Reflections on Two Kinds of Power
by John E. Mack, M.D.

In his December 7th, 1988 address to the United Nations General Assembly, Mikhail Gorbachev projected a vision of power different from the military and political expressions we have become accustomed to hearing from world leaders. “All of us,” he said, “and primarily the stronger of us, must exercise self-restraint and totally rule out any outward-oriented use of force.” Nuclear weapons, Gorbachev said, have ymbolized “absolute military power,” but at the same time have “revealed the absolute limits of that power.”

The need for a sense of personal power is one of the primary motivating forces in human life. Conversely, the feeling of powerlessness or helplessness is perhaps the most disturbing of human emotions, one to be avoided at all costs. But what is power? We seem to use the word in two fundamentally different ways. One use connotes vitality, a kind of natural energy, and, sometimes, even spirituality. It is a positive driving force expressing our loving connection with other beings and our conviction that we can have a positive impact upon the world around us. The other kind of power implies a relationship of domination and control; control of resources, nature, and other creatures. It is this second kind of power which finds its most extreme expression in the use of nuclear weapons as instruments of psychological terror.

From the time of our first awareness of dependence and weakness in early infancy, we develop strategies to overcome our helplessness and to influence the surrounding world, beginning with our parents. Through charm and seduction, cries of pain, and a growing capacity to say “no,” infants use the gifts at their disposal to affect their caretakers as powerfully as they can. Some children in modern American families, even before they are two, are so successful at dominating and controlling the household that they become true tyrants. One mother described her indulged 21 month old son sitting at her desk “like an executive, in charge of the situation, asserting his power.”

But more fundamental is the small child's sense of helplessness and vulnerability in the face of the apparently arbitrary comings and goings of those upon whom he or she depends for protection and for life itself. The child's primary strategy for gaining power is to form alliances, bonds of affiliation, at first with his or her family members as individuals and then with the family group as a whole. The sense of belonging within a family, through which a greater sense of personal power and security develop, is the prototype for later alliances and group participating in clubs, communities, corporations, public and private agencies and professional organizations. The child's feeling of belonging in the family later becomes an attachment to “my” family, tribe, or nation as opposed to others.

The need for a sense of personal power, which becomes closely linked to self esteem, is manifested clearly in the way individuals behave in or identity with the institutions to which they belong. The perception that power and other resources in the group or institution are limited, or that one's position in the group is threatened, blocks one's experience of power of the first sort — one which grows out of connection and influence — to encourage one to seek power of the type which relies on control or domination.

Our identification with those groups or institutions which serve functions of survival and protection, such as the military or the church, and, above all, the nation state, are especially profound and resemble quite dramatically the connection with our own families. It should not surprise us, therefore, that we may be willing to die or kill for the nation state should we be told that its identity or survival is threatened. The violent uprising of threatened peoples all over the world attests to the supreme power of ethno-national identifications.

The limitations of military force in an age of nuclear weapons have made the use of power in the second sense dangerous for the survival of life on the planet. Furthermore, advances in communication technologies have made it possible to connect the peoples of the Earth who were, before the nuclear age, separated by vast geographic, cultural, and political distances. A return to the experience and use of the power of connection and influence has become not only possible, but also a necessity in the face of rapidly changing global realities. In the sphere of international relations this shift will require what might be called political maturation. In a speech at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Andrei Kortunov of the Soviet Institute for the Study of the United States and Canada reflected on Gorbachev's address to the United Nations. He attributed the breaking of new ground in that address-the express recognition of global interconnectedness-to just such a process of political maturation.

“We have lost the arrogance of power typical of every young dynamic nation,” Kortunov said. “Kruschev came to the United Nations as a soldier against imperialism. Gorbachev came as an engineer to construct a new world order. We lost our ideological zeal and gained political responsibilities. Our world is united, not divided into hostile systems. We learned the hard way in the high seas of the Caribbean, the streets of Prague, the mountains of Afghanistan, the conference tables of Moscow, and the rice fields of Russia. We learned for all mankind what it has not been easy for mankind to know.” The new sense of international unity Kortunov spoke of was symbolized by the U.S. airlift of medical and rescue supplies to the stricken areas of Armenia following the earthquake that dramatically cut short Gorbachev's visit to New York. This was the first time in its history that the Soviet Union had accepted major medical and humanitarian aid from any other country. On December 10th, in the Global Classroom, a video space bridge linking Tufts and Moscow Universities, American professors and scientists expressed sympathy to their Soviet counterparts, who thanked them warmly before large student audiences in both of our countries.

There can be no turning back. The problems which we now face on this planet cannot be solved by single nations acting independently. Environmental pollution, the greenhouse effect, and the destruction of the ozone layer connect the peoples of the Earth as surely as intercontinental ballistic missiles and communication satellites do. If we escape the fast form of planetary death by nuclear weapons, we will surely die by slower means, unless we address together the ecological disasters that are destroying the life of our planet. There is no place for dominance, greed, and the power to control in addressing these new global challenges. But self-restraint and renunciation of force, combined with the exercise of that power which connects us with the Earth and is most fully expressed in our love for one another, can bring us back from the abyss.


John E. Mack, M.D., is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Mack is the founder of the Center for Psychology & Social Change. He is the author or co-author of ten books, including A Prince of Our Disorder, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), and most recently, Passport to the Cosmos.

© 1989 John E. Mack
Originally published in Center Review, Vol. 3, No. 1