Photo by Rafał Szczawiński on Unsplash
In the issue of Amazing Fantasy #15 (An early Spider-Man Comic) Peter Parker’s Aunt May said those famous words, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Remember, Peter Parker is really Spider-Man, so the lesson we learned from those words was that with the great power that Spider-Man had (Aunt May didn’t know Peter’s Secret identity at that time) also came with the responsibility to use it for good.
That phrase is one most of us have heard either through the Spider-Man comics or movies, but the idea was around before that. You can find a similar phrase in the ancient Sword of Damocles story, Voltaire’s writings on governance, and Franklin D. Roosevelt who said, “great power requires great responsibility.”
That is not the model we are operating under
Think about the society we live in today. Think of the leaders we have today. With great power generally comes no responsibility, certainly no accountability.
This is evident in the study I have cited in this space before. In it, professors Martin Gilens (Princeton University) and Benjamin I. Page (Northwestern University) looked at more than 20 years’ worth of data to answer a simple question: Does the government represent the people?
Their study took data from nearly 2000 public opinion surveys and compared it to the policies that ended up becoming law. In other words, they compared what the public wanted to what the government actually did. What they found was extremely unsettling: The opinions of 90% of Americans have essentially no impact at all.
Administrations in most developed countries often primarily listen to corporations and lobbyist because that is where the money is. In a society based on eternal growth, following the money is going to be where leaders focus most.
Societies have learned that lesson before.
It is important to understand that our society is an anomaly. In the book “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow, (that I have also mentioned before) the authors focus on primary freedoms that are essential for emancipation and reimagining of social arrangements. They are:
The freedom to move away or relocate from one’s surroundings. This allows individuals to escape from oppressive conditions and seek better opportunities.
The freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others. This freedom empowers individuals to challenge authority and make their own choices.
The freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones. This freedom is crucial for the argument that social structures can be refined and reimagined, leading to more equitable and just societies.
The authors show that in many societies in the Native peoples of America, leaders were generally chosen because of their oratory skills and their wisdom, but that people were generally free to disobey or ignore the order of these “chiefs”. On some occasions, such as a yearly hunt when many tribes came together, there were those awarded great power, even punitive powers, but these were always temporary and those that had the power one year, would not be allotted it the next.
The societies we have in today, those who achieve great power generally treat those positions as rewards, which allows them to accumulate more wealth and power. The point of great power is to get the spoils that come with it, to serve oneself, not society as a whole.
What Aunt May was talking about (though the writer Stan Lee) back in 1962 was servant leadership.
That concept is essentially lost today. Sure lip service is paid to it and you can read many books about how real leadership is service. But that is not how our current society is structured.
How we can get there again
As I was writing this, I came across the story that a woman in Minnesota was murdered today (Wednesday) by an ICE agent as she drove away from that agent. It should be noted that before the video of the event came out, ICE had said that the woman posed a threat to the agent who acted in self-defense. Once the video of the event came out, everyone could see that what ICE said was a lie. The woman was driving away, his life was not in danger, and he shot her in the face - killing her.
With great power, comes no responsibility.
If we humans can’t handle the responsibility that comes with great power, then maybe we should make it so that no one has too much power.
There are ways to do that.
Sortition, electoral reform - including laws with teeth that do not allow our politicians to be bought, a change in culture that again allows us to ignore orders we don’t like, and an increased focus on ideas like bioregionalism as a way to prioritize what is most important.
It will take our communities and our societies clearly saying that we either want great responsibility to come with great power, or we don’t want anyone to have that power at all.
If you say, that the genie is already out of the bottle and we can’t take power away that has already been given, I say you are wrong. History is replete with stories of peoples changing the way their societies operated if they found a need for a change.
A truly free society is one in which citizens can choose to disobey orders.
You don’t have to follow orders.
A community that comes from coercion is not a community; that’s a prison.
Do you wish to live in one?
I prefer not to.
There is a deep paradox about how one would go about creating a world in which, in the end, power alone determined who ruled the roost. I keep seeing evolutionary biologists who credit the "success" of humanity at taking over the planet to Darwin's "natural selection"--that humans are genetically programmed to default to violence. The argument is that groups of humans who used violence killed off groups that didn't, and that over time, this process selected for some set of genes that inclines humans towards using violence. So the dismal history of the European genocide in the New World demonstrates how violent cultures conquer less violent cultures.
So now we get to the paradox. If we know that there are groups out there that are willing to use violence to get their way, even to the point of killing their opponents, how do the opponents organize themselves to defend against violent groups, without in the process becoming as violent as the people they are trying to defend themselves against?
The perverse and convoluted evolution of the doctrine of "deterrence" against nuclear attack is an example of this paradox in action. Proponents of nuclear weapons development came to defend the possession of nuclear weapons on the grounds that the only way to defend against other nuclear-armed nations was to have a nuclear arsenal large enough to cause other nations to fear to attack.
I would be interested in hearing ideas about how one might go about dealing with this paradox, how to create a just society when we are living in such a profoundly unjust world.
I recommend listening to Joan Tronto, "Ethics of care" on YouTube