Power, Freedom and the Imagination

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” Albert Einstein.

“The power of imagination makes us infinite.” John Muir.

I once read a book called the 48 laws of power - you may have heard of it; the idea is that when we cut through the illusions of everyday life we get to the basis of what people really want or should want and that, the book claims, is power. It goes on to lay out a number of “laws of power” with examples from history of individuals who followed or failed to follow these laws and ended up gaining or losing power as a result. I realized pretty quickly that it would take a sociopath to take this book completely seriously - many of the examples were misleading or irrelevant to modern society and in some cases, downright nasty. It was an interesting read though and what has stuck with me most was the point that we do seek power whether consciously or unconsciously, that we have a variety of strategies for doing so and that we do so for a very simple reason, which is that to feel strong is to feel good and to feel weak is to feel bad. No matter how much we tip-toe around morality, we can’t escape that fact and we can't escape the power struggles that go on both in the open and behind the scenes of everyday life. What is power then and what should or shouldn’t we do about it? I won't pretend I can answer that question but I might be able to offer some food for thought.

In order to exercise power, we need to be free to act, in terms of our own abilities and the environment in which we use them. We also need the will to act. We may be free, for example, to tell our boss that we want to quit our job but we need the will to carry that through. Before any of that though, before freedom and will, we need the capacity to imagine even the possibility of acting. And this highlights the fact that the necessary basis of power, underlying both freedom and will, is the imagination. The freedom to act depends on our ability to recognize possibilities and we need to use our imaginations to conjure these up in our minds. Without imagination there are no possibilities to choose from, and freedom and will are made redundant.

What makes us act then in one way or another, and who benefits? The answer I think lies in the struggles for power that we are, whether we like it or not, constantly engaged in. Power is like (and sometimes essentially is) money; in any self-contained community of individuals there is only so much to go around. Everybody can’t be in charge or no-one is in charge. Those who benefit from a restriction of our power are simply other people. And if we accept that power is fundamentally based on our capacity to imagine possibilities, we must accept that those who restrict our capacity to imagine also restrict our potential power. This can happen openly on a micro-level, for example when someone says we are this or that, contradicting and possibly threatening our self image and what we imagine we are capable of, or on a macro-level when society labels us as part of a group that it considers limited in some way, due to our race, culture or appearance, again threatening our sense of self. A similar process can also happen behind the scenes and much more perniciously when other individuals or society in general distracts us from who we are, or who we could be by offering to do our imagining for us, by offering to substitute the products of their imagination for our personal capacity to create our own mental worlds. It could be argued that this is essentially what the entertainment industry does and in doing so, that it draws power (not to mention money) from us.

The trade is simple – pleasure for power, and there are two major problems with it: One is that we lose the power to act in certain ways and the other is that the less power we have, the less potential pleasure we can gain from the trade anyway. So the more movies we watch or fiction we read, or entertainment websites we visit, the less pleasurable the whole thing becomes. What most of us do is take a break when we've had enough and start the whole process over, but why not question the process itself? If boredom leads to us to seeking to be entertained and being entertained leads us to boredom, isn’t there something wrong with the whole picture?

I'm suggesting here that there must be; we're not any different genetically from our hunter gatherer ancestors and unless we believe they lived in a constant state of boredom and depression then what is the justification for our entry into this circle in the first place? A circle that I'm arguing is both unnatural and unhelpful to us in developing our capacity to actualize potential possibilities for ourselves. It’s also significant that this process mirrors the vicious circle of addiction: need, satisfaction, exhaustion, and more need, with the level of satisfaction constantly reducing with exposure, but the need constantly increasing.

So I'd argue that entertainment that's engaged in purely for pleasure seems to be a bad trade. There are, ironically, movies that warn as much. The film Wall-E paints a picture of a future where everybody is hooked up to a motorized chair and a TV 24 hours a day and all they need to do is eat, watch and sleep. This seems to be the ultimate end of the marriage of entertainment and technology with human laziness: nothing to do, nothing to think, nothing to be. Utopia or Dystopia? I think the answer is obvious.

But it’s hard; Who doesn’t get bored? Who doesn’t need to relax and unwind once in a while? Who doesn’t need pleasure in their life? We do, we do and we do, but we can do better. Rats will pull a lever that is hooked up to stimulate electrodes attached to the pleasure centres in their brains until they collapse in complete exhaustion having not eaten or slept since the process began and I'm sure we've all got ourselves into a similar state once in a while from an overdose of media entertainment. The rat can’t stop though, he has no imagination and no choice and that's the difference, we do and though it's hard, we can.

Personal power and happiness are not just given, but are earned through us creating ourselves in our imagination and giving the products of that creation to the world through our work, our art, or simply through acting in ways that are uniquely us, not just unquestioningly taking in what's offered to us by others. We should, each of us, be shouting out our songs of individuality from the rooftops, I say, in recognition that power, freedom and the imagination are intimately linked and that to sacrifice the last is to sacrifice all.