The nature of power

As humans, we are mysteries to ourselves. Every day we handle money. Do we ever stop to wonder what it is and why we're so compelled to use it? A piece of green paper with George Washington's portrait and "1's" at the corners is just what I described. Same with a green piece of paper with Ben Franklin's portrait and fifties at the corner. When we believe it's money, we treat it differently. We count it carefully, safeguard it, save or spend. We don't just possess the money, we're able to command it: buy something on a credit or debit card. Then you never handle the dollars you're exchanging. The money "emblem" doesn't even need the bills, it doesn't need to be visible. A few million electrons, too small for the eye to see are sufficient. Money is the difference between life and death, wealth and destitution. The amount we have divides us into classes. 

That's some powerful magic because when you get right down to it, money exists only in the human mind. Some people are disturbed by its etherealness and insist we must use gold. It doesn't matter really what we use to physically represent money, it's whether we regard it as money. Gold is impractical for our economy, there's not enough of it, it's heavy and cumbersome to transfer. During the 1870s-1933, in the planting seasons, farmers would take out loans for seed. The banks would run out. They had to send to Britain for more. The trip from Britain took two weeks, and by that time, banks would fail by the dozens.

My point being: money is imagined. We do a lot of things to keep up the illusion. Our social understanding that sees it creates it and respects it. Other things that have enormous influence over us exist only in our minds. Borders. Nation-states, private property. Why do we all go along with it? Because some people might not have an objection, and there's a cost to rejecting them, just like there's a penalty for ignoring any of the cornerstone social imaginations in our lives.

Money is power, and power is imaginary, too.

Money's not the only form of power. What is power then? The measure of a person's power is in how many people they can get to cooperate with them, over what duration, and to what extremes. I'm sure if the observations could ever be done, it can be described as people x duration x extremes.

And in judging power, it doesn't matter what the method is, whether he does it by his charm, her money, his ruthlessness. Adolph Hitler, Josef Stalin, Saddam Hussein, did it by being charming at first and then making the charmed people do brutal things, while the dictator did more charming. Once the dictator has surrounded himself by ruthless, but charmed people, and they have power networks of their own, he's set for life.

Money is power, and if people were aware of that, they wouldn't let anybody get too wealthy. The Koch Brothers have $40 billion dollars. How many assassins can that buy? How many mercenaries How many politicians? Even if one might turn the billionaire down, there's always another one to buy. Remember, it's the number of people cooperating, directly or indirectly, that makes somebody powerful. 

Is there any practical use for my observation? Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and all major and minor dictators through history were only men that people started to obey. Just remember we don't have to follow the dictator. It's the people in his network who can stop obeying him, and negate their obedience and the reason for it. I don't suggest they take that lightly because as I said, there are penalties.

I consider this to be very pertinent for today when we're facing a president who's an authoritarian.