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To be sure, power is a portmanteau
word, and covers all kinds of conceivable relationships —
sex and marriage, state and society, race and colour, work and
wages, institution and individual, etc. In most cases, such
relationships get conflated and even confused in a hopeless
manner. In modern times, all kinds of studies — metaphysical
or existentialist, bio-psychological, socio-linguistic etc.,
have sought to probe this phenomenon which remains intractable
precisely because it’s rooted in the human condition. Our
concern here is chiefly with political power, though I see
politics in the larger sense. And I recall in this context
Thomas Mann’s memorable words, "In our time the destiny
of man presents its meaning in political terms".
How Aristotle’s
homopoliticus acquires craft and cunning, and a whole
machinery of mischief with a view to realising the dream of
power is a story too complex to stand a passable scrutiny here.
One thing, though, is clear enough, there’s no human urge more
forceful than the urge to subdue reality, to tailor it to one’s
own perceptions and desires, and to devastate it when things get
out of hand as, for instance, in Shakespeare’s Macbeth,
or in Melville’s Moby
Dick.
The poison of
power stains one’s sensibility irretrievably when it’s
joined to an authoritarian psyche or personality. For most
rulers, hereditary or elected or imposed, power, as Henry
Kissinger put it, is "the ultimate aphrodisiac".
As I have said
earlier, in a basic sense, this dream of man is also the source
of all his development, both material and spiritual. And in that
sense, it partakes of the grand "design" (whatever its
nature, divine or Darwinian) beneath the order of human reality.
The drama of power leads, ineluctably, towards the dream of
aggrandisement, towards man’s desire to reach out to those
extremities and absolutes which, in their very nature, invite
massive pain and suffering, tragedy and trauma. And thus the
overreachers of history always leave behind a desolate reality,
and a feeling of moral and spiritual revulsion. That’s the
human story from the Herods and Caesars and Tamburlaines and
Hitlers and Idi Amins to the less picturesque and more refined
variants in our times, particularly in the fledgling ‘democracies’
of the Third World. To quote Anthony Storr, "The sombre
fact is that we are the cruelest species that has ever walked
the earth".
In describing
the drive for power as the most potent urge in man, I wasn’t
unaware of the Freudian side of things such as the primacy of
sex, and of its double dialectic as an agency of life and death,
of the "heaven" perceived in bone and flesh, and the
" seen in street and home. It’s this equivocal nature of
sex that caused Shakespeare’s Hamlet, driven to the
utmost ramparts of distracted thought, to voice his agony over
the nature of man as an "angel" and a
"beast". His existential nausea is simply an index of
the misery of moral refinement in a world of traducers and
touts. However, what’s not so clearly understood is the nature
of the nuclear nexus between these two supreme urges: sex and
power. In fact, it’s in their symbiosis that each assumes the
aspects of the other, and each becomes implacable, irresistible
and imperious in will and purpose, absolute in action and
engagement.
And I can do no
better than return in Shakespeare for yet another insight into
the tragic nature of the two phenomena of what he calls
"appetite" and "authority" in King Lear.
"Appetite"
is his name for the sexual lust, and "authority" for
the political cupidity. It’s in this imperialism of sex and
power that the history of man may be described as one of
appropriating other bodies and territories, and of colonising
other consciousnesses. In either case, the terror abides.
Now, this is
not to aver that political power is ipso facto evil, or
that the dream of power in some select hearts will not acquire
nobility, perhaps even a ‘transcendence’ of some sort. From
Ashoka and Mahatma Gandhi to Jawaharlal Nehru, there has been a
small but significant strain in Indian polity — the desire to
use one’s talents and energies and endowments in the service
of a higher vision.
Even when such
rulers and mentors have to make unhappy compromises to meet the
requirements of the situation as both Gandhiji and Nehru had to
do in obedience to the imperatives of the moment, there is a
certain kind of transparency and truth about their actions. And
the requirements of the situation are then fused with the
requirements of "the imagination of loving". In that
particular and limited sense, politics then becomes a test of
one’s moral being, not a trap or a bait. I would even go on to
talk of the nirvana of politics in such rare cases. But,
increasingly, that classical breed is on the way out, what with
the hustlers in high authority, and the ponces now in high
positions — the examples of the Patiala "worthies"
come quickly to our minds.
Again, as biographies of rulers
and masters show, a fairly large number of persons begin their
political or public career on the high note of idealism and
sacrifice. But such is this rough and stony but slippery road of
politics that few can stay on course for any length of time.
There are decoys and diversions, sirens and seductions all along
the route. Only those are able to preserve their integrity and
authenticity whose moral imagination can meet the assaults of
reality. Authenticity is a question of nerve and force of
personality, and of the courage to accept wilderness, should one’s
hopes turn traitors. As the American critic, Lionel Trilling,
argued in his book, Sincerity and Authenticity, it takes
two to be sincere, but one to be authentic.
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