https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=zC87jVJ82J4
Hello, and welcome to Navigating Patterns. What I’d like to talk about today is the concept of power. Now I know a lot of people talk about powers and principalities. I have some deep objections, obviously, to these terms and the way we use them. So when I’m talking about words that I think we misuse, what I’m basically at is we’re using the word one way and we’re understanding it a different way. And this is causing problems with our sense making. And as always, these are my definitions. And I’m going to go into my definition. I’m redefining power for you. So if you like it, use it. If you don’t like it, throw it out. I’ll never know. Or better yet, modify it for your own use and understanding. So when we talk about power, we seem to be using it in a particular way, as though it’s some agency that is bearing down on us and forcing us to do something specific, as though it has control and a specific control with a specific aim. Instead of using the term power, I think what we should be talking about is control. And there’s a specific reason for this, because when we’re talking about power, we seem to be saying there’s something above us that is imposing its will, which implies a T loss, one to us that limits our options or forces us to behave in a certain way. Now there’s a couple of problems with this. One is I believe in personal agency, and therefore I believe in personal responsibility, because those two go together. The other is I don’t believe that other things have all that much agency over me. This is actually pretty easy to prove. A lot of the examples people use, and I’ve had many discussions with people about things like Amazon. Amazon has power over us. Jeff Bezos is powerful and he forces us to buy things from his company. They literally talk like this. It’s not true. The way power typically works is it’s something we have that we give to other people. And you may say, well that’s crazy. But I would say, wait a minute. You have songs by like Rage Against the Machine, we’re going to take the power back. Well, wait a minute. Back? How could you take the power back if you didn’t have it in the first place? Kind of a clue. So you can see we’re using the word in two different ways there. And if somebody has power, and power is the way we conceive of it, as though like, oh they’ve got it, and they keep it in a drawer, and they pull it out when they need it, and then we can’t do anything. How would we take the power from them exactly? I mean if that’s the way it is. If power is this enforced control that is being pushed on us and constraining us, then we’re not taking it away from anybody. That isn’t going to happen. It’s not going to happen. Also if it comes down from above, it’s got to be coming from somewhere. So the person that has it either had to take it from someone else who was above them, or it’s coming from higher up than both of them and being imbued down below. And the problem with this is most of the people who talk about power are also atheists. So they have a problem. Where is this power coming from exactly? If you don’t believe in a higher power, the power must be coming from below. It has to be. And there are lots of examples. You can talk about things like, well, there’s authority, and people with authority have power. Yeah, sure, okay. But I went to school. They had rules in school. One of the rules in school was you couldn’t have personal electronic devices playing music. This was obviously before cell phones were popular. But you couldn’t do that. You couldn’t have anything playing music on you. You had to pay attention. You couldn’t have headphones on or any of that. That wasn’t allowed. It didn’t matter if it was lunch either. That wasn’t allowed. Let me tell you something. I did this every year I was in public high school. Every year. And no one said a damn thing. Ever. To me once. Why? Because I didn’t get in trouble. Which isn’t to say they didn’t know. I walked right past headmasters, my headmaster, many times with headphones on. He didn’t even bat an eyelash. Kid got busted in front of me while I was standing there. And he said, what about that guy? And the headmaster said, you worry about you, he’s going to worry about him. And the authority didn’t care. Why? Because it’s not how authority works. You know, did they think they had the power to make me take off the headphones? Maybe they could have coerced me into it. Sure. But that’s more of a negotiation. And this is where we get confused. You can say, well the cops have the power to take you to jail. And okay, they usually have the ability to take you to jail. I’ve been taken to jail. Illegally, I might add. A couple of times actually. I’ve been stopped on the street. Completely illegally. But I complied. Why? Because they have power? No. Because I gave them the power. I could have told them to go screw and kept walking. I had that option. I just didn’t take that option. Why? Because I didn’t do anything wrong. And I wanted to find out what was going on. I was kind of like, oh, something bad must have happened if they’re just stopping people walking on the streets at night. Which in both cases, something bad had happened. They didn’t have the power to do anything. They could have tried. I would have run away from them. And they wouldn’t have caught me, by the way. No, no, no. I have escape routes. Or at least I used to. Especially when in the city. Because you kind of have to. If you’re smart, you kind of have to have escape routes. So, you know, you can walk in neighborhoods you don’t know anything about. But I was walking in a neighborhood I knew well. And they wouldn’t have caught me. No freaking way. I know how to go places cars can’t go pretty easily. So they wouldn’t have made it. And the police department there wasn’t huge. So it’s not like they could have put 30 cops to cordon off an area. And they would have given up. And I had places, buildings I could get into that they didn’t know about. There’s always options like that. And smart street people know how to do that. And I’m not the smartest street person in the world. I’m not claiming that. But I have my roots, believe me. They didn’t have all that much power. Like I said, you know, they can stop you. They can pull you over from the car and say, hey, stop or whatever. One time the three of us, there were three of us that got stopped. We were blocked from the house. Just walking, you know, walking around in the morning, no less. And we got stopped because we were wearing hoodies, quite honestly. Three white kids wearing hoodies, you know, in the middle of the of the expensive neighborhood. Ooh, we better stop them. And we basically told the cop to go screw and cross the street anyway. And the cop was, you know, like he’s in a car. He couldn’t even get out because he didn’t want to block traffic and stuff. So he like whipped the car around and we just walked into our onto our private street at basically where he was like, oh, wait a minute, this is a private street. And then we walked into our apartment and now when that was done and he went away, he didn’t. He can’t come in the apartment and get us anyway. He didn’t have the right to stop us. So he didn’t have the power to do anything. He he thought he did. He certainly tried. Didn’t work. You know, we’d run fast. Not that we needed to. We were only a block away from the house, but he was stuck in the car. He didn’t have all that much power. He can’t get in the house after that. He can go on a private street on private property and arrest you. That he can’t do. He doesn’t have the power. All right. The state doesn’t give him the power. It’s not to say that they don’t do illegal things, but they’re illegal. If you do an illegal thing, do you have power or not? See, I’m confused. I’m confused. How do we use this? And so we all kind of have power, right? And we all kind of give up some power in a negotiation, right? It’s some form of control. And we give this up and we give it up voluntarily often. And you know, when we say we have power, what power do we have? I have a YouTube channel. Obviously you’re watching it now. Or maybe you’re watching a bit shoot or something else. What power do I have? I didn’t do this YouTube channel. I didn’t do this YouTube channel. This isn’t me. This isn’t me. I have so much help. I couldn’t do this. And you can say, look, Mark, you’ve got authority with your friends. And they’ve volunteered their time. There’s Michelle and there’s Sally and there’s Andre and there’s Rizzi and there’s Jonathan. There’s so many people. There’s Manuel. I mean, I can’t do anything without Manuel, right? There’s so many people involved in this project. There’s so many people. Do I have the power? I don’t think so. I mean, they’re very generous with their time and their energy and their attention. And they’re on this project, on this journey with me and with you behind the scenes, doing things, doing all kinds of things. There’s Yana doing artwork and animation. Sally Jo’s doing artwork for me and helping me out with a bunch of other stuff. And you know, and I help them too. Sure, absolutely. But that’s a negotiation. I don’t have any power. I don’t have any power over that. That’s where the power lies in the concerted effort of the project. That’s where the power is. It’s not one person. It’s not one authority. There are times when I’m just like, I don’t want to do any YouTube videos. Not that I don’t have material. I’ve got a file in front of me full of ideas, just full of stuff that I have to do. And I have a plan. Sure, there’s a plan. I’m doing most of the planning. Do I do the planning by myself? No, no, I don’t. I can’t. I’m not good enough. I’m not smart enough. This project is bigger than me. It’s bigger than you. It’s bigger than all of us. That’s the thing. That’s the thing about this. I don’t have the power on my own to run a YouTube channel. I don’t have it. There are some days where I just I can’t do it. I just can’t. I can’t do the thing I need to do, schedule the time, whatever it is. People like Manuel and Michelle and so many other people like, oh no, they prop me up. Sometimes they don’t know it. Sometimes they have no idea. But they prop me up and they get me going. And then I’m like, okay, no, maybe I can pump out a video today. Maybe I can plan a couple of videos for this week. Maybe I can get some of these points across. And then there’s all the people on the Discord server, on the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Discord server who ask me questions, who talk about things. And they say things and they challenge me because I can’t express my ideas clearly all the time. In fact, I fail constantly. And it’s in their questioning. It’s in their interaction with me where they’re pretending like I know something that they need to know. And maybe I do. I don’t know. All right. They’re asking me. Right. Maybe they’re right. And my attempt to explain myself to them makes these videos. These videos don’t exist without a year and a half plus of interacting with people on the Discord server. And years, years before that, talking to people about philosophical issues, discussing words and language and meaning and patterns and the world and how things fit together and what people are up to. Right. People don’t mean what they say, but they sure as heck mean what they do. And that’s why the pragmatist perspective is so important. Because when we talk about something like power, who has power? What is this mysterious power? People only have the power you give them. And maybe four people give somebody power and it’s four people against you and you lose. Maybe. I don’t know. But I do know this. You have a lot more power than you think. And that power is not complete. Because we’re all insufficient. We’re all insufficient. I don’t care if you’re the head of the corporation. I don’t care if you’re the president. Like any model you use where somebody has power is going to be wrong. Horribly wrong. It’s going to miss the mark in a big way. Because power doesn’t work the way we talk about it. But it does work the way we use it. We’re going to take the power back. That means it was taken from us and we can possess it ourselves. Very interesting that we use it that way. But that’s not what we mean when we say it. That’s not how we’re using it. Even though that’s what we’re using it for. It’s very interesting. So power doesn’t really have any ability without structure. Without maybe principality. And I will try to discuss principality in another video. We’ll do principality. We’ll get to it. But the structure that I provide for the YouTube channel is what makes the YouTube channel. Am I the single most important part of the YouTube channel? This YouTube channel? Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t know. I do a lot of the organization. A lot of the planning is mine. The initial plan is mine. The initial idea was mine. But I can’t do this artwork. I can’t do the animation. Not that I physically can’t. I mean I probably could if I spent enough time, energy and effort. It’s not like I’ve never animated anything. But hey, all the tools are new. I’m not that good at it. I never was an expert at animation or drawing, even though I was a graphic designer. I couldn’t do this without those people. Without their volunteer work in many cases. Unreciprocated volunteer work. Although hopefully I’ve helped them in some way that made them want to help me. It’s not, it’s the structure that I’m providing that gives people a way to manifest their power. So, it’s not my power, right? But it is power, sure. But it’s the structure that makes the power work. These two are intertwined. They’re connected in some important way. I’m not going to sit here and pretend like I can explain this to you or even prove it. But if you look around, I think you’ll see it. I think you’ll notice the police officer, in and of himself, he’s just a cog in a machine. And that machine has a structure. And it’s the structure that we give the power to. It’s the structure that holds the power. It’s the structure that we negotiate with. Sometimes it’s the individual because the individual has some power within the structure. And sure, you know, have I talked my way out of tickets? Absolutely. Although I didn’t deserve any of them. I still, still claim that. That happens. You can talk yourself out of a ticket. What does that mean? If you can talk yourself out of a traffic violation or any other violation, and there are some people that, man, they can talk out of anything. They can talk their way out of anything. I’ve met them. They’re amazing people. Then how much power do they have? And how do they seem to have more power than the whole system that’s down against them? I mean, some of these people are hardened criminals and they can talk their way out of criminal charges. I’ve seen people do this. I know people that do this on a regular basis, or at least I used to know them. It’s amazing to watch. They seem to have power and they seem to have more power than the criminal system that should be out to get them. This is very weird. Power doesn’t seem to work the way people talk about it sometimes, but it does work the way they actually interface with it. So the structure matters. The group matters. If somebody has authority and you ignore it, and boy, I’ve done that before, what good is that? I burst in at one o’clock in the morning into a dorm room at Boston University that was guarded. It was guarded. There was a guard at the front desk. Because of the way I walked through the door and the insistence that I had on my face, he didn’t say a word to me. He knew better. He knew right away. Oh, I don’t know what this guy’s up to, but I’m not going to try to stop him. He knew. I knew what I was doing. I knew how to manipulate that situation to make sure that the power structure in place wasn’t going to stop me because I had to get into that dorm room. There was something very important going on at the time. Maybe that’s a story I’ll tell someday, but suffice it to say, nobody tried to stop me. Nobody. Nobody went after me after the fact. Nothing happened. I had the power. Not the machine, not Boston University, not the dorm room guard, none of that. Front door, burst right in, guard right in front of me, in the little thing, could have got me. I wasn’t running, but no one was going to stop me. No one. I don’t care who was there. They weren’t going to stop me. And they knew it. Everybody that saw me knew they weren’t going to stop me. I was going to go where I was going to go. What is power? How does it work? How can people get away with these things? How did I get into that dorm room? What was going on there? Power just doesn’t work the way you think it does. We all have a great deal of agency and a great deal of power. And we all have a great deal of control, control over ourselves, and we can exert control and influence over others. Do I influence the people that help me with my YouTube channel? Absolutely. Do I sometimes call them out when I want something done and they’re not doing it quick enough, even though they’re volunteers and I have no right to ask? Absolutely. This all happens. Is that power or is it negotiation? Is it negotiation? Is it their willingness to be involved in the structure that is creating this YouTube channel? Because this YouTube channel is not created by Mark. It’s not. It’s way bigger than me, way bigger than me. Again, it’s the product of years, years of understanding, thinking, and discussing the topics that I’m discussing with you now. This particular video I couldn’t have discussed before today because I had a conversation with Jack. And until I talked to Jack, I was missing some thing about power, way of explaining it. And when it clicked for him, I went, aha, this is another piece. I couldn’t have done this. This video would not have worked until I talked to Jack earlier today. It’s amazing to me. And with that, I’d like to announce that I’ve put branding all over my channel. I’ve got a bunch of new graphics up. Maybe it’ll change. We’re trying out thumbnails. You probably noticed. We’re trying out a new thumbnail based on the animation. We’ve changed up the music for the animation. It might change again. The animation might change again. Hopefully my good friend Justin will be doing that if he gets some time. But maybe not. Maybe he’s busy. Fair enough. I don’t have the power to make my volunteers do anything. So when they volunteer to do something, it’s very generous of them. And if they don’t make the timeline that they originally thought they’d make or that I would like, then they don’t make it. I don’t have the power or the control to make them do that. Only they have the power and control to do that, to contribute to the structure of the YouTube channel, to contribute to storefronts and Subscribestar and BitChute and all these other things that we’re trying to do to get the message out. So hopefully I’ve given you some examples and some ways of understanding this concept of power and how it interfaces with structure or maybe principalities and why it’s important to understand that. Because if you think that you don’t have the power, then you won’t use the power and you won’t take the responsibility for the power that you do have, the things that you do have agency over, the stuff that you do on a regular basis. And we need to be more careful. We all need to be more careful. Myself especially. With the agency that we have. With the power that we exert over others. With the things we’re asking from others. With the things we’re giving to others. Because sometimes we’re giving things away power wise and we have no idea that we’re doing it. Because we don’t understand how power works. Sometimes we think we have to do something because the other person has power over us or a culture has power to tell us to do this thing. But sometimes that’s not true. And I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do things because maybe you should do them. Maybe the reason why your brain thinks there’s power there is because it’s the right thing to do and that’s the only way you’ll do it. Fair enough. But there are a bunch of things you don’t have to do that you’re doing that maybe aren’t helpful. Maybe for the people you’re doing them for even, there’s a thing called enablement. And that’s why it’s important to understand these things. And so as I sort of relaunch and rebrand my channel here, please remember that while I may have some degree of influence, which is a good way to think about it, and I may have created the majority of the structure that enables this YouTube channel, structure around videos, structure around the artwork, structure around the theming, right? I don’t do all that by myself. I can’t do all that by myself. So maybe I have some power over it, but actually it’s bigger than me and it’s bigger than me plus the volunteers that are helping me. It’s bigger than me plus the volunteers that are helping me plus the people that watch my channel. That’s how power works. There’s an element of structure. There’s an element of control. There’s an element of influence. And all of these things combine to create the illusion of power. But power in the form of something that has control over us, that forces us to do things or constrains us from doing other things, that doesn’t exist. Take back your agency. Be more responsible. And most of all, thank you for giving me the thing that gives this channel more influence and more power to help influence other people, and that is your time and attention.