From the book "Kinds of power : a guide to its intelligent uses" by James Hillman. Copyright © 1995 by James Hillman. Published by Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., 1540 Broadway, New York, NY 10036.
PART 2: Styles of Power
The Language of Power
Control
Office
Prestige
Exhibitionism
Ambition
Reputation
Influence
Resistance
Leadership
Concentration
Authority
Persuasion
Charisma
Rising
Decision
Fearsomeness
Tyranny
Veto
Purism
Subtle Power
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p. 156
Concentration
We begin by looking at old movies for images of concentrated power: the oak-paneled library set where the evil widow now owns all the stock in the company; the somber magnate alone in his Western railroad car; the tight-lipped Mafia boss under his black hat, back to the restaurant wall; the kung fu teacher utterly focused, utterly compact; the paranoid enemy of James Bond, isolated and impregnable, the concentric focus of a world empire; the frail churchgoing schoolteacher whose single-minded determination turns the frontier around. Or imagine Rodin's statue of 'The Thinker'---that head, that fist, that concentration. Images of power.
In the textbooks of business today, concentration of power gets poor marks. A chief executive, a board or a company are considered to be on the wrong managerial road when power is concentrated in too few hands. Power is to be decentralized among subsets, each with its own decision-making and profit-generating autonomy. Centers of power are to be loosened, empowerment shared. Cooperatives, teams, worker-shareholders, conversations rather than directives, networks.
The network replaces the turbine as a governing image. Today, not the massive dynamo of tightly coiled wires wrapped around themselves, not even the tightly packed silicon wafer; but the images of flow, feedback, distributive energy, touching all the bases, balancing constituencies, delivery---an indeterminate field of almost random forces---are the new images of power. Not the heart, the capillaries.
The famous lines of the greatest of Irish poets, William Butler Yeats, which prophesied the horrors of Western civilization during the first part of the twentieth century---"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world"---also foreshadowed the chaos and catastrophe theories of the latter part of the century, theories which void the center in favor of creative innovation, freeing enterprise to find its niche and do its thing any which way it can. The center 'should' not hold so that things may indeed fall apart. All you need is access with the help of compatibilities. The internet linkup is where power resides.
Power comes in to any of us by being plugged in---or rather, power 'is' being plugged in, since there is no single generative source. The concentration which "Think" requires, like the corporation whose motto it was, gradually gives way to Stay-in-Touch.
Despite these trends, concentration remains a distinct proclivity of the human mind. Something about the mind enjoys a focused immersion into itself. To bring careful consideration to a single question, to evaluate options and set priorities, to lay out an intelligent schedule, to listen without distraction, to observe, attend, analyze, mull---all this calls for a power of mind beyond the "takes" of aides and the briefings of experts. Hercule Poirot in the Agatha Christie detective novels called this capacity his "little grey cells," by which he meant not mere "smarts" but the ability to concentrate fully on the puzzles of the crime, its circumstances, the characters, motives, alibis. All held together in the intensity of thought, resulting in masterful strokes of action.
The idea has occurred to me of a possible relation between lack of concentration in schoolchildren, which psychiatry calls "attention deficit disorder," and the increased violence with weapons in the same population. The intense concentrated power of a weapon---gun, knife, club, chain---may offer single-minded focus to a distractible and diffuse consciousness that surfs through the day as if it, too, were part of the media, all channels on at once. If, as I am suggesting, the psyche desires to concentrate, then a weapon may be satisfying what the school-room does not afford. Besides policing weapons, we might search for methods of teaching that capture attention and evoke concentration---images, dramas, rituals, rhythms---thereby transferring power back from the weapon to the child's mind.
My emphasis on concentration as power, and a power that the psyche needs and enjoys, takes us away from current ideas of leadership as learning---that is, the idea that the power of an advanced leader lies mainly in an ability to stay open. The very word "concentration" means closed circles, self-enclosure, inward focus, density, intensity. Surely, it will be said, such a mind will asphyxiate in its own closet, breathing only its own exhalations. No winds of change blowing through, no assimilation of new input, and so it cannot learn and therefore cannot lead. From this standpoint, concentration looks like withdrawal and the abdication of power.
However, concentration finds its learning elsewhere and receives input from other sources rather than other people. This is the introverted style of power found in the shaman, the recluse, the hermit, the mystic, the contemplative. They turn to dreams, meditations, reveries, signs, omens, old texts, motions of nature and "sessions of sweet and silent thought." Concentration gives access to other powers---inner, hidden and highly suspect to the everyday camaraderie of business. It attempts connection with genius, with inspiration. It trusts solitude. It enjoys silence. And it rises with an agreeable determination to the challenge of tensions, crises and no-win dilemmas.
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p. 160
Authority
There is a kind of power given neither by control, by office, nor by prestige, and it can't be achieved by ambition. Reputation is some of it, but only some. This is the power of authority.
The nature of this kind of power, where it comes from, how it can be recognized, the ways it works---these are questions that stock answers cannot satisfy. For instance, authority may come with older age, although that is not assured, since the seniors in our society may not carry the authority of clan elders. The accouterments of age, such as the dyed hair, dentures and wrinkles of a person in a retirement beach chair, do not confer the same authority as do similar signs (scars, lines, toothlessness and tattoos) in the face of a tribal elder. Age is not enough. Nor does the maxim "information is power" hold for authority. A person may be crammed with data and remember all the intrigue and personal history of the office, proving "invaluable" to the company, and never gain enough authority to be heard.
Authority may come from exceptional accomplishment, but that, too, is not assured, for specific expertise does not necessarily confer the wider weight of respect. Field experience may contribute to authority, but armchair reflection may prove proportionately more significant. Therefore, the frequent use of experts on TV as "authorities" confuses the narrow with the broad, opinion with sagacity (wisdom, shrewdness), and information with knowledge. The voice of authority on Eastern Europe or education policy called to the TV panel need not be limited to field hands "who have been there" when what is wanted is that old mental virtue called estimation, the capacity to make value judgments by seeing not just all the angles but also seeing deeply into the long-term roots and ramifications of an issue. Speaking to the essential issue differs from speaking for or against a position in regard to an issue. The authoritative voice brings an intrinsic quality of disinterest---with conviction.
The quality is hard to describe, yet like good art and bad pornography (or bad art and good pornography), "I know it when I see it." It may be lodged anywhere in almost anyone, though actual examples are few. We come across it in memory---someone in your hometown childhood, a person of dignity who could size things up and whose words struck deep, whose mere presence appreciated invisible values. Was it what she did; what he said? Was it how they carried themselves, or reacted at a critical moment? Was it their aura of distance or their easiness, so at home in the world? One thing seems sure: they made you feel the power of authenticity. They simply had it in themselves.
Even if authority arises as an autonomous gift and resides in my specific nature, its actual power manifests only within a communal context. It must be recognized. I may be experienced, intelligent, unique and detached, but until I am needed, until my voice is called for, I do not have authority.
Other people grant the authority that cannot be conferred by individuality alone. Authority is therefore societal, just as self is communal. We belong to each other, and the recognition by others of the qualities that each person embodies is as basic to human awareness as is the recognition of cries and songs among birds and smells among mammals. Authority may be intrinsic, but it is not really there until given confirmation by the world. "World," by the way, is not confined only to other people; for authority in humans is recognized also by animals, who show quickly whom they respect and whom among their handlers they can trick, scare and disobey.
That authority cannot be affected by persuasion and does not try to tyrannize or even subordinate shows its intrinsic autonomy. This autonomy is less a sign of aloofness than of radical independence from all other kinds of power. The radical independence of judicial courts written into the Constitution separates judgment from other kinds of power. It must be disinterested. Perhaps it is in this very independence from the usual manifestations power that the authority of authority lies.
The misuse of the term "authorities" for governing bodies, of "authoritarianism" for despotism, and diagnosing an "authority problem" as a rebellious inability to take direction defame the idea of authority and confuse it with other styles of power.
This confusion of an authoritative voice with an authoritarian one shows how little we grasp this kind of power. It also shows how fearful we are of authority in a democratic society, and one increasingly egalitarian. But even more, these confusions tell how ego-centered are our notions of power in general; we seem unable to imagine authority as a gift or capacity not located in the ego. So what limits our understanding here is not fear of authority but the justified fear of usurpation of it by the ego.
I want to stress the detachment of this kind of power, its inner restraint, for authority gives enormous power. One voice can sway a thousand. The respect afforded by others raises you above others. A potential for tyranny is always there the moment you exercise your authority. Shakespeare writes (Measure for Measure II, ii, 108): "O! it is excellent / To have a giant's strength, but it is tyrannous / To use it like a giant." Withholding, disinterestedness, independence seem to be necessary corollaries of authority.
The independence of authority frees it from the office, prestige and trappings of power. Bernard Baruch had only a park bench; Wendell Berry keeps to his poems and his Kentucky farm. Einstein. Segovia. Casals. Rouault. Matisse. Recent pop psychology that wants to give back to men the authority they feel they've lost refers to this independence as the inner king. In a play that treats the lost power of a king, Shakespeare says a lot in a few lines about authority. When Kent places himself in service to the king, Lear interviews him for the job (King Lear I, iv, 24ff.):
"What wouldst thou?"
"Service."
"Who wouldst thou serve?"
"You."
"Dost thou know me, fellow?"
"No, sir; but you have that in your countenance which I would fain call master"
"What's that?"
"Authority."
And this is after the king has been deposed from ruling power. Clearly Lear's authority is intrinsic (deep-rooted, deep-seated), and as the play proceeds and his helplessness and madness increase, the power of authority never leaves him.
Of course, some of it comes from his past performance. After all he was the king, as Oedipus at the end of his life, blind, aged, impoverished and dying, still was once Oedipus Tyrannos. The past is still there in the present.
In our times Averell Harriman, though not to be measured against figures like Lear and Oedipus, into his nineties was a man of authority. Without office, without a power base, his generation of influence long past, he nonetheless still carried authority. Having been an ambassador, a governor, a special emissary and troubleshooter, a scion of a privileged family, and present at decisive moments of twentieth-century history, of course conferred power on him. But there are many others who "have been there since the beginning" yet fade into oblivion. Authority is more than knowledge, memory, judgment, competence, social relations; more than who you know and where you've been. And because it is an invisible quality, it also attracts great envy and its authenticity is demeaned as merely, in Harriman's case, deriving from wealth or belonging to the right class.
One final component needs to be singled out: what the Romans called 'gravitas,' a certain weight that gives importance, even an oppressive seriousness. Descendants of 'gravitas' appear in our "gravity" and "grave" and in the French 'gravide' for pregnant. 'Gravitas' itself descends from an even older, though still most popular, Sanskrit term, 'guruh,' weighty. The power of authority comes from the belly; its direction is earthward like gravity.
Perhaps, authority rises as the soul sinks gravely---graveward---as one becomes an ancestor, a figure who represents the stored wisdom of the community, a representation rather than a personality. One's authority comes then less from personal history and more from impersonal authorities beyond the grave, the dead and their teachings. Is that why we turn in crises and in older age to biographies, trying to deepen our individual personality by connecting with the past and the dead, those figures Emerson called Representative Men? And perhaps that's why authority seems most apparent in the aging. Maybe it is ultimately authorized by the chthonic gods of the Underworld, by Hades, and the ancestors whom our culture recognizes only as History.
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From Dictionary:
chthonic (also chthonian)
adjective
concerning, belonging to, or inhabiting the underworld : a chthonic deity.
ORIGIN late 19th cent.: from Greek khthōn ‘earth’ + -ic .
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