Godless Honour and the Trap of Empowerment

Is there an enlightened way to conquer nature and people?

Human empowerment is one of those secular ideals that’s only implicit in what we say and do. We’re generally taught to be ashamed of wanting power.

But most of us acquire some at work, or in our personal lives — we’re then corrupted by the resulting temptations and privileges. It’s here that we seek more and more, and care less about our victims.

But can we crave power without degrading ourselves? Is it the desire for wealth that enables us to achieve our goals sustainable or is it self-destructive?

The Conquest of Nature

Historically, there are two main kinds of power, control over nature and control over people.

The first kind is the impetus behind civilization. We left what we nostalgically think of as the freedom and paradise of hunter-gatherer life in the wilderness, for a sedentary lifestyle. We gather together in large numbers in cities to be fed from stored food supplied by a central authority.

Early on in that transition, the law of oligarchy came into effect for at least two reasons.

First, consider what happens when a large population of highly intelligent primates spontaneously organizes itself into a hierarchy of leaders, known ethologically as alphas, betas, and omegas. To physically manage hundreds of thousands or millions of people, power has to be centralized. Whereupon the leaders give orders to their sub-commanders who exercise their authority over their underlings and so on down the chain of command, until the common objective is completed.

This is the human version of the animalistic dominance hierarchy, which is most apparent in the military or the police, but which is operational also in virtually any bureaucracy.

In the ancient world, that concentration of power typically led to decadence in the upper echelons, as they grew isolated from the rabble that blindly obeyed out of terror or desperation. As a result, the leaders, namely the kings and their families tended to be ruthless in exercising their control over the population. Moreover, the leaders were more often than not male rather than female and were therefore subject to the pitfalls of toxic masculinity or alpha-maleness, better thought of as exacerbated psychopathy.

In short, ancient societies warred with each other, tamed the wilderness and exterminated wild animals wherever possible, took armies of slaves, and ruthlessly oppressed their women. More extensive forms of exploiting nature had to await the rise of more rigorous, scientific methods of reconnaissance.

Second, most people in large populations are necessarily strangers, since we have limited memory and emotional capacities and can’t be on intimate terms with more than roughly 150 people (Dunbar’s number).

To cooperate and keep the peace, we had to be domesticated, which was the purpose of theocracy. That social structure worked as follows: a minority of insiders would devise laws and myths to exploit and subjugate the majority, giving the former control over the latter (the second kind of power, to be examined in the next two sections).

But theocracies also functioned as what Lewis Mumford called “megamachines,” as armies of soldiers or laborers who worked tirelessly for the glory of their gods and their royal representatives on earth. Kingdoms thus acquired power over the wilderness, as the ancients cleared forests, cultivated the land, and domesticated livestock.

Cut to thousands of years of “progress” in that enterprise, and we’ve reached a tipping point according to most scientists: the natural environment may be poised to fight back with a vengeance against the Anthropocene.

I won’t belabor the thrust of environmentalism here, except to point out that secular progress amounts to human domination of nature which is likely unsustainable without a radical transformation of our mentality. In particular, to continue to empower ourselves at nature’s expense indefinitely, we’ll have to learn not just to work together at the species level, but to detach ourselves from our home planet and to conquer destinations in outer space.

That inner transformation would amount to nothing short of a global religious awakening, which means that in revering power over the environment, the secularist can’t be consistently opposed to religion as such. Whether it’s transhumanism, corporate-driven hyperconsumerism, or pantheistic, Nietzschean totalizing of aesthetics, the atheist will have to embrace some such stand-in faith or myth to prevent ecological and civilizational collapse.

Conservatism as Social Darwinism

Power over people is a more unconscious ideal, since we take coercion or the violation of someone’s will to be immoral. Therefore, this form of power had to be rationalized with more elaborate propaganda. Traditionally, the lines of rationalization break down into “conservative” and “liberal” excuses, but those conventional ways of speaking are almost wholly misleading since, again, they’re offered as cover-ups.

Still, we can use that conventional dichotomy as a starting point, rushing, though, to clarify that what the division is really about is whether we identify with the dominators or with the victims in the power dynamic.

At one extreme end, then, is the unapologetic defense of some people’s having power over others. This is the most conservative position which is equivalent to what used to be called social Darwinism. Typically, the conservative myths stipulate that a minority has the right to rule, thanks to divine commandments or to natural laws. There’s no arguing with the unequal distribution of power since at this extreme the inequality is taken as a necessary fact of life. Here conservatism merges with dystopian thinking.

The key problem with this view of social power is familiar: when dissent is silenced, the dominators acquire absolute control over the rest of the population and are all the more surely corrupted by the lack of challenges.

This is why kingdoms and dictatorships collapse because the leadership becomes isolated and sadistic or effete, unable to manage its affairs of state because the leaders’ power has infantilized them. Rival kingdoms fill the power vacuum with war or with Machiavellian sabotage.

This dynamic is apparent in petty tyrannies such as at work when the boss’s power has “gone to his head.”

This was the plot of the movie Working Girl, for example, in which a secretary knows how to run things better than her arrogant superior, and a capitalist revolution takes place that restores justice in the corporation. The movie ends before the filmmakers would have to decide whether the film is meant to be pure fantasy. Since we could expect the cycle to repeat itself: the secretary who’s disgraced and unseated her corrupt boss would eventually become corrupt in turn, as her successes build up and her power goes to her head, whereupon her secretary would be incentivized to revolt.

Conservatism amounts to the contention that a minority of people should rule over the majority, even if that arrangement is grossly unjust or counterproductive. All the theological and economic rationales about God’s will, manifest destiny, free markets and so on are distractions from what the conservative is ultimately conserving: a mere natural and therefore amoral and mindless dynamic that works until it doesn’t.

It’s like glorifying sunny, warm weather, boasting that the sun is meant to shine — until one day the clouds come out and it rains and eventually everything’s freezing and covered in snow. Idolizing the ugly business of overpowering other people is just as foolhardy, since nature works in cycles, not in straight lines.

Progress, Morality, and the Abandonment of Power Politics

At the other end of the continuum is a progressive, moralistic critique of the natural power inequality. The progressive liberal sides with the victims against the monstrified oppressor, and contends that power should be distributed more equally, as in the case of a democratic republic.

This critique can be developed in two directions, back towards conservative compromises, as in the case of neoliberal or centrist ones, or towards a more radical, apolitical stance. In the former case, the talk of democracy and of self-empowerment serves as a distraction from the natural reality that recurs regardless of the progressive efforts.

For example, a society can be nominally democratic even though the real power lies in the economic sector so that the nation is functionally a plutocracy, thanks to the warping of capitalism that naturally occurs. In that case, once again the “liberal” values would be in the service of large-scale frauds.

We may be proud of our right to vote even though the viable political parties always turn out to be more or less corporatist ones that serve unelected masters, giving the victory to the “conservatives.” The true voting would happen in the marketplace where we’d reveal our true identity as relatively selfish consumers of mass-marketed products rather than as responsible citizens whose individuality and wisdom are worth protecting from the onslaught of predatory power elites.

Alternatively, the progressive may lean towards socialism or anarchism, maintaining that power should be so equally distributed that social domination is no longer a factor.

In this context two further points suffice. First, no one knows how such an alternative would work without, once again, a dramatic, quasi-religious transformation of the human mindset, which would contradict the mainstream atheist’s secularism. Second, at any rate, this alternative would entail the concession that power shouldn’t be valued, in which case it’s no longer relevant to the article you’re currently reading.

Enlightened Empowerment

Evidently, wealth or power is a problematic secular ideal, but this doesn’t mean we should disavow these strengths in all their forms. Renouncing power entirely would amount to giving up on life, since without the ability to put our will into effect we couldn’t do anything we wanted, in which case we wouldn’t be adding to the world and might as well not be around.

The crux is our attitude towards power and to the cluster of related values such as ambition, success, and management. Power over the world is a corrosive goal. To avoid being monstrified by the entitlements and luxuries attained from success in bending the world to your will is likely impossible in the limit case.

Philosophy, spirituality, humility, depth of character, a sense of humour — these can act as breaks on the ironic processes of infantilization and monstrification, but eventually, the natural dynamic takes its course and even a person with noble intentions withers under the godlike temptations. The more power we have, the more we surround ourselves with an entourage of sycophants and scammers, which divorces us from reality until we’re reduced to being narcissistic solipsists who’ve fallen for our hype.

Religions generally teach that the accumulation of wealth and power is sinful or foolish, that it’s better to protect your soul’s purity than to gain the whole world. The problem is that the religious narratives that justify some withdrawal from dominance hierarchies are no longer credible.

Clearly, we should recognize that if there’s anything worth doing in the world while we’re fortunate enough to be alive, we’ll need the ability to put our ideas into practice, to improve our situation, and to respond nobly to nature’s inhumanity.

But the secularist’s challenge is to empower ourselves without idolizing the trappings of power and without succumbing to sordid rationalizations. Much of our success has always been due to accident and luck, and our highest obligation is to humanize the appalling wilderness without becoming egoistic monsters in turn.