The inherent illegitimacy of social power

Every now and again I get to feeling like some things are really obvious, but no one else seems to get them.  Or maybe they're too polite to talk about them.  And then sometimes I get writing fiction and bits of reality insist on intruding, or maybe vice-versa, and I get an explanation of why I cannot stand to read a lot of otherwise excellent writing.  And then I wonder if I ought to post this at all.

But, anyway; if we talk about "power" in a human social context, power is the ability to have other people not fight back when you harm them.

(If you're doing a really good job exercising power, they'll come up with reasons why they deserve to be hurt.  A mediocre job will have them come up with reasons why they cannot hope to retaliate effectively.)

Any power structure has to do two things; it has to make it unambiguous who is allowed to hurt whom[1], and it has to get itself copied into the future.

Attaching the exercise of power to individuals isn't the only way or the best way to organize society, but it's extremely persistent.

It's extremely persistent because it's simple—better usually means more complicated means more maintenance and more trouble with system exploits by defection—and because it provides a powerful motivation; no one wants to be powerless because being powerless means you get abused.

There's a big set of social and economic changes going on where the (obviously) economically superior form of organization says "let's not structure society around who gets hurt" and there's enormous pushback from the people who have power and want to keep it.

(This is why it's useless to talk about "privilege"; privilege is in the passive voice, and you don't get from impersonal historical forces to a recognition that those who now have power ought not to because there is no legitimate exercise of social power vesting in individuals.)

So one response to the helpless—refugees, the poor, anybody lacking the social connections to have a good-enough lawyer—is to hurt them.  This has (from inside that social structure) the positive feature of reinforcing the social order.

So when people get up and make calls for refusing any and all Syrian refugees, the harm to the refugees isn't a lamentable side effect of due public caution; it's the point.  It establishes who legitimately exercises power.

When people engage with art by adding layers of story, there's a ubiquitous tendency to make violence and cruelty not that character's fault because that's the character they like. This is arguably what art is for.  This context of art makes looking at the legitimacy of social power vested in individuals difficult.  (There isn't any, unless you agree that you should be hurt for the convenience or pleasure of others.  It's…awkward, to have to start over.)

This presents the really difficult question of "what else should we do?"

Social power structures depend on getting copied into the future.  Imagining an entire future is too difficult; no one can, or can expect, to be able to do that.

Fortunately, an entire future is not necessary.  Delegitimizing social power vested in individuals -- agreeing that nobody gets to hurt others because they want to (or claim they need to, or have a belief system which asserts the positive good of coercion…) -- is enough.  The result isn't predictable in detail, but is predictably better in result.

It's enough to get something better; that's success.  Control, specific foreknowledge of just what better thing can be had, isn't available and (fortunately) is not required.


[1] this is why "gender neutral" children's clothing looks like boy's clothes.  In a patriarchial culture, girl's clothes label you as someone anyone male can hurt.  Very nearly someone who anyone male should hurt.