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I grew up in Montreal and studied physibsp;at McGill Uy. In the summer of 1981, as I was finishing my undergraduate degree, I attended a meeting of the Pugwash ferenbsp;on Sbsp;and World Affairs in Banff, Alberta, where I heard a speebsp;about the crucial energy and enviroal challenges arising out of the increasing plexity and fullnessof people and ideas and thingsof the world. I decided to shift my studies from physibsp;to social sces, and I went on to do a graduate degree in eibsp;and publibsp;polibsp;at the Uy of California at Berkeley. After graduation, I worked at a variety of researbsp;institutions in North Ameribsp;Europe, and Asia, and then in the corporate planning department of Pacifibsp;Gas and Electribsp;pany in San Francisco.
My father had taught me the value of industriousnessof doing my job well, whatever that job wasand of selfdetermination and selfimprovement. His favorite story was of Henry David Thoreau, who had lived in the woods at Walden Pond and after two years had e out with his axe sharper than when he had gone in.
I was young and ambitious and keen to make my mark on the world.
GEIVE POWER
In 1988, when I was twentyseven years old, I moved from San Francisbsp;to London to take a job in the global strategy department of the energy pany Royal Dutbsp;Shell. What I loved most about w for Shell was the power. I enjoyed getting the diplomatibsp;memos: "The gover of C?te d'Ivoire has reiterated their request that we desist from referring to them as the Ivory Coast." I onbsp;got a mistaken phone call asking me where a 300 million payment for a fuel oil delivery should be deposited. I liked Shell's practibsp;role in providing the world with energy: the pany ied hundreds of millions of dollars a year in researbsp;and development, drilled for oil thousands of feet uer, and produbsp;fuels by heating oil sands and cooling natural gas. I reveled in being a small bsp;in this big and important mae.
I was at Shell at the height of capitalist fidenbsp;The Berlin Wall had just fallen, the I boom was starting, Franbsp;Fukuyama had published "The End of History," Tom Wolfe was writing about Manhattan financiers as "Masters of the Universe," and Margaret Thatcher was pronoung that "There Is No Alternative" to the AngloAmeribsp;free enterprise model. The dominant cultural meme was that in all sphereseibsp;political, social, legal, iional, intellectuala test among peting powers produbsp;the best oute.[11] From my offibsp;in a London skyscraper, it seemed to me that if everybody just did their job and pushed forward their partengaged in civilized, manly jostlingthe whole would grow and prosper.
My experienbsp;at Shell, and elsewhere in the world of business, was of an almost singleminded emphasis on the pragmatibsp;use of powerthe kind of power that a former physibsp;student could reize. It seemed to me that businesspeople uood power the same way Martin Luther King Jr. did: "Power properly uood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose."[12] Their as seemed to accord with Paul Tillich's explanation of power's geive root: "the drive of everything living to realize itself, with increasing iy and extensity." This drive bsp;be seen in the forbsp;of a growing seed: the forbsp;that "guerrilla gardeners" employ to turn vat urban lots into parks, when they surreptitiously plant seeds that break through the crete.
At Shell I could see how my own drive for selfrealization, along with that of my colleagues, produbsp;furiously petitive intellectual creativity and growth. The head of our department, Arie de Geus, wrote a book called The Living pany. This helped me also see how the pany's living drive for selfrealization, along with that of other panies, produbsp;furiously petitive ercial creativity and growth.[13]
In all of this I saw the geive aspebsp;of power: the universal drive to "get one's job done." Power expresses our purposefulness, wholeness, and agenbsp;Although power is the drive to realize one's self, the effebsp;of power goes beyond one's self. Power is how we make a differenbsp;in the world; it is the means by whibsp;new social realities are created. Without power, nothing new grows.
At Shell I was head of the strategy group that structed sariosplausible alternative storiesof socialpoliticalenviroal texts in whibsp;the pany might find itself. In 1991, Pieter le Roux, a professor at the leftwing Uy of the Western Cape in South Afribsp;tacted me because he wanted to use the Shell methodology to help a group of South Afribsp;opposition leaders develop a strategy for effeg the transition away from apartheid. Nelson Mandela had just been released from twentyseven years in prison, and the iations between the opposition and the white minority gover had started in ear. Le Roux's projebsp;sounded iing and worthwhile to me, and my Shell bosses were happy, after years of being vilified for not having divested from South Afribsp;for the opportunity to rebuild the pany's relationships with the opposition. So in September 1991, I traveled to Cape Town to facilitate the first workshop of what became known as the Mont Fleur Sario Exercise.[14]
What I found exhilarating in meeting these leadersfrom politibsp;parties, trade unions, unity anizations, uies, and panieswas their powerful purposefulness. Every one of them was itted to addressing, from their particular idologibsp;and institutional base, South Africa's tough challenges, and they had already realized that they could be successful only if they worked together. White businessman Johann Liebenberg later remembered, with surprise and pleasure, his versations with the blabsp;leaders who had hitherto been his adversaries: "This was new to me, especially how openminded they were. These were not people who simply said: 'Look, this is how it is going to be when we take over one day.' They were prepared to say: 'Hey, how would it be? Let's discuss it.'"[15] I felt excited to play a part in this important social ge process.
What I saw in these workshops, and through the window they provided me onto the dynamibsp;of South Africa's extraordinary transition, ged my uanding of what was possible in the world. I saw that a team of leaders from across a social system could, even in the most plex, flictual, and challenging of texts, exercise their power collectively to ge that system for the better. I was inspired by what I was learning about this geive power.
What I saw also ged my uanding of what was possible for me. I saw that I had a job to doa way of making a differenbsp;in the worldin supp subsp;teams. In 1993, I resigned from Shell and moved to South Afribsp;Sinbsp;then I have been doing this kind of work there and elsewhere.
DEGEIVE POWER
How do we e to notibsp;something that we are not notig? I was onbsp;w in my offibsp;and my sunglasses were in my shirt pocket. I went into a dark closet and leaned over to pibsp;up some supplies near the floor, when I heard a sound that I couldn't plabsp;As I went out, I unsciously filed away that anomalous eventthe unexplained soundand went babsp;to what I was doing. Later I saw that I had misplabsp;my sunglasses and began looking all around for them. Then I remembered the unexplained sound and realized it had been the sound of my sunglasses falling out of my pocket onto the closet floor.
During the first years after I left Shell and started w as a facilitator of social ge teams, I kept hearing sounds of a sed kind of power that I didn't know how to interpret. My first interpretation of what had happened at Mont Fleurthe interpretation that I was w fromwas that the team had decided that their power, their drive to realize themselves as individuals and as a nation, could more effectively be exercised w with rather than against one another. They had used four bird images to summarize their shared uanding of the different ways the future of the nation might unfold: an "Ostribsp;sario of white denial, a "Lame Dubsp;sario of an overstrained new blabsp;gover, an "Icarus" sario of the new gover flying too high too fast, and a "Flamingos" sario of rising slowly together. But when Pallo Jordan, one of the intellectual leaders of the Afribsp;National gress, heard these sarios presented at a party meeting, he thought they were ridiculously na?ve about the essentially violent dynamibsp;of power in the South Afribsp;text. "What is all this about dubsp;and flamingos?" he asked incredulously. "The only birds that matter here are hawks and sparrows!"
It is not surprising that Jordan and I had different perspectives on power. I came from a peaceful and uered background, and I had entered South Afribsp;for the first time in 1991, one year after the hopeful transitional iations had started and several years after the hopeless, violent clashes between the gover and the opposition in the 1970s and 1980s. Jordan is blabsp;whibsp;in apartheid South Afribsp;means he grew up as a sedclass person. He had spent decades in exile w for the Afribsp;National gress and had only just returned to the try to engage directly in these tough iations. Power looks different to people who have to struggle for it.
Now I realized what I had been hearing: power has two sides. The geive side of power is the powerto that Paul Tillibsp;refers to as the drive to selfrealization. The degeive, shadow side is poweroverthe stealing or suppression of the selfrealization of another. Tillibsp;reizes both sides: "Power actualizes itself through forbsp;and pulsion. But power is her the one nor the other. It is being, actualizing itself over nonbeing. It uses and abuses pulsion in order to overe this threat. It uses and abuses forbsp;in order to actualize itself. But it is her the one nor the other."[16] Powerover abuses forbsp;and pulsion to suppress or oppress or dominate another.
Like Pallo Jordan, my wife Dorothy is blabsp;and grew up in South Afribsp;and was involved for years in the antiapartheid struggle. When later we visited Guatemala together, she notibsp;something that I didn't. The position of abinal people there reminded her of blabsp;in South Afribsp;they were treated as if they were invisible. Not to see another person, or to see her or him as a nonperson, is the extreme maion of powerover.
The most on uanding of power is as powerover. When Stephen Lukes, a professor of politibsp;and sociology at New York Uy, wrote his classibsp;1974 book Power: A Radibsp;View, he equated power with domination. But thirty years later, in the sed edition, Lukes revised his view: "It was a mistake to define power by saying that 'A exercises power over B when A affebsp;B in a manner trary to B's is.' Power as domination is only one species of power."[17] Powerover is a subset of powerto.
Degeive powerover arises out of geive powerto. When I am exerg my powerto and I feel myself bumping up against you exerg yours, and if in this flibsp;I have the capacity to prevail over you, then I bsp;easily turn to exerg power over you. My drive to realize myself slips easily into valuing my selfrealization above yours, and then into believing arrogantly that I am more deserving of selfrealization, and then into advang my selfrealization even if it impedes yours.
Many whites in South Afribsp;valued their selfrealization above that of others, and they deployed an ideologyapartheidto justify their behavior. We bsp;see analogous dynamibsp;across rabsp;or ethnibsp;groups or classes or genders in every society. Thus, the seductively beautiful fabsp;of powerto morphs, as in a horror movie, into the viciously terrible fabsp;of powerover.
Onbsp;I had seen the two sides of power starkly in South Afribsp;I could reize them more easily elsewhere. After I left Shell, I sulted to several panies and business associations in Houston, Texas. I found the business culture of Houston unusual and fasating. The businesspeople there were unstrained in their enthusiasm for indepe, unregulated, entrepreneurial powerto. The do property developers I met owned private panies with names like "John Smith Is," whibsp;I uood to represent an unabashed celebration of the advang of an individual's own is and power.
These same businesspeople were also enthusiastibsp;in their support for voluntary philanthropy and civibsp;e. They were more aware than people I had met elsewhere of their role in the evolution of their social reality. Houston had grown from being the twentyfirst largest city in the United States in 1940 to fourth largest in 1990. It had bee what it was not by act, but as the result of the iional decisions made by people subsp;as themselves, and they felt a responsibility to tinue this publibsp;work. The ideology of Houston businesspeople promoted individual selfrealization in alig with collective selfrealization.
In this unity, the very epitome of powerto was Ken Lay, the founder and chairman of Enron, the 100 billion natural gas, electricity, and teleunications pany. Enron had been named "America's Most Innovative pany" by Fortune magazine six years in a row, and Lay was admired as an entrepreneurial genius. At Shell, young staff who sidered themselves to be sophisticated strategists were in awe of Enron's deal making. The pany was one of Houston's biggest employers and charitable donors, and it had sponsored a popular new downtown stadium. When Lay visited our Houston workshops, the other business leaders treated him like a god. Lay symbolized the virtues of the free marketeer whose uered powerto produbsp;both private wealth and publibsp;good.
In 2001, I chaired a Business Leaders' Dialogue at the Aspen Institute in Colorado. Among the partits, who included iional corporate, gover, trade union, and nonprofit leaders, Lay was the star whom everyone wanted to meet. By this time, stories about Enron's malfeasanbsp;were beginning to circulate. The most promi accusation against Enron was that it had illegally manipulated California's electricity market, and California attorney general Bill Lockyer was calling for Lay to be prosecuted.
Lay's way of participating in our meeting was striking. He moved in and out of the sessions, whibsp;we had all agreed not to do and whibsp;no one else did. He seemed to hold himself apart from or above the group. He was the only dissenter from the group's clusion that corporate social responsibility should be enforbsp;rather than left voluntary. The only time he participated passionately was when, with righteous indignation, he told the story about Lockyer having threatened him by saying, "I would love to personally escort Lay to an 8by10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, 'Hi, my name is Spike, honey.'"[18]
During these sessions, only one other partit, a trade unionist, ever challenged Lay. Everyone else spicuously deferred to him. I thought that if Lay was so powerful and wealthy, he deserved to be looked up to, and also that if I was polite to him, I might be from his largesse.
One year after the Aspen Institute meeting, Enron declared bankruptbsp;and five years After, Lay was found guilty of ten charges of fraud and spirabsp;The pany's collapse wiped out more than 60 billion in shareholder iment and 6,000 employee jobs, and led to the dissolution of Arthur Andersen, its auditor.
Exerg creative, entrepreneurial, profitable powerto is not hard if you pretend, and are allowed to pretend, that you live in an unregulated terra nullius. But Lay and his Enron colleagues did not live in subsp;an empty world, and in defrauding millions of people, they severely undermined those people's powerto. Lay's emphatibsp;reje of rules that govern the collective, as maed in his disi (enabled by our deferenbsp;in the small matter of our meeting's ground rules and the larger matter of U.S. law, illustrated his disected, degeive powerover.
The irresponsible powerover exercised by Enron executives foreshadowed the global financial collapse of 2008. Business journalist Mark Haines was flummoxed when the crisis broke: "We assume that the individual pursuing his or her own best i will result in the maximum be for society as a wholeand that certainly has to be questioned now."[19] The uanding that I had imbibed in London twenty years earlierthat a system driven by the powerto of the parts would produbsp;a beneficial result for the wholewas tragically inplete and ie. Before this became apparent, however, I was to have other experienbsp;that led me to my current uanding of degeive power.
When, after Mont Fleur, I had started w on different tough challenges in different triespowerover maing in iy and inequalityI carried with me a certain fidenbsp;that I came from a try, ada, that had successfully overe its own subsp;challenges. So in 2003 I was taken ababsp;to find myself in a ferenbsp;room at the Department of Justibsp;in Ottawa, Ontario, listening to a group of leaders of gover, business, and abinal (Native or First Nations) anizations talk about their enters with the realities of abinal people in ada.
As we went around the table and heard eabsp;person's storyof extraordinarily high levels of poverty, addi, and suicide; decades of abuse by "welliioned" govers and churches; flibsp;over the extra of oil and other natural resources; thousands of stubsp;land and treaty disputesit became obvious to me that I did not e from a try that had successfully overe subsp;challenges. My colleague Ursula Versteegen says that our most important learnings e not simply when we see the world anew, but specifically when we see ourselvesand our role in creating the worldanew.[20] On that day I saw that I was part of a society that was exerg a terrible powerover.
One aspebsp;of this adian situation was the widely held mental model that abinal people needed to "be developed." This model had been institutionalized in, among other practices, a polibsp;of aggressive assimilation that sinbsp;the 1850s had taken children away from their parents to be educated in churd staterun residential schools. One of the founders of residential schooling in North Ameribsp;characterized his approabsp;as "kill the Indian and save the man."[21] Residential schooling created a legabsp;of physical, emotional, sexual, and cultural abuse. By the time the last residential school in ada closed in 1998, this power over abinal people had been replicated for geions.
After this meeting in Ottawa, I and a few colleagues began w with a team of national gover and abinal leaders to try out a new way to unstibsp;this stubsp;situation. We chose as our entry point the extraordinarily high rate of suicide among abinal youth: five times the adian average. But after four years of onandoff efforts, we had hardly moved forward at all. We kept running into roadblocks, large and small. At one point we were frustrated in trying to unicate with the staff of an abinalrun ferenbsp;ter. I plained about this to my friend, activist Michel Gelobter, and he chided me: "Why are you surprised that oppressed unities exhibit serious dysfuns? These dysfuns have to be reized and dealt with; they reinforbsp;and maintain oppression by diminishing the capacity of these unities to heal." The degeive impabsp;of powerover are resolutely persistent.
I also notibsp;that within our miibsp;projebsp;team, we succeeded in recreating the stubsp;relationships that characterized the ma we were trying to ge. The gover leaders wanted to remain in trol and to "fix" the abinal problem. The abinal leaders didn't want to be trolled or fixed or developed by anyone. And those of us who were sultants dispassionately kept ourselves apart from and above the situation. We all had our own different roles and powers and trajectories of selfrealization, whibsp;never really moved and never really met. So we made no progress on the challenge that we had set out to address. (Only later, when these roles and power relations were forcefully restructured and ownership of the projebsp;was taken over by a lobsp;abinal unity, did the initiative begin to move forward.)
In ada, as in South Afribsp;and Houston, I had been able to reize the sound of powerto more easily than the sound of powerover because the former resonated more strongly with my own privileged experienbsp;Then in 2004 I got a taste of the experienbsp;of the underside of powerover. My London partner Zaid Hassan and I were invited to facilitate a workshop in Michigan for a group of U.S. minority activists who were rethinking their strategy for achieving racial equity in light of the justissued Supreme Court decision that sharply limited affirmative a.
I was uled even before the meeting started. Zaid is Muslim and I am Jewish, and on the plane ride he had shown me an artibsp;in an activist magazine that pointed out how many of the U.S. neoservatives are Jewish. He also showed me a letter to the editor that he had written, in whibsp;he aowledged how tentious this assertion was but defended it as informative and fair. We started into a tense discussion, a fractal of the larger MuslimJewish flibsp;but then bsp;short our argument to get ready for the workshop.
With this unresolved tension between Zaid and me, the workshop started awkwardly and got worse. The partits were feeling beaten down by the regression in civil rights in the United States and disced about the poor results their existing strategies were produg. They didn't think my leadership of the meeting, with my white and fn colleagues, was legitimate, and they were unhappy with the process we were using. Harsh power struggles swirled around and within the room. Eventually it became obvious that I wasn't wanted in the workshop at all, and so, feeling humiliated, I gave up. I left the group to lead itself and went babsp;to my room.
That night I had a terrifying dream. A gang was harassing me mercilesslycrowding and shoving and hitting meand I couldn't escape. Eventually I became so hopeless and despairing that I pulled the pin out of a hand grenade and blew myself up with all of them: I became a suicide bomber. Through this dream I experienbsp;the terrible, debilitating feeling of being on the receiving end of powerover.
By 2008, my uanding of the dynamibsp;of power and love was taking shape through subsp;experienbsp;and refles. Then I had another enter with abinal issues, this time in Australia. I was invited to Melbourne by an Australian abinal leader named Patribsp;Dodson. He is well known for his decades of varied strugglesmobilizations, iations, invocations, lawsuitsto address the challenges fabsp;by his people, and specifically for his efforts to achieve reciliation between abinal and nonabinal Australians.[22] He knows how hard it is to move forward on these challenges and wasn't surprised by the labsp;of progress of the effort in ada in whibsp;I had been involved.
Dodson wanted me to tribute to a meeting that he was vening with John Sanderson, the former chief of the Australian Army. They were trying to strubsp;a new set of agreements (including stitutional ames) that would, more than 220 years after the arrival of the settlers and 15 years after the High Court verdibsp;that overruled terra nullius, put the relationship between these two peoples on an equal footing.
The evening before our meetings were to start, I walked by an outdoor ema and found myself watg two dotaries. The first was The White Pla, a film about arctibsp;wildlife and the dangers it fabsp;from global warming.[23] The sed was Kanyini, about an Australian abinal leader named Bob Randall, a member of the "Stolen Geion" who as a child had (like many adian children) been taken away from his family by the gover.[24] In Kanyini, Randall argues that the crisis in abinal society inated in their having been dispossessed and estranged from the four aspebsp;of life that are essential to survival: their belief system or law, their land or try, their spirituality, and their families. "The purpose of life is to be part of everything that is," he says in the film. "You take away my kanyini, my intereess, and I'm nothing. I'm dead." I was strubsp;that Randall's yearning was the same as Paul Tillich's love: "the drive towards the unity of the separated."
In the juxtaposition of these two films, I could now see what happens when we employ our power without love. Our destru of abinal societies worldwide and our headlong rush towards the destru of the ecosystems on whibsp;all our societies depend arise from our dise from one another and from the earth. Enviroalist Julia Butterfly Hill made the same point in describing her unlikely partnership with social activist Van Jones: "I brought the piebsp;that we are not separate from the pla. His piebsp;was that we need to uplift everyone. We were itted to seeing how those piebsp;fit together. We could see underh all of it was the idea of disposability: the idea that you've got disposable people, a disposable pla."[25] If we push away or abandon our sense of e with othersour aowledgment, our sensitivity, our lovethere is no limit to the sadness, terror, and pain that our unchecked power bsp;produce.
We bsp;reize this degeive phenomenon of power without love because, in so many texts and at so many scales, power dominates love. We see this in our homes, anizations, unities, nations, and in iional affairs. Patribsp;Dodson told me a story about Michael Long, a popular Australian abinal sportsman who had walked from Melbourne to berra to draw attention to the desperate situation of his people. Long met with Prime Minister John Howard and asked him the anguished question: "Where is the love for my people?" We all feel the anguish that results from the defibsp;of love.
LOVE IS WHAT MAKES POWER GEIVE
Based on these experiences, then, here is how I uand the nature of power and its relationship to love. Power has two sides, one geive and the other degeive. Our power is geive and amplifying when we realize ourselves while loving and uniting with others. Our power is degeive and strainingreckless and abusive, or worsewhen we overlook or deny or bsp;off our love and unity.
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