In order to understand why power is coveted, we need to understand human motivation. The best theory I've read on human motivation, comes from Drive. As described by scientific research, once you go beyond our primal need for food, safety and companionship, there are 3 primary factors that motivate us. Mastery, autonomy, and purpose.
Mastery is the ability to master and perfect a craft you care about. This can most likely be achieved without having power over others. No problems here.
Autonomy is exactly what is described in the article. The freedom to avoid being micromanaged. On the face of it, you don't need power over others to be autonomous either.
Purpose, however, is a lot trickier. If like the author, your purpose in life is simply to engage in the arts, you're all set. You don't need power over others, and you won't understand why anyone would want that.
But suppose your purpose in life is to save millions of lives, like what Bill Gates has done with his foundation. Or to help all Americans get universal healthcare, like what Sanders wants to do. Or to help mankind become an interplanetary species, like what Musk is aiming for.
It is near impossible to fulfill such purposes without wielding power. Either political or economic or cultural. There are some purposes, even the noble kind, which can only ever be accomplished by shoring up a lot of power.
To go one step further, a lot of people try to fulfill their life purposes through their jobs. They want to help people, and so they work at a non-profit. Or they want to further scientific progress, so they work in a research lab. Which is great, except that by becoming a cog in a powerful machine, they are surrendering their autonomy in the process. They find themselves having to choose between autonomy and purpose. Regardless of what they choose, they fantasize about having enough power so that they can have both. They dream of being rich enough to start their own non-profit, not just work in one. They dream of heading a research lab, not just being a cog in someone else's.
People like the author are in an enviable position, of having their cake and eating it too. For others with a different purpose in life, power is the only way of having the best of both worlds.
I think it's simpler than that. Humans desire political power because there's an evolutionary advantage to being in charge of your tribe. Primates care about the politics of their tribes, so do we. No need to delve into secondary, non-specific human needs. It's a direct, intrinsic motivation.
No, people desire power (political or not) for more than one singular reason.
Outside the realms of true global (or even country, or state level...) power, I've been driven to "power" before because I felt that my part of the community was being wronged and I had the attributes to fix it. When I fixed that wrong, I relinquished that power and went back to my place of relative obscurity (the way I like it).
Was I motivated by some basic thirst towards being the leader of my community? Nope. I was driven by anger and injustice for my community.
Are there are basic instincts at play? Probably, maybe, I don't know, but the simple point I'm making here is that you can't reduce it to evolutionary advantage of being in charge, otherwise people would never relinquish the power.
Humans are social creatures, and wildly vary in what they offer the group, and when they feel the need to.
We are survival machines for genes and are biologically programmed to move in the world in a fashion that our genes survive. Females desire to mate with the highest status males and males are compelled to fight each other for status in order to win the females with the best genes. It's horrible but its true.
It's only generally true, and I would say people vary too much for it to be basically true even when just talking about biological imperatives (e.g. The fact that homosexuals exist in the gene pool confound the basic biological imperative you're arguing for).
But lets take what you said as fact - the conflicting factor even here is that humans have a layer over the top of our biological programming, which results in people going against their "basic" interests quite often.
Not everyone does, but many do, and we are talking about humans on that layer - whether that goes against our instincts or not.
I would not say it confounds the issue. Just because someone is homosexual it doesn't mean they don't look for similar attributes in their parters. Would it be surprising if women that dates other women generally look for high status, while men that dates other men look for genetics (ie appearance)? There is also a few but correlating findings where if one sibling is homosexual then the others siblings have more children compared to the national average, but researchers don't really know why except that it is statistically significant.
You are right the human factor is relevant and people can go against their "basic" interests, but statistics from census data and dating sites shows quite grim numbers. Wealth (as a proxy for social status and power) is the single biggest dominating factor for men with a very sharp drop at the bottom, and appearance (as a proxy for genetics) is the single biggest dominating factor for women. It also correlated to the size of peoples social support network, stress levels, overall health, and life expectancy.
Just looking at life expectancy, wealth for men has a correlation of about 10-15 years difference. Exercise in comparison seems to only have a correlation of around 7 years difference.
>Would it be surprising if women that dates other women generally look for high status, while men that dates other men look for genetics (ie appearance)?
Absolutely fascinating question, I would not be surprised by this possibility at all. It seems quite probable.
> But suppose your purpose in life is to save millions of lives, like what Bill Gates has done with his foundation
It could just as likely be the other way around: the reason Bill Gates created the foundation was to make him have a purpose in life after leaving Microsoft. If he hadn't created the foundation, he would now just be an extremly rich nobody. Saving lives is just a nice side-effect. Power is just a tool in this case, not the goal.
Originally, Bill Gates had neither. He used the power gained by fufulling his purpose of writing software to find a higher purpose. Id imaging his sense of purpose changed as his power (and resulting responsibility!) changed.
what’s interesting to me is the sly admission that he exerts power as an artist through trying to change what others think, but to him, that’s a benign form of power. some (foucault, orwell, etc) would say that’s the most insidious and effective form.
unless you are truly disconnected from the world, you live in the web of power that envelops us all, certainly, some feel less burdened by it, and maybe that’s the measure of freedom that many seek.
Everyone is under the influence of power. Most of your behavior is shaped by the power organizations and individuals have over your life. Your value judgements are shaped by them. For instance, being a useful employee, a good student, even a good spouse is defined by the people who have the power to judge, reward or punish your behavior. To want power is to go against this current and push your own values.
The why of power isn't as relevant as the how. Historically every powerful person has had a "purpose". To give some moral underpinning is a shallow veneer that excuses the actions necessary for power, since power is a full time job. If you have power then that is your purpose, since anything else would keep you from it.
Look too closely at any powerful person with a purpose and things get ugly. Whether it's FDR, Bill Gates or Walt Disney. Power comes first or not at all.
There is a certain physiological response to conquest that goes beyond satisfaction, especially in males. For example , the fans of a football team having their testosterone levels go up after a win. This translates to every sphere as some kind of reward to domination. That said, just because it's evolutionarily selected for , doesn't mean power relationships and dominaance have any kind of legitimacy or optimality. They are just as primal as our urge to kill, and should be viewed with suspicion.
i think social recognition is maybe more of a 'we expect this to develop earlier in life'
sans obvious pop world examples of this being possibly a driving force. certainly social rec appears to be a layer or more above the other factors.
The idea that you are somehow enslaved by a predefined, concrete purpose that requires you to find power is toxic and must be killed. A person is capable of matching their means with their desired ends and finding meaning while avoiding the trap of needing power. You may arrive at power or influence, but I'd argue that should never be required.
A purpose can (and should) be defined by a process, and a motivation, and a living philosophy more so than a tangible number.
You can have power, and use it for good. But the toxic idea is that you must pursue power first, and that you must pursue power to fulfill some in-born, per-defined reason.
Warren Buffet did not set out to make billions of dollars of donations. He wanted to be a businessman, and ended up rich. Great, he's trying to do right by the billions he has, but could have probably had a bigger impact over the course of his lifetime by being directed at helping first and foremost.
You send a message that sets a chain of events in motion that saves millions. A common trope in fiction, with some basis in reality(e.g. the nuclear attack warnings during the Cold War, which a few soldiers in bunkers decided to ignore).
Power just means you get to call shots and take credit. It doesn't mean that you were the most valuable player.
I'm not sure that purpose is always so created. For me, it seems to arise from within. A deep, slow, emergent, understanding of purpose. I did not choose it, it came to me while I was busy with surviving. Perhaps I could choose another, perhaps I could re architect my personality. But would that ever be as authentic as the thing that first came into the light? Would it ever be as truly my own as some new construction?
We create ourselves to some extent, but also we are born. To deny that part of us which is born is a great shame.
Curious if you think power and influence are synonymous. I don’t think they are, but I do think they can achieve similar things which require a collaborative effort of many, like saving millions of lives or interplanetary habitation. To me power implies some sort of DAG whereby decisions are made to move closer to a goal, whereas influence is much more arbitrary and disconnected but still creates solutions. It might me less efficient, but trade offs are unavoidable
Practically speaking, developing Autonomy requires "not having to deal with other people's shit", which is certainly an aspect of "power". More so if you want to maintain a particular quality of life, and even more so if this quality of life is abnormal.
Mastery is the ability to master and perfect a craft you care about. This can most likely be achieved without having power over others. No problems here.
Autonomy is exactly what is described in the article. The freedom to avoid being micromanaged. On the face of it, you don't need power over others to be autonomous either.
Purpose, however, is a lot trickier. If like the author, your purpose in life is simply to engage in the arts, you're all set. You don't need power over others, and you won't understand why anyone would want that.
But suppose your purpose in life is to save millions of lives, like what Bill Gates has done with his foundation. Or to help all Americans get universal healthcare, like what Sanders wants to do. Or to help mankind become an interplanetary species, like what Musk is aiming for.
It is near impossible to fulfill such purposes without wielding power. Either political or economic or cultural. There are some purposes, even the noble kind, which can only ever be accomplished by shoring up a lot of power.
To go one step further, a lot of people try to fulfill their life purposes through their jobs. They want to help people, and so they work at a non-profit. Or they want to further scientific progress, so they work in a research lab. Which is great, except that by becoming a cog in a powerful machine, they are surrendering their autonomy in the process. They find themselves having to choose between autonomy and purpose. Regardless of what they choose, they fantasize about having enough power so that they can have both. They dream of being rich enough to start their own non-profit, not just work in one. They dream of heading a research lab, not just being a cog in someone else's.
People like the author are in an enviable position, of having their cake and eating it too. For others with a different purpose in life, power is the only way of having the best of both worlds.