Change Agent
I've been thinking a lot about the nature of power recently. It seems to me that there are two levers that someone can pull to exert power over someone else: authority and influence. Authority is clear cut—the laws of man and nature grant us authority to do certain things. I cannot fly but a robin has that authority in spades. A robin, however, cannot own property or arrest me should I destroy its nest. In a democracy, we give individuals the authority to act on our behalf and then set up guardrails to that authority in the form of a constitution, oversight committees, etc. We are ok with this arrangement because the ultimate authority stays with us, we have the ability to remove failed politicians through a vote.
In autocracies, authority is much more broad. Kim Jong-Un is not hamstrung by any constitution, Vladimir Putin can change his when it suits him. A Roman emperor's authority was so absolute he could call for the death of a person just with his thumb. It should be noted that when a gladiator was sent to death, the emperor gave him what to us looks like a thumbs up. This is often confused because we think of signals as binaries for good and bad—thumbs up for good, thumbs down for bad. But Roman's didn't give a thumbs down signal. The emperor's thumb was the sword; if it were out, it meant the gladiator's life. If it were sheathed—tuck into a closed fist—than he lived.
Still, even with all the authority of the law, a leader is hemmed in depending on his influence, including the emperor who executed a popular gladiator at his peril. Examples abound of characters with little authority but extraordinary power because of their influence like Littlefinger from Game of Thrones, Aladdin's Jafar, Wormtongue in the Lord of the Rings books and Iago (Shakespeare's villain of jealousy, not the parrot also from Aladdin). However, seeing as all of those characters meet unenviable ends forced upon them by the authority of others, influence, while powerful, has its limits as well.
This is all true in our daily lives, of course. My authority as the legal spouse of my wife affords me some rights should we break up and if Rocky announced tomorrow that he wants to live with the neighbors, I have the authority to block that from happening. I am also considerably stronger than he is and am relatively smarter which gives me some corporal authority over him, but this is usually only reserved for when he's trying to grab the sharpest thing in any given room.
My power as a parent comes almost completely from influence. The good news is, Rocky is incredibly influenced by me. Seriously, he unthinkingly swallows anything I tell him. If I tell him that we can't go to the park today because it was swallowed by a sink hole, as I did on Saturday, he believes it. If I explain to him, which I do daily, that Daniel Tiger is only available at 6:10pm, he never questions it. Reader, I am lying to him. The park, as far as I know, is still there and in 2020, he can watch Daniel Tiger whenever he wants on numerous devices. Instead, however, he waits fairly patiently and then—get this—he thanks me for turning Daniel Tiger on even though I have secretly been withholding it from him the whole time. If that's not influence then grits ain't groceries.
Last week, we transitioned Rocky from his infant room to his new bedroom which we have been telling him is his big boy room. This is pure power through influence. He's not a big boy. He's tiny! And he can't do things that even the smallest big boy can do, like use the toilet or read. We're calling it his big boy room because it makes it more palatable to him. If we said "you need to be in this room because your baby sister is taking your room"—which is the truth—he'd be very upset. But because we've repeated "big boy room" enough, he's all about it. And, even though I have absolutely no authority to do so, we've imposed a 7pm bedtime, which he accepts because we've made it seem like there are no other options when in reality there are many. If I say something clearly and often enough, even if it's totally ridiculous, he totally falls for it. I could even, should I want, totally misconstrue the truth of the COVID-19 pandemic. I could downplay the seriousness, I could pretend like it doesn't effect us and I could claim that I was doing a great job handling it. Because he doesn't get information from any other source and he doesn't even seem to trust other adults, my influence over him is incredibly strong.
This could change. As he gets older and has the ability to verify things for himself, he may discover that my rules are arbitrary and that I make statements that conflict strongly with reality. Even now he asserts his power over me, mainly his ability to be very loud while not giving a fuck, but these instances, while daily, don't erode my influence. To reject that, he'll have to start thinking for himself, a tough ask for many adults. Besides, Nietzsche was 9 when he told his sister "don’t talk such rubbish about the stork. Man is a mammal and brings his young into the world alive." So even if my son is on the trajectory of one of the greatest thinkers of all time, I still have 7 years to just sell him nonsense (it should be noted that his boy cousins, 4 and 6 years old, have started taking most of what I say with a sizable grain of thought [for most things, but not everything]).
I'm not quite sure why that's been on my mind lately except that a person that wielded that kind of influence over a large amount of people, even if that person didn't have a terrible amount of authority or nominally had checks and balances over that authority could be very dangerous. In fact, that person could simply repeat misinformation, congratulate himself even in the face of failure and nonsensically blame others while claiming authority that he only has in the minds of those he influences. That is a scary thought indeed, but, as I said before, the ultimate authority in a democracy does rest with us and this year we have an opportunity to exercise it. I can think of no more powerful prospect.