The will to power, and the power to restrain

In “Kings, Conquerors, Psychopaths,” Abraham spends substantial effort cataloging stories of individuals whose ruthless, violent, and quite often murderous, domination that can only be described as obscene. Abraham is not a naïve genetic determinist. Indeed, he recognizes and specifically avoids simplistic arguments that led to conflicts over the sociobiology of the 1970s and 1980s. However, he certainly believes that some sort of evolutionary process (which might include cultural evolution) underlies such patterns of behavior, because behavioral dominance and submissiveness have such obvious fitness effects. He makes the case that the pattern is persistent enough, and so closely related to “normal” human behaviors, that these extreme examples are not going to be extinguished through any evolutionary or societal process. Further, the modern world offers opportunities in scale and context to make these individuals even more dangerous to those of us who, to put it mildly, have more communitarian tendencies.

The ways in which power is attained and sustained have been and remain a subject of interest. Sun Tzu’s The Art of War was compiled roughly 2,500 years ago. Machiavelli’s The Prince appeared 500 years ago. Closer to 100 years ago, in 1936, the political scientist Harold Lasswell wrote Politics: Who Gets What, When, How. Through these works and many others, we can gain insights into the ways in which power is attained, sustained, and exercised, and the personalities and egos that drive those efforts.

Within evolutionary biology, as well, the development of cooperative behavior and altruism have also been of considerable and ongoing interest. E.O. Wilson argued in The Social Conquest of Earth that humans are essentially eusocial. But in a eusocial setting, it would seem to me (decidedly not an evolutionary biologist or geneticist!) that the society needs an effective mechanism to police itself to maintain some (ideal?) collaborative model.

Mathematical models (nonzero sum) have been used to study the development of cooperative behaviors as well (see, e.g., Evolution of empathetic moral evaluation, Radzvilavicius et al., https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.44269.001). Such models necessarily involve simplifying assumptions, and some part of that will include value judgments of what constitutes the “good.”

In these models, then, there are gaps for an individual driven by a quest for personal gain (power) to manipulate communities through various mechanisms in order to achieve their goals.

Abraham focuses on the darker impulses to power and argues that throughout history, and today, we will always have a plethora of individuals whose quests for power are driven by exaggerated psychological motivations that can only be identified as pathological. Given today’s political currents, the project to better understand and engage the underlying motivations of, and the need to provide more humanistic alternatives to, authoritarian visions is particularly urgent.

There can be no doubt that humans naturally, and necessarily, seek power. Survival depends on at least some ability to control one’s immediate environment. We learn through experience various strategies to achieve goals both small and large, and it is obvious that all of us use a variety of strategies depending on context. It is less obvious at what point those strategies might be classified as dysfunctional or rise to the status of a serious disorder. Abraham finds plenty of examples that demonstrate the abundance of individuals who have attained power in part through exhibiting extreme behaviors that certainly qualify as psychopathic by just about any definition.

In current biological research, it is not hard to find references to stochasticity in descriptions of fundamental biological processes. As a mathematician, and thinking at the cellular level, this makes sense to me. The challenge seems to be to understand how statistical biases, driven by genetics, chemistry, and physics, in some dance with our environment, conspire to shape who we become as individuals. Whether or not we can even develop a biological understanding of consciousness remains unclear.

What is clear is that, regardless of our naive sense that species have normal representatives, wide variability is the norm. Both physical and behavioral differences represent variations of characteristics that tend to be clustered around a set of means. As we seek to interpret the world around us, we characterize some individuals as being “normal” or “abnormal” with respect to the characteristics in question, though where to draw the line between normal and abnormal will also vary among observers. If we consider ourselves normal, we tend to think that characteristics in others that we consider abnormal are not present in us—though it is much more accurate to view such outlier characteristics as simply exaggerated versions of characteristics we ourselves have.

Our very human tendency to judge the world in terms of our own experience, together with our equally human need to craft narratives to explain our lives coherently, serve as barriers to advancing our understanding of both ourselves and the world that we live in. These narratives are deeply rooted in our fundamental assumptions about the world and are always co-constructed in a social context, often vary situationally, and usually evolve over time based on our lived experience.

Our own narratives exist in tension with those of our family, friends, and coworkers. As Abraham points out, those with power project narratives designed to strengthen their positions, and truth may not be central to that agenda. Yet still, a message that I might qualify as toxic propaganda may resonate with your assumptions about the world, or your anxieties, in ways that make that same message appealing to you. Sometimes these differing perspectives can be healthy and, if situated in a context of healthy dialogue, lead to progress. But for those who are of more interest to Abraham’s study, advancing their cause usually involves the dehumanization of others—making it all too easy to create a power base that is hostile to the interests of those outside of some favored group.

The reality is that those with power will continue to seek to enlist us to carry out their wills through the use of narratives, rewarding allies and punishing dissenters. For those of us who prefer a more equitable, rules-based order, that recognition requires us to remain vigilant and work in concert with others who seek similar outcomes.

That, Abraham suggests, requires that we develop our capacity to analyze the narratives that we tell ourselves, recognize their shortcomings, ask questions about who benefits from our acceptance of particular narratives, and whether or not we might be better served by modifying our narratives. He is not suggesting that we encourage others to adopt any particular narrative; rather, that individuals learn to work through these questions for themselves.

That would seem to be the ideal goal of education, and Abraham ultimately argues that education is a key, and in fact the essential, element to counter those individuals who would take us for everything we have.

It may be a natural variation that leads human evolution to produce the occasional extreme individual Abraham describes as the atrox. However, Abraham also implies that we have it in us to police the strong group benefits of equitability and counteract such individuals. I’ll apply a term that does not seem to be in wide circulation for the educational solution that Abraham imagines above. Three cheers for undoctrination!