The Tribune - Spectrum
 
ART & LITERATURE
'ART AND SOUL
BOOKS
MUSINGS
TIME OFF
YOUR OPTION
ENTERTAINMENT
BOLLYWOOD BHELPURI
TELEVISION
WIDE ANGLE
FITNESS
GARDEN LIFE
NATURE
SUGAR 'N' SPICE
CONSUMER ALERT
TRAVEL
INTERACTIVE FEATURES
CAPTION CONTEST
FEEDBACK



Sunday
, May 26, 2002
Books

SIGNS & SIGNATURES
Power, money, sex: A Freudian nexus
Darshan Singh Maini

"Wherever I found the living, I found the will to power

— Nietzsche

"Power is the birth-right of every human being"

— Fanon

IT is one of life’s painful ironies that power, money and sex, which in their positive and purposive aspects sustain man, society and civilisation, are, at the same time, cruel despoilers of life’s bounties and largesse. And if I muse over this agonising issue today, it’s because what we have read in the media, and seen on television apropos of Messrs Sidhu and Ahluwalia only provides sinews for my argument. The dialectic of power, cupidity and sex abides in all circumstances.

The darker Freudian nexus, with its roots in human nature, continues to play havoc and create chaos in life. If the tiger cannot hide its stripes, or the leopard its spots, man, it appears, is helpless before his dark inner drives. One requires a moral imagination to keep the sirens of sex and sleaze away.

The more you ponder over the problematics of power, the more you are inclined to consider the issue in terms of what Joseph Conrad called "heart of darkness", that pit where moral chaos eventually turns into evil in the theological sense. In all great writers — Shakespeare, Goethe, Dostoievsky, Melville, to name a few — the theme of power and evil turns up compulsively in their passage to cognition, thought and insight. To be able to deal with that Leviathan, one needed "the imagination of disaster", to use one of Henry James’s eloquent phrases. For such is the torment of truth, and such its dialectic. Indeed,the fatal fascination and the corruptions of the spirit which the pursuit of power involves lead us back inevitably into "the congoes of the human heart". And there the mystery and the misery abide. The tigers roaming in the human unconscious strike the prey unawares. The Jungian concept of the "Shadow" — the lurking outlaw in us is recalled here to underscore the argument.

 


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.