More Power to You

In the past fragments I have explored specific definitions of love and wisdom that I considered to be very fruitful: wisdom as the ability to drop all perspectives to go beyond whatever perspective you are currently holding, and love as the capacity to see the world from another’s perspective. According to Daniel Thorson, from whom I learned these perspective-related definitions, we can then finally define power as the ability to get others to see from your perspective.

‘Power’ is a difficult word as we have lots of negative associations with it. Our tendency in our modern, democratic societies is to let everybody have their own convictions that nobody should interfere with. But the greatest things we achieved as humanity, such as the advances in science, art and engineering, aren’t things that any one single person could have achieved on their own - they are the results of collaboration, be it by contemporaries or by people building on the knowledge acquired by the generations before. In other words, they require alignment. Alignment emerges when people can at least partly share a perspective - enabled by both the willingness to shift one’s own view and the ability to invite others into it in a convincing way.

Power without wisdom and love will eventually become violence. In this sense, power can even mean just being a writer who manages to write in a compelling and well-argued way so that the readers truly understand and come to share the author’s perspective regarding a specific topic.

With this understanding in mind, I would argue that wanting to cultivate power, alongside wisdom and love, is required for those who seek to improve the world by creating more alignment in a divided world like ours.