Capacity, Power and their Natural Origins

The fun part is not the ideas we find, but how the ideas fit together, what we find when we play with the ideas. The fun part is not the powers you were given, but what we do with those powers, those fruits of a loved labor, a labor like all others, but one made special by what we find in the process of honing these powers, having fun with ‘em, how we make these powers our own by imprinting who we essentially are in the stylistic and pragmatic choices we make with our powers. 

What I mean by power here is capacity, or potential to do something cool. I mean your skillz, passions, hobbies, anything you care for, preferably a capacity through which you incrementally grow in or enjoy engaging. Your power could be tapdancing, finishing really long shows and staying invested, making your people laugh, whatever it may be, the fun part of having this capacity is not having it in store somewhere where it doesn’t see the light of day in the actual and living world. A capacity isn’t much more than an idea if you don’t act on it, and choose it consistently enough that it becomes part of your volitional character. 

We usually take power to mean the relational power we may hold in community with other people. Just because you have a power, this doesn’t give you power over other people. Systemic and organized power can only be understood in social or public context. A nark has agential power in a public square because they wear a uniform, they hold a gun licensed to them by a state department of security and defense with a monopoly over the legitamate use of force in a given territory. That same cop, without the uniform or the license to maim off duty, is just a person walking around, as ‘powerful’ as the next person in line at the comics store. The role that this off-hours cop fulfills on shift carries with it a social context of organized power distribution, no matter who fills it. The power they wield for those 8 hours isn’t essential to the nature of their wills, it’s accidental to the set of circumstances that lead to them getting that job or being on shift that day. Now the police force is, questionably, an agreed upon legitimate power structure that we’ve entered in by accepting residency in this territory, under these particular social conventions. 

Other times we may find ourselves in an illegitimate and coercive power structure, based on accidental properties of the empowered person rather than their essential ones. To this day we can frequently find ourselves in personally or systematically imposed, illegitimate, power structures armed with missiles, laws, pens, pushers and suits, actions and choices, gazes and the worst of all, weaponized love. A people can be evicted and erased, beaten and charred, by a slow and violent occupation of a foreign army. Others can be searched and seized, exploited and discarded, shuned or shoved by agents who embody persistent racial, ethnic and relegious hierarchies. You may be harassed, assulted, oggled, looked down upon, doubted and instrumentalized, objectified and commodified by People who employ the weight of their sex or gender and impose a reproductive hierarchy. You can even be picked on for being the smallest one in a group that establishes a height hierarchy in the distribution of jokes. 

Point is, in all these cases, the power exercised by agents by these militantly or volitionally authoritative power structures is always based on accidental properties this human being finds themselves responsible in rather than essential properties to their humanity or personhood. Their birth in an occupied country and an occupying country, which side of the gun each person stands on, is a stroke of fate. The continued choice of employing a suffocating occupation to enforce an illegitimate hierarchy, is a military and volitional act of cannibalism. The color of your skin is accidental, your religion is accidental, your sex or gender are accidental, your generational wealth is accidental, your intellect, beauty, sexuality, degree of capacitation or disability, your height too are accidental; despite systematic and social enforcement of social hierarchies being founded on accidental properties of our humanity, they establish lasting and unsustainable conditions of justice that violate the natural and essential properties of human life. In some ways the essential nature of every will is deeply personal and individuated, and in another, every one of us shares the same essence as living beings;  a shared signature which sources our biological makeup to the same point of departure as other humans, animals and plants under the Sun, the same ancestry that made our life here on earth possible. The same world Spirit which moves us towards our shared Horizon too.