Fighting your way to the top doesn't work. The secret is to befriend.
“What am I supposed to tell my daughter?” a Facebook friend posted recently. Her question was prompted by Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, but I doubt I could easily find a parent — of a brown child, a refugee or immigrant child, an LGBT or Q child, a Jewish child, a daughter, a son, a school kid — who has not asked this question lately, prompted by one news cycle or another.
I have been wondering what to tell my daughters, too. Mean people will try to hurt you is an obvious place to start, but our children can see that for themselves. Everywhere we look, mean people seem to have the upper hand — racists, bigots, bullies, rapists, shooters, anti-Semites, homophobes. Is this inevitable? Does power always accrue to the mean, and the violent? Is this what we should teach our children, to prepare them for a world we haven’t been able to fix for them ourselves?
I think not. I think mean people only get the upper hand when kind people misunderstand how power works — where it comes from and how it builds. One of the misunderstandings kind pople are prone to is the notion that we must make a choice between being powerful, and being kind. I want my daughters to learn something else entirely: How to be kind, and how to rule the world.
Since these subjects are not to be found in any school curriculum that I know of, I have been forced to develop my own lesson plan. In the process, I’ve discovered something unexpected. The lessons in power and the lessons in kindness are one and the same. Kindness is no excuse for powerlessness.
Here are those lessons.
Lesson #1: “Be Good” Is Power’s First Warning
The first thing that will happen when you show an interest in power is a warning: Be good. Most of us become so conditioned to this warning that we give it to ourselves the moment the subject of power comes up. Certainly other people will give it to you if you tell them you plan to be powerful. They will ask nervously, But will you use your power for good? You don’t really need to be powerful, do you? You just need to be safe. Don’t you know that power corrupts?
Where does this voice come from? Whose interest is it in that we back away from power before we even pick it up, and never seek to figure out its tricks? Ours? Or that of the currently powerful, who do not wish to be challenged?
What do we mean when we tell other people to be good? When we say it to girls, it sounds like: Do not drink, get high, swear, look sexy, have sex, sneak out at night, go to parties, or have any other kind of fun breaking rules set by people who have power over you. When we say it to brown-skinned boys, it sounds like: Do not yell, get angry, roughhouse, talk back, wear those clothes, drive in that part of town, forget to say “sir,” and do not ever, ever argue with a cop. The underlying message is the same. Do not challenge power. If you break the rules, you are not good, you are bad, and when you get hurt, you will deserve it. In fact, your getting hurt will be seen as proof that you deserved it. Be good = Be submissive. Do not challenge the powerful or they will assert their power by making you a victim of punishment. Who are the powerful in this case? The parents laying down these laws out of fear for their children? Or the people who rape those girls and lynch those boys and face no consequences? We don’t tell heirs to power — our cops and politicians and prep school boys — to be good, or if we do, we don’t mean it. We expect them to do whatever they’re going to do and get away with it. Boys will be boys. We expect them to assert power and win.
When someone tells you to be good, look around for the power that is being kept from you. It will be there. When you spot it, keep your eye on it, and also on the person who will hurt you if you reach for it. Do not confuse the person who tells you the rules for the person who has the power. The person telling you the rules is trying to keep you safe. The person with the power doesn’t care if you get hurt.
Lesson #2: Power Is Not What You Think
Once you have your eye on power, the obvious next question is, Where does it come from? Why does the boy rape the girl and not the other way around? Why do black men get shot by white police and not vice versa? Why does the man get elected and not the woman? We look at these inequalities, and see that white men — especially rich ones — seem to have all the power, and we make a mistake. We think that rich, white men have power because of what they are. We think that wealth and privilege and gender are sourcesof power. But this is another one of power’s tricks.
Power really wants you to believe that it comes from things that are difficult or impossible to achieve unless you are born with them, are very lucky, or both. Wealth. Privilege. Gender. Race. A capacity for violence. If you believe that power is not yours because of who you are, you will likely give up and do what power tells you, because what choice do you have? You’ll never have power because people like you have no access to it.
It’s easy to believe that power comes from wealth. Rich people, if they are rich enough, can buy anything they want, go anywhere they want, hire anyone to do anything they want. Isn’t that the definition of power?
But look more closely.
Who is more powerful? A kid with no friends and a hundred dollar bill in his pocket? Or two buddies who steal his money and alibi each other, who are athletes whose teammates will assert that they are good guys who wouldn’t do such a thing, governed by school administrators who don’t like to punish athletes because suspending them from sports ruins the fun for everyone?
Wealth is not the source of power, it’s a consequence. The powerful use their power to accumulate wealth — taking money from those who are weaker than they, directing its flow, and passing it around amongst themselves. Wealth in the hands of the powerless rarely confers power, but instead leads to victimization.
What do the athletes have that the friendless rich kid does not? Privilege. What is privilege? It is the condition of having lots of friends. The friend with the alibi. The friends with the character references. The friends in the justice system.
The kinds of friends who confer privilege do not have to know you personally. They just have to feel generally positive about you, and have interests that are aligned with yours. When you think about friendship this way, you see how far it can go. We’re friends with people we connect with on social media, whether we’ve met them personally or not. We’re friends with people who entertain us with music or stories or art. We’re friends with athletes whose sports we enjoy. We’re friends with people who went to our schools long before and after we were there. We’re friends with people whose ideas we glean from books, the media, or the Internet. We’re friends with people who fight on our side in wars. We’re friends with people who are from the same place we are. We’re friends with people we find attractive. We’re friends with people who look like us. We’re friends with people who share our church, our religion, our culture.
What if the friendless kid had a switchblade with which to defend his hundred dollar bill? Would his weapon be a practical defense against well-connected, but unarmed, thieves? Think about it for a minute. What would happen to an unpopular kid who pulled a switchblade at school? Out of school suspension so fast it would make your head spin, and likely arrest. If he were a black boy defending himself against harrassment by a cop? He’d be shot on the spot, and his killer would walk away without penalty. Weapons in the hands of the powerless, even more than wealth, lead to victimhood, not victory.
As for race and gender, who has the most friends? Folks who have, for millennia, been exploring the world together, sharing ideas with one another, fighting wars and playing sports together, building religions and governments together, going to school together, going into business together: e.g., men of European descent? Or folks who have been kept home looking after babies, separated from their families, cut off from their homelands, deprived of education and access to paid employment and the ability to freely communicate, and systematically denied opportunities to gather, unite, share ideas, or build things together: e.g., women, enslaved people, religious or ethnic minorities trapped in unfriendly dominant cultures?
Lesson #3: Connection Is The Original Human Superpower
Scientists have spent a lot of time trying to understand just what it is about humans that has led to our world domination. Why are there so many of us? Why do we have so much power over every other species on the planet, even the ability to affect the fate of the planet itself? Why humans and not dolphins or elephants or chimpanzees? The more we learn about other species, the more we realize that we are not alone in our intelligence, in our use of tools, in our capacity for violence, in our memories, in our longevity, or even in our ability to communicate.
What truly sets us apart? Our ability, our instinct, our hunger to connect.
Like ants and bees, humans are ultra-social. We depend on one another for our survival and well-being to a degree that is found nowhere else in the animal kingdom except in hiving insects. Hiving insects, however, limit cooperation and alliance to their own family members, while avoiding or battling the members of other hives. Humans form connection and cooperative alliance with everyone and everything: other humans; the Neanderthals and Denisovans whose traces linger in our DNA; other animals for food, utility or companionship; plants for food, utility or beauty; things we have made; places we have lived; ideas we’ve been taught.
Our connections and our hunger to connect have led to ever-improving tools to help us do it more effectively — language to connect more accurately and in more detail, writing so we can connect across distance and time, cities so we can connect with more people at once, religion and culture to connect us even more effectively across distance and time; currency, transportation, telecommunication, and now the Internet.
Every single means of exerting power over others that we humans possess — government, religion, education, technology, the media, the military, wealth, politics, fame, the patriarchy — depends on a single element: the power of human connection. In every case, more connection leads to greater power.
Lesson #4: To Gain Power, Make Friends
By the time power has become entrenched, and you are not in possession of it, the problem seems too large to tackle. How does one defeat an oppressive government, systemic racism, the patriarchy, the NRA?
But once you understand that the wellspring of power in every single case is human connection, the answer is surprisingly simple. It has two parts. 1) Do not attempt to befriend the power that oppresses you. 2) Befriend everyone else. Keep befriending until you have more connections on your side than those currently in power. And then you will be stronger.
The first part of the solution — don’t befriend an oppressive power — we understand instinctively. Don’t vote for the loathsome candidate. Don’t work for the exploitative company or the evil boss. Don’t court the mean girl at school. Don’t date or marry the abuser. But when we fail to follow up with the second part of the solution — befriend others — we often feel we have no choice. We didn’t vote for the candidate, but too many others did. The exploitative company with the evil boss is the only one hiring. Without the mean girl’s approval, no one else will be our friend. If we leave the abuser, no one will protect us from him.
Of course, where power is your enemy, it does not want you to make friends. It will do anything to separate you from those who would strengthen and defend you. This is why the oppressive government can’t just ignore you, but actively seeks to harm you (by removing your children, restricting your access to marriage and health care, refusing to indict your rapist, putting your sons in prison, singling you out for harassment in public restrooms, declining to protect you from gunmen). This is why the exploitative company eliminates labor unions and makes you sign non-compete agreements. This is why the mean girl is not content to shun you herself, but attempts to deprive you of all other friends, too. This is why the abusive spouse harms your relationships with others. All victims, whether of abuse, mugging, racism, enslavement, or holocaust, are first isolated from those who would defend them, and then harmed. Isolation is how power weakens its victims.
If you are going to be powerful, you are going to have to make friends anyway. This is the ultimate defiance of power and the only effective one. To do this, you do not have to be bad, but you will almost certainly not have the option to be “good.” You will have to keep secrets, withhold information from the power that seeks to isolate you. You may have to sneak out, wear clothes that are against the rules, and have the kinds of fun that power does not want you to have. Fun is not the only glue for sticking friends together, but it’s an important one.
Secret #5: There Is No Such Thing As The “Right” Friends
Two things matter in a friend: 1) A sincere interest in your well-being, and 2) Presence. The person who will hurt, betray, or abandon you if it serves her interests is not a good candidate, and neither is the person who likes you fine but is never there when you need him. Since having friends requires being a friend, these are also the two things you must give to people you wish to befriend.
Nothing else matters when it comes to friends. You need true friends who care about you and vice versa, and you need them around you. Period. Who these friends are does not matter in the least. They do not need to be rich or popular or attractive or famous or well-connected. They do not need to live in the right neighborhoods, go to the right schools, have the right jobs, the right degrees, the right other friends, the right sexual orientation, the right gender, or the right skin color. They do not have to wear the right clothes or sit at the right table in the cafeteria or play the right sports. The people you will be tempted to perceive as “right” are the ones who already have power, and want to stay in power by depriving you of friends. So they will first convince you that they are the only friends worth having, and then they will refuse to be your friend. Do not fall for it.
Don’t fall for it in the lunchroom, and don’t fall for it in the world. In every situation in life, the rules of power remain the same. Power does not have a calculus, only simple addition: The one with the most friends around themwins. This is true in the highest circles of government and it’s true at that drunken party you lied to your parents and snuck out to attend. The friends who care about you and are around you will make sure you get the job. The friends who care about you and are around you will not leave you drunk and alone to be raped. The community that cares about you and is around youwill not call the cops when you walk down the street, or support a police force that terrorizes you.
The “right” place to be, always and without exception, is the place where you have the most friends around you. This principle is sometimes at odds with certain cherished notions of liberal society, chiefly diversity and integration. If attending a school or moving to a new place will result in your having more friends rather than fewer, it’s a powerful move. Sometimes the opposite is true. When power offers you an “opportunity” that will take you away from the people who care about you, and surround you with hostile strangers who cannot be won, you should decline. Before you decide, though, take your own attitude into account. Not every stranger you regard as a potential friend will become one, but the strangers you shun as potential enemies don’t stand a chance.
Lesson #6: When You Have To Choose, Choose Friendship
There may be times when you feel that you would rather be right than make a friend, or keep one. We often confuse agreement for friendship. This is a mistake. Remember that a friend is someone who cares for you, and is there for you when it matters. Period. Some friends will betray you in the voting booth but be right there for you when you are sick or in trouble. Keep these friends, not because politics don’t matter, but because people who care about you may change their minds for you, and people who don’t never will. Every friend you forego for some abstract ideological reason is power you give away to your enemies. Attend to your connections, and be wary of anything that threatens them — the impulse to guilt-trip, accuse, or argue for the sake of winning rather than converse for the sake of understanding.
Lesson #7: Bullying Is Power On Its Way Out
Bullying, whether it is done by the mean kid at school or by the president of the country, is done by the currently powerful to the currently vulnerable. However, bullying is the action of a powerful person who feels threatened — someone who is no longer expanding his influence by building connection to others, but who clings fearfully to the power he already has by seeking to erode the influence of others. Since bullying by its nature damages connection rather than builds it, bullying always leads to a decline in power rather than an expansion. If you are the target of bullying, it means that the bully fears the possibility of your power, and seeks to undermine it before you can use it against him. If you respond to bullying by building your allies, rather than by fighting back directly against an enemy that is, for the present, stronger than you are, you will always win in the end.
When power is at its most oppressive, it is at its most vulnerable. The oppressive power has looked around and found no new allies, so it has turned instead to terrorizing those it fears, isolating them from one another and sowing discord among them so they will not unite against it. Consider the government which has ceased to build new alliances, and instead picks fights with former allies, builds walls against immigrants, terrorizes and erodes the rights of women and minorities, and allows children to be shot in their schools. Who is this power afraid of? Everyone. It cannot grow. It has no friends to call upon. It has armed itself with guns and retreated to the castle where it is currently under siege. The only reason it has not yet been defeated by election and disarmed with gun legislation is that its enemies are too busy bickering amongst themselves to storm the castle.
Assignment:
Look around you for antagonists who ought to be allies. Some examples to get you started are pink people who want to end racism and brown people who do, too; women who fear rape and men who deplore it; feminists and anyone who identifies as a woman; people who matter enough to each other to share holidays even though they voted for different political parties; and two friends who get into a fight at a slumber party. When you notice this dynamic in your own life, avoid immediately joining sides and starting to throw punches. Instead, look for the true enemy. In the examples above, the answers are, respectively: racism, rape, misogyny, family discord, and friend discord. When you have identified the true enemy, do whatever you can to unite the parties at hand against it. Understand this action not as meekness or conflict avoidance, but as the true work of a general, which is to build an army so large and united and just that there is no one left for it to fight.
Don’t believe that old saw about power corrupting. This is just another way that power tells you, “Be good; don’t challenge me.” True power comes from connection. Building connection means making friends and standing your common ground together, and no corruption ever came of that. The definition of corruption is to break down and rot. Corruption is not what living, growing power does: Corruption is what happens when power stops growing and begins to die. When a large power dies, it makes a big stink, like a whale rotting on a beach.
Connect, don’t corrupt. Grow your power as if the fate of the world depends upon it, because it does. That is your assignment.
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