Wednesday, September 25, 2013

The Powerless Are Not Necessarily Pure

by Miki Kashtan

I am not so keen on the idea that power corrupts, and have already discussed this to some extent in an earlier post. My difficulty with this framing is multiple. For one thing, this saying maintains the pervasive belief that power is bad in and of itself, a belief that can only result in perpetuating itself, since it will keep many people away from taking power lest they oppress others.

As I see it, coming into power does not create the fundamental desire to have things be our way; it only provides access to resources that make it possible to do so. In the process, extraordinary harm can be done to others, sometimes millions of others. Whatever our sphere of influence, and whatever our vision or personal goals, our power gives us access to extra resources, and thus can multiply both our benefit and our harm. There is no substitute for meticulous attention to the effects of our actions. I see it as an enormous challenge to come into power and live its attendant responsibility without creating harm. I am concerned, in part, that less of this work will happen for as long as we continue to believe that the issue is power rather than what we do with it. My hope remains that that we can all recognize that we can have power and still not use it over others.



Another difficulty that I see stemming from associating power with badness is the corollary move of associating powerlessness with purity. I cannot imagine finding a way to say it any clearer than MLK:


One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love.... What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love. (From “Where We Go from Here?”, 1967 speech.)
If powerlessness is associated with purity, then those without power are, by necessity, better in some sense. This absence of humility is one of the reasons I see for why when previously oppressed people come into power they often recreate what was done to them. In fact, we don’t have to go very far. Every parent was once a child with their own parents who, most likely, didn’t leave them very much power. As research seems to indicate, and many, myself included, believe is deeply true, every time a parent mistreats a child, we can assume they were previously mistreated. Not engaging with the effects of being powerless, and, especially, denying the effects of internalized powerlessness on our ability to make choices that take the effects of our actions into consideration, can have serious and harmful effects (see Power Under: Trauma and Nonviolent Social Change, by Steve Wineman). 

The Nakba, 1948: Palestinians expelled from Israel
The most painful example for me is what happened to my own people, the Jews, after many centuries of oppression and lack of sovereignty in particular. When political independence suddenly gave us the state of Israel, with it came the possibility of oppressing others. Right in the wake of the Holocaust, my parents’ generation participated in mass expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes, sometimes after many centuries of living there. My own generation and beyond engage in an occupation that deprives the Palestinians of livelihood, political independence, oftentimes of survival, and almost always of dignity. I have yet to be able to breathe fully enough when I contemplate this turn of events. I feel a tremendous urge to pull away and distance myself, a big factor that went into my choosing exile for all these years. I resist this pull, however challenging it is to stretch into a willingness to be a witness to what is happening. I keep choosing, as much as I can, to manage, internally, my appreciation for some aspects of my culture while holding in the same awareness the other aspects of that same culture that are so painful for me to know about. To whatever extent I do this, I expand my human capacity within myself – to hold complexity, to hold everyone with tenderness, to have empathy for many forms of being human. This is not an easy task.

Part of what makes these kinds of situations so complex is that the people whom I see as oppressing others are not thinking, “Oh, it’s so wonderful to be powerful and abusive.” They’re thinking, “Oh my God, we’re so threatened. We’re so outnumbered. How can the world not see? There are millions and millions of them, and we are just a tiny poor nation just trying to eke out a living, and they are being anti-Semitic when they call us racist.” From within it makes complete sense. The fear and concern are not fake. The people living in Israel are not focused on the harm that they are creating for Palestinians and Bedouins, for example. They are focused on their fear about what Palestinians and others could do to them. This fear and what I see as a distortion make Israelis more dangerous than if they knew they were the most powerful nation in the Middle East, because it makes them less likely to see the effects of their actions, and even less likely to take ownership and responsibility beyond justifying the choices made.

My high point of a training I once did for a group of union organizers was the moment when they were able to see and acknowledge that if they had power, they would treat management as poorly as management was treating them. This example is key to me for illustrating why we need to do the work of transforming our judgments and continuing to see the humanity of everyone, including those whose actions we most deeply deplore. The more extended the period of powerlessness, the more important this inner work is. Unless we are able to see the humanity of others along with healing from the effects of our own traumas of powerlessness, nothing will protect us strongly enough from becoming oppressors if we come into power. 




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8 comments:

  1. Dear Miki,
    I am responding to this blog after walking into a homeless shelter just last week and being hit with my own visceral response to seeing a teaming crowd of people who hold very little if any formal power. These are people who are so removed from the notion of holding any power that they engage in all sorts of behaviors from self medicating with all various types of substances to self mutilation to checking themselves into mental hospitals, because the pain of not being seen and not mattering, to a world that does not want to see their impurity, has become just too intense to bear. If you stood in that space, saw what I saw, and felt what I felt, you might understand how your title hit me. I fully appreciate where your blog ended up. We all need to reckon with our traumas. I have read Wineman's book, and even he, in writing, re-enacted his trauma from his mother in his heartless vilification of her (hugging and kissing him while he struggled as a child to get away).
    Your example of the Jews using their newly received power to expel the powerless Palestinians from their homelands demonstrates how any of us who have been traumatized by severe violence and oppression can internalize and unwittingly re-enact that trauma, inflicting it upon another. But it does nothing to address the powerless=good and powerful=bad myth, which is simply another attempt to over simplify so that the truth, that we are all both pure and impure, does not have to be seen. It is common behavior to see ones’ own goodness and to project ones’ own “badness” onto another, and those who hold less power make the best scapegoats. The Jews held power when they evicted the Palestinians, they were not powerless. So this example actually reinforces the notion that power corrupts and does not support your title “The Powerless Are Not Necessarily Pure.” There are countless examples that power corrupts. It does not have to be this way, and my hope is that we can keep opening up to the possibility that we can somehow transcend our own ability to blind ourselves to our own actions. But it happens, and happens, and happens, because we are human.
    The point to me is not who is pure and who is not. The point to me is that we are all both pure and impure and that when I accept myself my whole self—pure and impure—I can have compassion and love myself and have no need to cast out my demons onto the swine.
    With love and gratitude to you for your open and fearless heart,
    Cynthia

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    1. Dear Cynthia,

      I had a different experience when reading the above blog from Miki as I do feel Miki did address "the powerless=good and powerful=bad myth, which is simply another attempt to over simplify so that the truth, that we are all both pure and impure, does not have to be seen."

      with these words:

      "Part of what makes these kinds of situations so complex is that the people whom I see as oppressing others are not thinking, “Oh, it’s so wonderful to be powerful and abusive.” They’re thinking, “Oh my God, we’re so threatened. We’re so outnumbered. How can the world not see? There are millions and millions of them, and we are just a tiny poor nation just trying to eke out a living, and they are being anti-Semitic when they call us racist.” From within it makes complete sense. The fear and concern are not fake. The people living in Israel are not focused on the harm that they are creating for Palestinians and Bedouins, for example. They are focused on their fear about what Palestinians and others could do to them. This fear and what I see as a distortion make Israelis more dangerous than if they knew they were the most powerful nation in the Middle East, because it makes them less likely to see the effects of their actions, and even less likely to take ownership and responsibility beyond justifying the choices made. "

      But perhaps I am not understanding you fully? I just feel strongly that the way to address the myth is to go to the core of what thinking each of us go to when we are threatened and scared and I know for one,I return to the myth you describe. Like to hear your thoughts and feelings .

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    2. Hi two women,

      Yes, I agree with Miki. I was addressing the title, which reads "The Powerless are Not Necessarily Pure." If you walked into a homeless shelter you would see clearly that people who are powerless are seldom considered pure. You may carry this myth within you, perhaps because you have not experienced that level of powerlessness. The point is all people have the capacity unwittingly to carry and transmit their trauma. Why haggle over a useless dichotomy--that really does not culturally prevail. If the powerless were considered more pure, would our prisons be disproportionately filled with people of color?

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    3. Like Miki, I believe our words matter. Especially when we have power.

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    4. thanks much for the clarification ..very clear and I do see what you mean ;-)

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  2. I am appreciating how this article goes right to heart of the complexity of compassionate interaction where power and an absence of power exists. I had such hopes that Obama could bring some of this perspective you describe to his presidency, to Congress specifically. He seems to have been worn down and I sense is holding (understandably) enemy imaging as he struggles to work with the power he holds.Can you speak to this? If you were in his shoes what might have you done differently in the last 5 years? How can he best be supported? What Mandela achieved when he came into office follows in my eyes a lot of what you describe (the film Invictus shows this).....is Obama NOT doing what Mandela did? I am interested in your opinion,I realize there are not easy answers to the questions I pose. I am interested in your opinion as I hold respect for your thought process,it helps me to define my own thought process more clearly.

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    1. Nini, supposing Obama was doing exactly what Mandela was doing (I think they are pretty different, but suppose they aren't), but the social and political conditions were completely different? Some ideas: in South Africa an activist segment of the huge majority had fought a violent war of independence and at the same time managed to mobilize a powerful global nonviolent disinvestment movement. The writing was totally on the wall for the apartheid regime. The question in all the onlookers' minds was: how much bloodshed will be involved in the handover of power? And Mandela amazed us all with his approach, and Tutu, and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, and many others.

      But what's been happening in the US? We have a president who talks about empathy and would like to be a peacemaker. But there's no movement. When FDR passed the New Deal he was afraid that the Left was going to create a communistic takeover of America; he said he was doing it to save capitalism from revolution quite as much as to help the poor for their own sake. There is no such movement pressing Obama to change our system, which is creating increasing inequality as well as risking global warming and civilizational destruction. If there was, Obama could play mediator. But as it is, there's the Tea Party that is mobilizing far more power than Occupy. A strong nonviolent movement of the kind MLK was building when he died, that combined black and white and brown to stand up for the poor and against war, could be just what Obama needs to pass even the moderate legislation he wants.

      Someone told me once that the center is defined by the extremes.

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  3. Thanks Dave ;-)........for trying to help me understand ;-). Hard for me to absorb all the specifics and come to some new perspective. I still have faith in Obama because not having faith is not a choice that gets me anywhere.. So let me see if I can be more specific.......what could Obama be doing now as the right tries to galvanize what it needs to defund ACA(Obama Care) that might align with Miki's message? Passing health reform i think has been an enormous accomplishment and the thought of losing that forward movement scares the pants off me.

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