? I’m going to try to improve your chances of getting both. Incidentally, one begets the other—the more power you have, the more money you will have, and vice versa.

  Power!

  Money!

  Get used to saying these words. Get rid of that voice in your head that tells you it is wrong to talk about and to go after these things. Our culture tells us we’re supposed to keep thoughts about money and power to ourselves. I disagree. Say these words out loud; listen to yourself saying them and pump yourself up. It will embolden you to actually do something about your situation, instead of thinking you’re a victim. You have to grab life by the scruff of the neck and make the world understand that you are a force to be reckoned with. That you are important. And that you won’t accept anything less than the most respectful treatment. You will only get the respect you demand. Take note of those throughout history who demanded respect and saw the results.