Theory
The theory of Social Power rests on a simple foundation: humans have needs and are driven to fulfill those needs. The amount of control that a person (A) has over another person’s (B) needs in proportion to the amount of control that person (B) has over person (A)’s needs is how much Social Power person A has over person B. It is a zero sum game where one person’s gain in power is another person’s loss of power. That may sound harsh, but these changes are mediated by a person’s ability to exit the relationship altogether (if possible).
One note on this essay is that it is really a set of thought experiments and not based on citing experimental evidence. It is not because such evidence doesn’t exist, but that I am not intimately familiar with it. Hopefully over time, I can fill in this essay with evidence from experiments and from historical studies.
Needs
Needs form the basis of the theory of Social Power. A complete understanding of the types and characteristics of human needs are necessary to extrapolate how this translates into Social Power. Needs form a kind of set of fundamental particles that when combined in different ways allow an very large, but finite number of types of interactions between people. These needs show themselves in different ways as part of the rules in the societies in which we live.
Humans have many needs and people have studied and theorized about this for centuries. Needs fall into two basic categories: needs that are required for a person to survive (basic needs) and keep living and needs that drive us but that we can live without (non-basic needs). Basic needs also have an order to them in that they have to be satisfied within differing amounts of time. The less time within which they have to be satisfied, the more basic the need (and the greater the power if another person has control of that need).
| Need | Time until death |
| Air | ~1 minute |
| Water | ~3 days |
| Food | ~20 days |
| Warmth | varies based on climate |
| Dryness | varies based on climate |
| Sanitation | varies based on conditions |
Beyond basic needs we could use person x’s catalog of human needs. How important these needs are to each person may vary over a wide distance. Some people may have a very strong need for companionship, while others for a sense of belonging in society, and yet others with a strong need for purpose in life.
All needs are mediated through feelings. We know about our various needs through the feelings we have about them, both positive and negative. For example, we have the feeling of hunger when we need food, and the feeling of satisfaction when we are eating.
By monitoring our feelings (which we do constantly — at least unconsciously) we seek to maximize our good feelings and minimize our bad feelings. In this way we seek to meet our needs with our feelings as our guide.
Ideas
Of the non-basic needs, the need to promote and defend ideas that we believe in is probably the most overlooked. We all grow up developing ideas about ourselves, our world and our place in it. These ideas become part of who we are. As such, they become just like an appendage that we feel we must defend/promote, even in the case where such ideas are harmful to us (e.g. if the idea is that we are inferior to others or undeserving of love).
Ideas are a basic building block of how humans as a social animal are able to cooperate to perform a common function (i.e. living together in a society). Every human society from hunter-gatherers, to people living in modern technological societies live in a web of institutions that bound what is possible in our lives. Those institutions are maintained by common ideas that exist in the minds of people who are in that society.
Marriage is an institution that comprises a set of ideas about who should get married, when they should get married, to whom they should get married, what it is like after they are married, and so on. Not everyone in a society has an absolute agreement about those things about marriage, but there is a range of ideas, probably roughly on bell curve where most people agree with some sets of ideas about marriage and less people (on the margins of the bell curve) have differences with the “mainstream views” but maybe still some overlap. Those ideas exist in the minds of the people in that society. Since it is a need to defend/promote our ideas, it is easier to agree with mainstream views on marriage than it is to hold outlier views.
People who agree on ideas that are important to them get along easier because there is no “discord” when talking about those ideas. If I believe that people who are gay should be able get married and I am talking about marriage with someone who believes that it is only for heterosexual couples, it is likely to be a contentious conversation. The more deeply held this idea, the more contentious the conversation is likely to be. On the other hand, if I am talking with someone who agrees with my views about marriage, then my talking reaffirms their ideas which gives them good feelings and their talking reaffirms my ideas which gives me good feelings. Good feelings all around gives me one more reason to spend time around that person. Bad feelings in talking to my “opponent” will make me not want to spend time with them or at least get me to avoid the topic of marriage.
Lest you think that the idea has to be some hot political topic, people can disagree on the most mundane things like how often a person should shower or brush their teeth. They can disagree on what foods should be eaten, or where and how a person should relieve themselves. The Indian caste system is all about ideas of who is and is not clean and what actions are considered clean or dirty. The Jewish and Muslim religions have rules about what is acceptable to eat and what is not. All of the mundane topics are the bread and butter of cultural norms. Because of the good feelings generated by agreement and the bad feelings generated by disagreement, it is easier to get along by going along.
A rule about ordinary every day behavior is just another type of an idea. It is just less abstract than other ideas that you might associate with the word idea. Rules, as ideas, can be more or less abstract themselves. The golden rule (treat everyone as you would like to be treated) is a very abstract rule that can be hard to know how to apply in every situation. On the other hand a rule to not eat a certain type of meat is very concrete and easy to follow.
Rules are very often written down, but don’t have to be. As long as they exist in the minds of the people to whom they apply, they are ideas that have power over people. The writing down of rules makes them easier to communicate to others and also codifies them so that they are more stable. People can compare the rule as written to the one in their mind. Lastly, written down rules can be more easily be adjudicated when the rules are used in large scale societies (i.e. not a small tribal society).
Like other abstract ideas, rules become part of a person’s ego. There is an attachment to the rules that one believes in and follows that a person will defend and promote. A person may be offended when they follow a rule and someone else to whom the rule applies does not.
Ideas and Social Power
The existence of a common idea in the minds of a group of people can create a very large power imbalance between people who agree on the idea and people about whom the idea is targeted. In the pre-Civil War south of the United States, there was an idea that accepted Aftrican American as slaves of white slave owners. As part of that idea, whites felt that African Americans where much less human than the lowest class whites. In this way an intangible thing (an idea) can have an incredibly large real world effect.
In that society, an African American (hereafter referred to as black) could not do basic things that a white person could do. If one white person ordered another white person to do something, the second could simply ignore the first’s order (if they were of roughly equal status – which is controlled by another set of ideas). Yet if a white person ordered a black person to do something in the presence of other white people, disobeying the white person could be a very perilous proposition for the black person. The reason is that all other white people who witnessed this event had the same idea that the black person should obey the white person. Remember that needs are communicated to each person through feelings. The more deeply the idea is held (through time and intensity), the stronger the feeling. When a black person resisted, the white people would have a strong visceral negative reaction. It would deeply offend the idea of white superiority. Also it would raise a specter of fear that if one could resist then others might resist as well. Considering how blacks had been treated, the backlash could be very intense and thus any idea that resistance is possible must be squashed.
So you see that the power relationship between any white person and any black person has very little to do with any kind of personal relationship that they have with other. The ideas that whites are very superior to blacks and that resistance of blacks to whites is futile, overpowers almost all other considerations. Of course the relationship between a slave owner and a slave they own is an idea that gives that slave owner even more power over that slave than even the anonymous white and black person.
In an environment like that, you can see how any discussion about changing those ideas would be fiercely opposed on more than just intellectual grounds. Speaking the idea that blacks and whites are essentially equal could provoke a violent response from a white of that period based on their feelings that arise from defending the idea of white superiority. A person doesn’t have to intellectualize the conversation and argue in the abstract to object. The feelings expose the idea to the surface to anyone who has that idea buried deep within their being.
The other thing to note is that since questioning the idea causes negative feelings among the whites in that society, all white people will be pressured to accept the idea to a greater or lesser degree. At least a person would be pressured never to speak against it. It is simply easier to be silent or believe the idea so that one doesn’t run into other’s negative feelings when the idea is questioned.
In any group of people, there is a tendency to agree on basic ideas about the world or when their is disagreement to avoid speaking of it. This occurs in every day life of everyone. The pre-Civil War south is an extreme example of idea conformity. Yet idea conformity is the norm in everyday life. People tend to migrate to people with whom they agree because it is simply more pleasant. It generates more good feelings and less bad feelings. This is why it is better to avoid the topics of politics and religion when around family. Family are not chosen affinity groups and avoiding those topics will make it easier to tolerate one another if there is disagreement on these topics.
Idea Transmission
Richard Dawkins has proposed that ideas are like genes in that they have a life of their own. They attempt to reproduce themselves as much as possible and mutate along the way. Like a gene lives as part of a DNA strand, a meme lives inside of the minds of people. It is transmitted from person to person through the various ways that people communicate with each other. They can be spread by a person talking to another person, or by being broadcasted on radio or TV, or spread virally over the internet.
For a meme to spread, it needs to have a place that it can land, be nourished and survive. There are a number of different forces that can help an idea survive or cause it to die. The first and most basic principle of idea survival is that If the person who receives the idea already has ideas that conflict with it, then it will have a hard time surviving. Another force is related what enticements to a person’s other needs are contingent on accepting the idea. Sinclair Lewis once said that “it is hard to get a man to believe something when his salary depends on him not believing it.”
Temporal Thinking and Planning for the Future
Because we have memory and the ability to think about the future, events that occur in the present become part of the fabric of our lives. That fabric consists of our memories of past events and anticipation of future events. All our interactions with others and the power relationships we experienced in the past inform how we make plans for the future.
With the past in mind we plan how we meet our needs in the future. When we plan on how we are going to meet our needs we have a hierarchy of plans. At the first level are plans to meet our most basic needs. Once we are satisfied that our basic needs will be met, then we can think about how our less basic needs can be met. In both cases, however, we are reliant on information about world around us to make these plans.
All of us have a conceptual world view of how the world functions. This involves an understanding of what events cause certain outcomes. From a young age this world view is built up as well as our ability to make plans inside that world view to get our needs met. We change or stick to our plans based on information that we first get from our own senses, secondly from our immediate circle of people that with live with, work with and interact with daily, and then lastly from information we obtain from media that we consume such as newspapers, radio, TV and the internet. Information that conflicts with our world view is often discarded and information that is aligned with our world view is often readily accepted.
The plans we make and the actions we take are very much informed by what we did in the past. If it worked in the past, then we are apt to believe it will work in the future. It is when our plans stop working (at meeting our needs) that our world views are more open to change. This is not to say that even in the face of failing plans, that people’s world views easily changed. Our world views are just sets of ideas about the world and how it works and thus they form a part of our identity. Giving up a part of our identity is hard to do and causes negative feelings. Those negative feelings fight against negative feelings of not getting other (possibly more basic) needs met.
In a rapidly changing complex environment involving millions of people, humans have a need for information to keep meeting their needs. Control over what information is available to what people can be a great source of social power.
Control of Information
When people lived in small groups who hunted and gathered, most everyone is a tribe had roughly equal access to information on which survival depended. Though due to ritual and social roles, some sub groups of people (women, children, men, warriors), may be denied information available to others. As long as there are common ideas (norms) within that society about this, then this information can be kept successfully separate from the groups of people that aren’t supposed to know about these.
As societies moved on to more centralized societies with more people in one place and with a hierarchy in place to coordinate the actions of people, information flow became more segmented. The hierarchy of course had an interest in controlling the flow of information in a way that would perpetuate their power but still allow the crops to grow and surpluses to accrue since their power depended upon that. Information flowed by the use of official scribes, public monuments and ceremonies where officials of the hierarchy could address many people at once with their view of the world.
Inheritance
The heart of this idea is that there is an ideal view of our maturation process from being born until we are adults. As we age, we are more and more responsible for our actions. If we perform actions that are good in the eyes of society, then we are rewarded. If we perform actions that are bad, then we are punished.
It seems like a fairly simple concept that most people would agree with: If it do something good, then reward me. If I do something bad, then punish me. None of us like to be punished, but we are apt to accept it as how things need to be if we are to live together in a society. What really makes people angry is to see that some actions for some people are treated differently than for other people. Unequal treatment is often treated as unfairness. However, society often creates roles that justify unequal treatment so that unequal treatment becomes the norm and even those being treated poorly accept it.
Beyond unequal treatment for similar acts, there is the glaring exception to treatment for acts which is inheritance. This involves many aspects, some of which are quite familiar. The receipt of an inheritance of wealth when an ancestor to someone dies is a very common example that everyone is familiar with. None the less it is still reward for being born as a descendant of that person and nothing else.
Less common aspects of inheritance involve having dedicated and loving parents as opposed to mean and neglectful or absent parents. We all wish that every child could have the first type and not the second, but that is often not how it works out.
Societal inheritances can span many different areas like agreements between groups of people that are long dead and perpetuate power differences that were in place at the times of the agreements. When war and conquest allow the capture of land and the signing of treaties ceding that land, then the decedents of the warring parties are bound to live by these terms (even though they may not have even been born at the signing of the treaty).
Colonialism is a great example of inheritance of a complex set of rules and relationships between two sets of people that even persist beyond the end of the colonial era. Countries were created during the colonial era that had little to do with ethnic boundaries at the time of their creation and more to do with the jockeying of imperial powers. Traditional economies were totally destroyed and the colonized population’s economies were integrated into the colonial power’s economies. Even after independence, the formerly colonized population’s economies were still dependent on their former colonizers. Much of Africa today is still organized around cash crops and resource extraction just like they were during colonial days. These patterns still prioritize the needs of outsiders over the needs of local people.
During the colonization process, some groups of people were made to be elites by the colonizers to do their biding which set up either continued dominance by those groups or resentments that could during into wars or even genocide. The Rawandan genocides roots go back to the elevation of the Tutsi’s over the Hutu’s when it was a Belgian colony. These “ethic” differences persist long past when these distinctions were first made.
So as you can see inheritance covers a lot of topics. Some of us in life are privileged by our inheritances and some of us are drowned by them. If you are an orphan in a poor area of a poor country, you are literally drowned by it. If you are born the child of Bill Gates, you have privilege beyond reason. Each child enters this world as a wonder of possibility and beauty. Each one everywhere deserves as much of an equal chance at life as any other and there is no moral argument that I can think of to justify anything else.