The True Meaning of Power

Power, behavioral ecology, and A Game of Thrones

What, exactly, is power?

Scholars have defined it many different ways and I often find discussions of power confuse more than they clarify.¹ When I wrestle with these sorts of deep, vexing questions, I lean on two sources of inspiration: 1) behavioral ecology and 2) science fiction and fantasy novels.

Taking the second source first, I have often found that the best insights about human nature come from authors rather than “scholars,” so let’s check in with George R. R. Martin. In A Clash of Kings,² Varys poses a riddle to Tyrion:

“In a room sit three great men, a king, a priest, and a rich man with his gold. Between them stands a sellsword, a little man of common birth and no great mind. Each of the great ones bids him slay the other two. ‘Do it,’ says the king, ‘for I am your lawful ruler.’ ‘Do it,’ says the priest, ‘for I command you in the name of the gods.’ ‘Do it,’ says the rich man, ‘and all this gold shall be yours.’ So tell me – who lives and who dies?”

Who lives, who dies?

The conversation continues later in the book:³

 “Power is a curious thing, my lord. Perchance you have considered the riddle I posed you that day in the inn?”

“It has crossed my mind a time or two,” Tyrion admitted. “The king, the priest, the rich man—who lives and who dies? Who will the swordsman obey? It’s a riddle without an answer, or rather, too many answers. All depends on the man with the sword.”

“And yet he is no one,” Varys said. “He has neither crown nor gold nor favor of the gods, only a piece of pointed steel.”

“That piece of steel is the power of life and death.”

“Just so… yet if it is the swordsmen who rule us in truth, why do we pretend our kings hold the power? Why should a strong man with a sword ever obey a child king like Joffrey, or a wine-sodden oaf like his father?”

After kicking the riddle around a bit more, Varys concludes (my emphasis): “Power resides where men believe it resides. No more and no less.”

So, from the world of fantasy, we learn that power lies in those invisible, inscrutable things, beliefs. Its ontology—its essence—derives at least in part from shared beliefs as opposed to formidability per se, as in the case of non-human animals (see below) or, as some might think, in things like laws and rules. In Varys’ riddle, it doesn’t really matter what is written on pieces of paper, whether political documents or religious texts. What matters, at least in this case and cases like it, in which there are multiple people involved, is what’s in the head of the people involved rather than the size of their biceps or the weapons they hold. When the king, priest, and rich man give their commands, the result—what actually happens—is determined by what the sellsword decides.

Now, how about my other source of inspiration, behavioral ecology? Biologists have understood power in a way that is fairly intuitive: it’s what determines who wins conflicts. Parker (1974) referred to “resource-holding power”⁴ as a measure of the traits that enable the organism to win fights with other organisms. This is often to do with size, but many other factors—e.g., experience, the stakes, home field advantage—can contribute. Importantly, many conflicts in nature are resolved with displays of force rather than the use of force. The organism making the display is saying, “If we fought I would beat you because I am big and tough.” The organism wins the conflict without having to fight. It just has to show that it could.

I have more resource holding power than you. (Photo by Simon Hurry on Unsplash)

So, for this post and the posts that follow—there will be several—I’ll adopt this perspective and define power as an organism’s ability to advance its interests through the use of force, threats of the use of force, and the use/promise of reward. (I add the use and promise of reward bit because humans can benefit others much more easily than most other species can. As a consequence, people can use rewards in a way that mirrors the use of threat. I get to reward in the next post.)

Now, in the world of non-human animals, conflicts are often, but by no means always, one-on-one (Harcourt, 1992). This fact explains why one individual can be dominant over many other individuals, even in large groups. Because animals don’t cooperate in conflicts, dominance is established by one-on-one fights or, again, displays that establish who would win should a fight occur. The biggest gorilla gains exclusive mating with females not because he takes on all contenders at a time, but because he can prevail against each one individually.

Now, among organisms that do cooperate—e.g., hyenas, chimps, and dolphins—an organism’s power is more complicated. In cooperating species, to the extent that one has more allies, one has more power because fights are generally won by the side with more individuals. So, in species in which kin cooperate with one another, such as baboons (Seyfarth & Cheney, 2012), power derives from the size of the family. This fact explains why dominance hierarchies can be stable over time: kinship is fixed, so the size of each kinship group only changes when births and deaths occur. Matters are more complicated in species in which individuals support non-kin, including chimps, macaques, and dolphins (Connor, 2007; de Waal, 1982; Schulke, Bhagavatula, Vigilant, & Ostner, 2010). These flexible coalitions give rise to interesting dynamics, so much so that de Waal, for instance, refers to Chimpanzee Politics to capture the complexity of their social world.⁵

As I am writing this (July 2023), there are two examples—one fictional, one real—that illustrate ways in which beliefs are the keys to power. In the fictional example—I won’t name the series to avoid spoilers (but here is a link)—a very small group of people force a larger group of people to do their bidding, armed only with non-functional guns. The false beliefs in the heads of the captives that the guns are real confer power to the captors. The few control the many despite having no real resource-holding power. In the other example, someone with a real weapon tries to commit a crime, but the victim doesn’t understand what is happening and the criminal eventually exits, empty handed. In both cases, the beliefs determine who bends—or does not bend—to whose will.

Now, you might think that these are both unusual cases and that power really comes from things like physical power, written constitutions, laws and such.⁶ But here again Martin has the right of it that power is a psychological thing and its ontology—its essence—derives from shared beliefs. The Constitution of the United States bears text that declares the President is the Commander-in-Chief of the military. Are the words what make this so? From Varys’ perspective—which I think is right—the President is the CiC because members of the military agree, in their heads, that this is the case. If they were all, for some reason, to abandon that belief, they would no longer obey his or her orders, showing that the source of the power is the beliefs, not the words.⁷

If you prefer your examples from the Judicial branch of government, consider Jackson’s famous (but probably apocryphal) remark when he refused to comply when Justice Marshall ruled in a manner not to his liking: “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it."  The Court, in reality, has little coercive power—no police battalions or army divisions—but what it does have is the power to persuade, to change people’s beliefs. Even if the Court writes a decision specifying action that is within its purview to specify, its power comes not from force but from the willing compliance with the order.

Is the Court Supreme? (Photo by Claire Anderson on Unsplash)

To take a more—heh—pedestrian example, jaywalking is against the law in New York, Los Angeles, and Berlin, but because of how the local law enforcement feels about the law in the big apple, the law is for all intents and purposes meaningless there. It is not the statute per se that determines the fate of jaywalkers.

Power is often invisible, hidden in the minds of many different people. Power depends, emphatically, on things that cannot be seen nor, in their fullness, known: beliefs, or representations in people’s heads.

Because power comes from people’s thoughts and beliefs—which are invisible—it is difficult to know for sure who has power in any given setting. I’ll refer to this idea, the uncertainty about who has power in any given context, as the Iron Rule of Power. (I call it the Iron Rule because it’s unbending, like iron.) The Rule is that until conflict occurs, we often just don’t know where power lies.

The central reason that the rule holds is that in sharp contrast to non-human animals—again, with exceptions—humans can coordinate their actions, forming cooperative coalitions, often on an ad hoc basis, depending on the circumstances. Human conflicts often escalate beyond two individuals and while bystanders are sometimes loyal to long-term friends, they also change sides, being flexible in their coalitions.⁸ This is why Varys’ riddle works. Sure, the guy with the sword has the greatest formidability—resource holding power/potential—but human life is not just a series of one-on-one fights, as it is for gorillas. What other people do—and think—matters. A lot.

Coda

While knowing where power lies is difficult, after a conflict has taken place, it’s much easier. To take the case of Varys’ riddle, to determine who had the genuine power, we would simply look at which of the people involved were still standing and which ones were dead. The dead ones, we can safely infer, had less power than the live ones. Barring complications, this is a good way to know where the power was and, frequently, where it still is. The winners had it, the losers didn’t.

References

Butler, J. (1997). The psychic life of power: Theories in subjection. Stanford University Press.

Connor, R. C. (2007). Dolphin social intelligence: Complex alliance relationships in bottlenose dolphins and a consideration of selective environments for extreme brain size evolution in mammals. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 362(1480), 587–602.

de Waal, F. B. M. (1982). Chimpanzee politics: Power and sex among apes. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power. Critical Inquiry, 8(4), 777–795.

Harcourt, A. H. (1992). Coalitions and alliances: Are primates more complex than non-primates? In A. H. Harcourt & F. B. M. de Waal (Eds.), Coalitions and alliances in humans and other animals (pp. 445–471). Oxford University Press.

Kurzban, R., Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (2001). Can race be erased? Coalitional computation and social categorization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(26), 15387-15392.

Maynard Smith, J. (1982). Evolution and the theory of games. Cambridge University Press.

Parker, G. A. (1974). Assessment strategy and the evolution of fighting behaviour. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 47(1), 223–243.

Schulke, O., Bhagavatula, J., Vigilant, L., & Ostner, J. (2010). Social bonds enhance reproductive success in male macaques. Current Biology, 20(24), 2207-2210.

Seyfarth, R. M., & Cheney, D. L. (2012). The evolutionary origins of friendship. Annual Review of Psychology, 63, 153–177.

de Waal, F. B. M. (1982). Chimpanzee politics: Power and sex among apes. Johns Hopkins University Press.

1. For Foucault, in The Subject and Power, power is "a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action." Judith Butler, in The Psychic Life of Power writes that “…power is not simply what we oppose but also, in a strong sense, what we depend on for our existence and what we harbor and preserve in the beings that we are” (p. 2).  I honestly haven’t the least clue what either of these might mean.

2. pp. 67-68.  

3. pp. 131-132.

4. Now the term is more often seen as “resource-holding potential.”

5. In the recent Netflix series, Chimp Empire, the narrator asserts this explicitly, saying, “Alliances create power” (episode 1, 13:50).

6. You’re in good company. Locke and Weber thought so too. And, just to say, of course the reality underlying formidability often matters, including in creating for the beliefs in people’s heads. The claim here is that the reality isn’t all that matters, making it crucial to consider the beliefs, whatever their origins.

7. Star Trek explores this theme in various episodes. See, for instance, Conundrum (ST:TNG, 14^th episode, 5^th season). In this episode, in their confusion because they have lost their memories, Riker ventures that Picard looks like the leader and Worf replies: “Perhaps we should not jump to conclusions. I am decorated as well.” From this we see the symbols on their uniforms connoting rank and authority are irrelevant without their supporting shared beliefs.

8. Kurzban et al., 2001.