Empowerment

Every day I try to be a bit better at everything I do. Some days are better for bettering than others, but bit by bit I feel like I’m getting there… wherever there may happen to be. As time has passed, though, I’ve come to interrogate my reasons for wanting to be better, and what ‘better’ means. Implied in saying that I want to be better is that I want to be better than something, or perhaps someone – a lot of ugliness can hide behind this idea of self-improvement.

Practicing and developing a skill is a form of empowerment, and all power can be abused. It’s necessary, sometimes, to take a moment and figure out where you’re imagining this skill taking you: Do you want to express or to impress? Do you want an audience or do you want fans? It’s never strictly one thing or another, because brains just aren’t that well organized, but it’s unnerving how the power fantasies can creep in. The step between wanting to be respected for your work and wanting to be A Celebrity is one that’s difficult to see sometimes, and I expect never more so than when you straddle it (though sadly I cannot comment from personal experience). It doesn’t help that, at some point, we each have something to prove: That we can create good work or make it as an artist, that we can get a crowd going or get a good review, whatever. Sometimes wanting to impress someone or show someone up is just the push we need to get started, but these sorts of social motivations do not age well – a push forward is great when you can’t start moving, but much less useful when you’re looking out off a cliff’s edge.

Creative ability is a form of power, and the desire for it for its own sake can be destructive. When the power we crave is purchasing power, we call that desire ‘greed’: What separates greed from the mere desire for money that we all tend to share is that greed wants money for money’s sake, while the rest of us want money to buy necessities and luxuries. There aren’t as many words for when we stockpile other forms of worldly power just to enjoy the sensation of having so much power: Pride could almost describe it, but I think something more accurate might be contempt – since, in the end, what makes the accumulation of power satisfying is knowing that other people are thereby disempowered. Greed flourishes on poverty; poverty justifies greed. The more a greedy person can force the poor into submission, the greater their pleasure, because the social power differential that is created was the real goal of the exercise all along. Rich people often seem like idiots because they’re willing to buy fancy garbage that is useless: The truth is it doesn’t matter that it’s useless or that it’s garbage, the only thing that’s important to them is that it’s expensive and they have it and you don’t. The pleasure is derived entirely from having something that other people cannot afford. Whether it’s something actually worth having is secondary.

The world we have now is structured in such a way that you are forced to develop a certain amount of hunger for power just to sustain ourselves. If you don’t allow this desire into your brain, you can’t eat or sleep in a bed: You have to convince people in power that you are competent in order to earn the privilege of living. In this way we are trained from childhood to crave power and to assume that the pursuit of it is intrinsic to being an adult. Some people have tried to live outside of the structure of society to avoid this, creating self-sustaining communes and whatnot – but, when they are cut free from the apparatus that wealth has captured, the quality of living tends to be pretty meager.

All this raises the question: When we practice, when we improve, what do we want to do with the power we are accumulating? Do we want to do it to make beautiful things? Or do we want to do it to feel better than other people? It’s a fine line to divide the desire to be an expert from the desire to be an authority.

The saddest part is that taking pleasure in this sort of social cruelty overall probably increases your chances of being a “successful” artist. The more you crave power over others, the more you promote yourself, sell yourself as a genius, as a visionary, the more likely you are to convince people of your unique talent – regardless of whether or not your actual work is good, though that certainly helps. I don’t mean to say that every successful artist is manipulative and egocentric, just that being so generally makes it easier to become successful. Maybe this sounds like bitterness – I don’t actually have anyone in mind. I’m just observing a pattern that seems to fit the facts.

It’s obvious that politics attract the sort of person who loves power: This is the big flaw with the system, is that the people least qualified to hold power are the people who seek it, and these people are inevitably the ones who end up with it. What’s less obvious is that this happens in all fields: Those who want power, who believe in power, seek it, and usually they find it. Those who believe in power see everyone who doesn’t grab at it at every opportunity as weak and foolish. We have a word for people like that: President.

Myself, I used to crave a certain sort of intellectual power – I wanted to be A Smart Guy, the guy who figures things out and generally seems like the cleverest dude in the room. I’m still not entirely free of this, but I realized how toxic it became when it changed from trying to make myself look smart to trying to make other people look stupid. I would make little jokes that were biting and unkind, references they wouldn’t get, little verbal traps for them to walk into, trying to make them demonstrate they were worthy of having this conversation. In actuality I think most of the time these were relatively harmless, but particularly around people who didn’t know me it could be somewhere between exasperating and infuriating. Most of the time it was just joking between friends, but it was also a social power-move. I still retain many of these habits, but de-fanged – the joking between friends remains, but the anger and social greed has gone out of it.

The drive for intellectual supremacy is not any more justifiable than other forms of greed. Something I say a lot now is that intelligence isn’t real; what I mean by this is that the human brain has countless capabilities and aptitudes, and we basically just threw a rough collection of these into a bin and called them ‘intelligence’, and pretended it was something that could be measured. You can’t actually measure a brain’s propensity to come up with useful ideas or solutions: The only meaningful measure of a person’s ability to accomplish is that person’s accomplishments. We invented intelligence so that we could create hierarchies of genius, create a path to power for those of a scholarly bent. Rather than allowing people to merely do good work, we have to deify them, grant them intellectual authority, make them Smart or Talented instead of merely good at their work. Intelligence and Talent are not useful descriptors for anything real: They’re just a method for creating a power hierarchy.

Still, I try to be better. All of this just means that, in the end, the responsibility also lies with me to decide what ‘better’ means, and what I need to do to get there. The only one I have to impress is myself.