Climate of Fear : The Quest for Dignity in a Dehumanized World

Two Of Power and Freedom

The totalitarian state is easy to define, easy to identify, and thus offers a recognizable target at which the archers of human freedom can direct their darts. Not so obliging is what I have referred to as the quasi-state, that elusive entity that may cover the full gamut of ideologies and religions, contends for power, but is not defined by the physical boundaries that identify the sovereign state. Especially frustrating is the fact that the quasi-state often commences with a position whose basic aim — a challenge to an unjust status quo — makes it difficult to separate from progressive movements of dissent, with which, too, it sometimes forms alliances of common purpose. At the same time, however, there lurks within its social intent an equally deep contempt for those virtues that constitute the goals of other lovers of freedom. Thus, to grasp fully the essence of power, we must look beyond the open “show of force,” the demonstration of overt power whose purpose is to instruct a people just who is master. We are obliged to include — indeed, to regard as an equal partner in the project of power — the elusive entity that is conveniently described here as the quasi-state. We shall return to that mimic but potent entity in a few moments.

The formal state, in its dictatorial or belligerent mutation, represents power at its crudest — African nations, caught in an unending spiral of dictatorships and civil wars, are only too familiar with this exegesis of power. Equally familiar, to many, are the daylight or nighttime shock troops of state, storming the homes and offices of dissidents of a political order, carting away their victims in total contempt of open or hidden resentment.The saturation of society by near-invisible secret agents, the co-option of friends and family members — as has been notoriously documented in Ethiopia of the Dergue, former East Germany, Idi Amin’s Uganda, among others, all compelled to report on the tiniest nuances of discontent with, or indifference toward, the state — these constitute part of the overt, structured forces of subjugation. To apprehend fully the neutrality of the power of fear in recent times, indifferent to either religious or ideological base, one need only compare the testimonies of Ethiopian victims under the atheistic order of Mariam Mengistu with those that emerged from the theocratic bastion of Iran under the purification orgy of her religious leaders. The Taliban remains a lacerating memory of antihumanism, as does the Stalinist terror in the former Soviet Union.

Gruesome as we may find the histories of formal dictatorships both of the left and of the right, however, it is to be doubted that the fear engendered by such regimes ever succeeded in percolating through to a visceral level as the totally unpredictable state-in-waiting, one that repudiates even the minimal codes of accountability that are, admittedly, often breached by the formal states. It is these that constitute the quasi-states, often meticulously structured but shadowy corporations of power that mimic the formal state in all respects except three: the already noted lack of boundaries, the lack of government secretariats with identifiable ministries, and, by extension, the responsibility of governance. The quasi-state, complete with a hierarchy of elites and its own monitoring — i.e., policing and enforcement — agencies, may indeed look to a future world order, but, in the process, humanity is blatantly declared expendable, and the actualization of that new order is limited to a close cabal, proliferating through warrens and cities, and contemptuous of boundaries.

Stalin’s Soviet Union is gone. Afghanistan of the Taliban is no more. It is the quasi-state that today instills the greatest fear, a condition that becomes almost neurotic where the real state, through its renegade choices, also conducts its affairs through the cultivation of the quasi-state, and thus in effect has its cake and eats it. Allied with an agency of terror that derives from its formal powers and enjoys its connivance, it sports, Janus-like, two faces, denying its furtive ally any formal recognition but empowering it at the same time. This was a common strategy during the Cold War, when one axis created its own secretive terror machine, launched it as a virtually autonomous arm of state policy, but studiously cultivated a distancing from its existence and operations. A poison-tipped umbrella carries out its mission on a dissident in the streets of London, all the way from its origination in the Soviet bloc. The death squads of a right-wing dictatorship from Latin America reach out and blow up a haunt or offices of dissident intellectuals in Spain or Lisbon. A state deploys a relay of suicide bombers well beyond its borders. The “leader of the free world,” the United States, explores the project of assassinating the leader of an ideological enemy and irritant through a detonating cigar. A pope comes close to premature beatification from the tortuous foreign policies of a rabid member of an ideological bloc. A planeload of innocents is taken out in midair with state connivance. So much for the hybrid entity.

On its own, however, the resistance manifesto of the quasi-state can prove seductive. Only rarely does it make the mistake of showing its hand in advance, as happened in Algeria. In that nation, decades of neglect, state corruption, and alienation of the ruling elite swung the disenchanted populace at the democratic elections of 1992 toward a radical movement, the electorate remaining more or less indifferent to the fact that the change threatened to place a theocratic lid on many of the secular liberties that they had learned to take for granted. Bread and shelter are more pressing issues, in the immediate, than notions of freedom of taste. Thus: We shall ascend to power on the democratic ladder—declared the evidently popular Islamist party—after which we shall pull up the ladder, and there shall be no more democracy. Let us spend a little time on the Algerian scenario; it holds many lessons for us and, of course, occupies the tragic role of being one of the unwitting dispersal agencies of human resources for our ongoing climate of fear.

Algeria is merely a convenient example, but it is also a subjective choice for me, I am compelled to admit. My generation grew up under the indirect education of a singularly vicious anticolonial struggle — the Algerian— one that surpassed in its intensity even that of the Kenyan Mau Mau — led nationalist revolt. That struggle easily qualifies as the most brutal of Africa’s wars of liberation right up to the independence decade of the continent— the nineteen sixties. In addition, Algeria played a key role in the formation of the radical corps of African — and even black American — nationalism in the fifties and sixties, served as a source of reference, solidarity, and material aid for many African revolutionary leaders, from Guinea and Ghana to the Congo and South Africa. This North African country belonged in the radical sector of African nations that eventually closed ranks with the more conservative group for the formation of the Organization of African Unity. Given such a history, it is perhaps inevitable that my generation would take more than a passing interest in the contemporary fortunes of that nation. As a newly independent entity, its experiments in postcolonial reconstruction provided study models in the quest for the developmental transformation of other newly independent African nations.

To watch such a people plunged into a state of social retrogression, from whatever cause, is a harrowing cautionary tale, truly tragic, a reminder of the Sisyphean burden that unforeseen forces often place on the shoulders of would-be progressive movements. It is a daily reminder never to take any political situation for granted, never to underestimate the focused energy of the quasi-state whose instinctive recourse to the rule of fear as a weapon of struggle drives the best minds of a nation into exile, liquidates others, and paralyzes the creative drive of a dynamic people.

Algeria, in 1992, was a dilemma posed to try the credentials of the hardiest democrat anywhere in the world but, most pertinently, her African cohabitants across the Sahara, who, in many cases, were then struggling to free themselves from the stranglehold of military dictatorship. That dilemma can be summed up thus: if you believe in democracy, are you not thereby obliged to accept, without discrimination, the fallout that comes with a democratic choice, even if this means the termination of the democratic process itself? This was the crux of the electoral choice that was freely made by the Algerian people.Why indeed should a people not, in effect, redeem Hegel from Karl Marx? They would only be paying Marx back in his own coin, since Marx’s boast was that he began with the model of Hegel’s schema of history but then turned Hegel on his head. He replaced Hegel’s idealism with a materialist basis and the class struggle. Both are agreed on the dialectical process that leads to the fulfillment of history in the emasculation of the state order. Social contradictions are resolved and political strife is eliminated. Rulership becomes indistinct from followership — in one case, through the benevolent embodiment of enlightened rule, in the other, through the eradication of classes.

What the Islamist party of Algeria did was simply to embody the historic will, or spirit, in the Koran. Ironically, this ought to be regarded as a democratic advance on Hegel, since the process of this annulment of history was reached through popular choice, and the mantle of interpreters of the historic will — summed up by Fukuyama as “the end of history”—had been bestowed on the theocratic class by the electorate itself.Who can argue against the proposition that choice remains the bedrock of the democratic process, and if a people have made a choice that eliminates all further necessity for the ritual rounds of choosing, well… that argument appears to have reached its terminal point. History has been fulfilled.

The problem with that argument, of course, is that this denies the dynamic nature of human society, and preaches that the purely fortuitous can substitute, at any time, for the eternal and immutable. Such a position opens the way for the triumph of a social order that is based on the concept of the Chosen — a mockery of the principle of choice if ever there was one! — and totally eliminates the impulse to change as a factor of human development. On the political field, it entrusts power permanently into the hands of a clique of rulers whose qualification could rightly range from membership in a military class to that of a Masonic order, or perhaps a labor or scientific union where specific circumstances have placed such a body in a position to resolve an overwhelming catastrophe or even dilemma. Wherever history is conceded its hour of fulfillment, revelation replaces inquiry or experiment, dictation replaces debate. For us in Nigeria in 1992, these were no abstract issues, much as we wished Algeria would simply go away or choose another time to pose a dilemma that provided ammunition for our own stubborn dictatorial order.

Let us quickly recapitulate, for those to whom both Nigeria and Algeria belong on an alien planet — or, as in some encounters I have had, are indeed the same nation since they sound alike. What happened was that in both countries — in 1993 in one case, 1992 in the other — a recognized political party looked all set to win an election. At that point, however, the process was truncated by the military for no other reason than that it did not like the face of the winners. There was a critical difference, however. The victorious party in Nigeria did not promote a manifesto that would abrogate all further democratic ventures, while in the Algerian case this formed the core of its manifesto. You will understand therefore why, whenever anyone approached me for an opinion on the situation in Algeria after those elections, I quickly looked for an escape route. Easy enough to simplify the issue and say, yes, take the democratic walk to its logical conclusion, but then, as we have attempted to question, just what is the logical conclusion of the democratic option? Dictatorship of a kind different from the dictatorial status quo?

Perhaps we can approach this dilemma obliquely, citing a very recent, and instructive, development within Nigeria — one that is, however, only a partial and tepid echo of the Algerian situation. Following the May 2003 elections, the second since that nation’s return to democracy, the Sharia pioneering state, Zamfara— progressively followed by nine others — declared that its governance would henceforth be comprehensively based on the Sharia in its strictest Islamic application. One of the later subscribers to Sharia rule was the Yobe state. In December that same year, the governor, himself a Muslim, found himself obliged to take stern measures against an extremist movement that named itself after the Taliban.This group rose against the state government, claiming that it had failed to keep strict adherence to the Sharia. The sect launched an insurrection, took over some police stations — one of which, incidentally, it renamed Afghanistan — inflicted a number of casualties, and sought to overthrow the elected government. It was subdued by state forces, the movement banned and the Council of Ulamas, the religious leaders, dissolved.

Would it be totally illogical to project that this could also easily have been the fate of Algeria if indeed the victorious party had succeeded in forming a government? Once righteousness replaces rights in the exercise of power, the way is paved for a permanent contest based on the primacy of the holier-than-thou.

However, this is mere speculation.What we do know, as fact, is that since the undemocratic choice was made in Algeria, over 150,000 lives have been lost, several of these in a most grisly manner. And not just writers, cinéastes, painters, journalists, intellectuals — those purveyors of impure thoughts who are always the primary targets of fundamentalist reformers and thinkers— though these, as usual, have also been at the forefront of carnage. We are speaking here of entire villages and sectors of urban society that were considered guilty of flouting, at one level or another, the purist laws of the opposition, now transformed into a quasi-state, or simply of failing to show sufficient dedication to spiritual expectations. A resistance movement that began as a legitimate reaction to the thwarting of popular will, expressed along democratic lines, has degenerated into an orgy of competitive bestiality. State and quasi-state are locked in a deadly struggle, marked by a complete abandonment of the final vestiges of the norms of civilized society.

Such extremism could not stay localized for long. We have only to recollect that some of the leaders of this new insurgency cut their teeth in the struggle for the liberation of Afghanistan, a struggle that triumphed with the expulsion of Soviet forces of occupation from that nation, then recollect that such mujahideen are pitted against a regime whose leaders are also veterans in the bruising war of liberation against French colonialism. And the consequence of these antecedents for global politics? The end of the notion of a nationalist war that would remain strictly within national confines. Perhaps such a notion had long since dissipated — only not much notice was paid at the time — dispelled by the Vietnam War, a war that sought no more than the liberation of its land from the domination of foreigners.

Regarding that war, I must express a puzzle.Vietnam, then known as Indochina, fought two wars of liberation, first from France, which she defeated at the famous battle of Dien Bien Phu, then from the United States, which felt that she knew a thing or two that France did not. No one can forget the saturation bombing carried out by the United States in the latter stages of the war — a brutal assault that was actually described by the president, Richard Nixon, as an exercise to bomb North Vietnam to the negotiating table — nor the earlier barrage of defoliants whose effects have yet to wear off completely in that nation, the deadly chemical weapon napalm, with horrendous images of inhuman disfiguration permanently seared on world memory. Now, the puzzle is this. I find it curious that the North Vietnamese, victims of two world powers in rapid succession, did not ever consider designating the entire world a war arena where innocents and guilty alike would be legitimately targeted. Not one incident of hijacking took place during those wars, neither did the taking of hostages, or the random detonation of bombs in places of tourist attraction or religious worship. United Nations agencies, as well as humanitarian organizations, appear to have enjoyed the respect due to neutrals in conflict. Most unbelievable of all, however, was the aftermath of that war, the now ritual encounters between U.S. veterans and their former enemies in an embrace of reconciliation.

Certainly, during the entire Vietnam wars, it would have been an excessive claim to suggest that the world was trapped in a climate of fear.While we may dispute in the end what lessons must be drawn from this contrast, what remains certain is that it is one that needs to be closely studied. In the fifth lecture of this series, “ ‘I Am Right;You Are Dead,’ ” we shall take this up again. Certainly we cannot ignore the antecedent histories of such peoples, their philosophies, and their religions.The same observation may be made, albeit in a different vein, of the antiapartheid struggle that was waged with no less commitment and intensity against a ruthless foe. The oppressed black people of South Africa did not pronounce the outside world guilty of the crime of continuing to survive while a majority race was being ground to earth by an implacable machinery of racist governance. There are hidden lessons in these studies in contrast, lessons that may enable us, after acknowledging the principal sources of the current climate of fear, to seek remedies that go beyond the rectification of the glaring and sustained conduct of global injustice.

It is always easy enough to address the material factors of conflict, and we do know that in most cases, such will be found as the primary causes. They can be identified and grasped, and usually provide a basis for negotiation even in the most intense moments of conflict. Nations fight over land, over water supply and other material resources, and, in civil wars, also over political marginalization — these are accessible causes of discontent, cogent in their manifestations. They go to the heart of a people’s sense of social security and need for survival. Intermeshed with these, however, but not so intricately as to be totally inseparable, is a much neglected factor in its own right — the quotient of power, the will to dominate, to control, that strange impulse that persuades certain temperaments that they can realize their existence either individually or collectively only through the domination of others. We are speaking here of that phase when a struggle moves beyond its material causes — to restore parity within an exploitative order or whatever — and becomes one that is dedicated to the seizure and exercise of raw power. It goes to the heart of the phenomenon of those dictators who, long past their creative usefulness, still cling ruthlessly to the seat of power, a contemporary instance of which can be seen in the pitiable condition of the once revolutionary, now merely embarrassing ruler of Zimbabwe, whose rule is sustained today not by popular acceptance but by the agency of terror.

Let us not therefore limit the thrill of power only to its structured manifestations. The territorial — that is, the physical expression — of the will to dominate is only part of the story. There is also its furtive exercise, one that, often outgunned and outmaneuvered, may even give up all interest in territorial control but will not give up the craving for domination. We may liken it to that now-commonplace technological gadget known as the remote control, one that incidentally plays such a lethal role in the explosive dialogue of today’s parties of conflict. We are speaking of the thrill of power by means other than actual governance, power as a pursuit in its own right, an addictive concentrate, extract, or essence. It is a realm that need not be anchored in material grounds, remains a pursuit in its own right, craved for its own sake. The conduct of the child taunting and circumscribing the motions of a captive insect, or the well-known antics of the school bully — these are early forays into the laboratory of power, from which a taste may develop into major assaults on entire communities. The complementary emotion of the victim — insect or school pupil — that the tormentor loves as his reward is, of course, the expression of fear, accompanied by an abject surrender of volition.

I believe that it is time to confront a heightened reality — heightened, because not exactly new — and to include the factor of power, the instinct to power, among the motivating components of the human personality and social movements, an unquantifiable element that has always governed much of social and nation relationships. History concedes to exceptional figures, past and present — Alexander, Suleiman, King Darius, Chaka the Zulu, Ataturk, Indira Gandhi, etc. — the temperaments of nation builders as well as nurturers of power. That latter impulsion is not glossed, either by historians or by the psychoanalysts of supermen and — women.What differs in our contemporary situation is that the relishing of power is no longer an attribute of the outstanding, exceptional individual, but is increasingly accessible even to the nondescript individual whose membership in a clique, or activities on behalf of the Chosen, more than fulfill this hunger for a share in the diet of power.

Is it strictly out of a commitment to the moral law— Thou shalt not kill—that the extreme antiabortion crusader in the United States stalks and kills abortion doctors, patients, and innocent passersby, sometimes operating from within a network of protective cells? Or is there also an element of the thrill of membership in a quasi-state, exercising a form of power that transcends all mainstream social accords? We shall turn more fully to the theme of the Chosen in the fifth of these lectures.

For now, let me assure you that if you wish to observe the face of power at its most mundane, you do not have far to seek.You do not need to pay to see Marlon Brando in his role as the Godfather at the head of a Mafia combine. That face is omnipresent — from the clerical assistant on whom the emergence of a critical file depends to anonymous members of an unacknowledged terrorist organization in the United States known as the IRS — the Internal Revenue Service. Simply be on the receiving end of a letter of demand from that body to construct on your retina the driven personality of the writer!

Actually, that ogre has long since been displaced in my personal encounters — at least temporarily — by one of the new creatures of the heightened state of alert that now prevails in countries like the United States. These days, after you have checked in and gone through all the security checks, you may find yourself at the departure gate being subjected to a final, detailed check of your person and your baggage. That selection is mostly a random one, carried out by the computer. However, in other airports or, more accurately, with certain airlines, it is an airline security official who decides your fate, either immediately before or after you have passed through the baggage-screening section. That individual, who presumably is trained not only in human but in document psychology, looks you up and down like some strange insect species, takes another look at your passport, weighs it in one hand or in both, and takes another look at you. She does not ask you any questions; all decisions are based on that dual inspection — of you and your documents. She pauses — there is a long queue behind you but she pauses a long while — to let you know that your fate is in her hands. Then, with the most contemptuous toss of her head, she indicates that you may go through, or… step aside and join other lesser beings who are huddled, waiting to be stripped to their barest essentials. Don’t take my word for it, go and see these individuals at work. There are a hundred ways I can think of — most of them actually polite and humane— whereby you can let a voyager know that you are about to subject him to some inconvenience, but for a laudable cause. No, these individuals let you know, in advance, that what you are about to experience is indignity, and that they, and they alone, are the powers that force-feed you this diet of humiliation.

I regret to have to inform you — and political correctness can go take a jump — that the nastiest, most obviously power-possessed officials that I have encountered in this manner have all been women, mostly between the ages of twenty and thirty, and — black! Perhaps the perennial war of the sexes is a factor, tied to the additional complication of the history of racism in the United States; I leave it to sociologists to look into this experience for me and offer their own explanations. All I do here is testify from experience — and on oath!

Let me not fail, simply for reasons of a deep, subjective, murderous loathing, to pay tribute to the creature to whom the modern crown of furtive power rightly belongs: the domination freak whose warped genius creates those invisible, proliferating Frankensteins from his dingy computer den and sends them in virtual space to invade and destroy the work of individuals and institutions. These aberrants are without an ounce of hatred in their veins, with no wrong to avenge, no cause to promote, with no physical or territorial ambition, indeed with no motivation other than the lust for power over unknown millions, both the meek and the powerful, the affluent and the deprived, the professor and the school pupil alike. I refer, of course, to none other than the cybernerd, whose depredations we all must have felt at some time or other, or barely escaped. The most recent of these, like Mr. “I am God” the Maryland sniper, is not without a message for his captive world—“Have the guts to call the name of Jesus” is the subject line of the stalking horse on which his cannibal creation rides to wage his war of destruction on the unsuspecting.

It takes little imagination to picture this figure at his computer with, literally, the whole world at his fingertips, locked in a competitive lust with unknown others for the power to inflict the maximum injury on humanity. Usually youthful, European or Asian — so report the cybersleuths — and again, PC be damned, this individual is of course impelled by a genuine passion for discovery, but the space between that motion of a technological curiosity and the gesture that launches a virus on the world is the space that separates the explorer from the conqueror, the adventurer from the imperialist, the revolutionary from the dictator: it is the space of pure, unadulterated ecstasy of power.

Power, alas — even in its comic vein — is neither abstract nor metaphysical in its impact on society. The axis of tension between power and freedom continues to propel the very motions of personality development, social upheaval, and nation conflicts. We must stress yet again that the urge to dominate may be the product of existing realities. Where such realities are not addressed, the political space is left fallow, enabling the calculating hand to fan the winds of fear. Some of these actualities may expand to threaten the peace of the world. Are they new, or are they simply the accentuation of well-known anomalies in nation relations? I began my remarks by deliberately identifying one such contributory breeding ground, Algeria. In forthcoming lectures, we shall touch on others — such as the Middle East — look into causes and effects, and perhaps even venture into speculations over possible solutions. I intend to proceed on the premise — one that I think is easy to agree upon — that humanity would rather work to dispel a climate of fear than live within it, and I assume also that we are equally agreed that, at this moment of speaking, we are well and truly enveloped in it. For now, let me devote the remaining time to taking us on a few turns along the axial relationship between power and freedom.

Science-fiction literature, of which I used to be an avid fan — I still am, it’s just that I do not have as much time to indulge in it as I once had — is most instructive, as are films in the same genre. Take The Day of the Triffids, where plants attempt to take over human society, or those films of alien body-snatchers, that most subversively imaginative way of taking over the key elements in a community,

its government, progressively taking over the nation by assuming the physical shapes of a nation’s ruling cadre. (Can we swear, by the way, that George Bush and Osama are not aliens in human shape?)

We may ask the question: in such fictions, what is the most basic element that twangs a chord of trepidation in the human viscera? Where does the reader, or viewer, identify most viscerally with the characters in this literary or cinematic genre? What gives that piquant edge to one’s apprehension in much of science-fiction and horror literature? I suggest that it is very simply the notion of coming under the control of another being, of finding oneself dominated by an alien force, an alien bundle of values, sensibilities, tastes, agenda, beliefs, and direction — in short, being robbed of one’s social anchor. Apart from a fear of the loss of identity to those goblins from outer space — with heaven knows what nasty habits — one recognizable source of that repulsion is, very simply, the ancestral adversary of human freedom that we designate “power.” The goblin has taken over control of our existential volition.

Taking the foregoing together, we find that we need not wait to be visited or infiltrated by beings from outer space to arrive at the same state of fear and loathing that is associated with being manipulated by a force outside our own will. The vector of domination can, and constantly does, assail us in the here and present geographical environment. And we do know that in order to ensure absolute submission, that alien force must first lay a track of fear on which it rolls its juggernaut of domination. Even if the goals are not immediately articulated and may never be fully defined, power revels in first making itself manifest — then other social themes may follow in its wake. May. Or may not. Power is selfsufficient, a replete possession, and must be maintained by whatever agency is required. We have already indicated that the readiest methodology to hand is the inculcation of fear. Ethiopia under Mariam Mengistu and the Dergue, Pinochet in Chile, or Miloševićc in former Yugoslavia, or the terror regime of the late General Sanni Abacha of Nigeria, all provide chilling contemporary testimonies of this relationship. Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe is doing his best to ensure that the African continent remains relevant in the global study of this social phenomenon.

The mutual dependency of power and freedom has long been recognized, its consummation undertaken throughout the history of human association to the accompaniment of orgies of human sacrifice. Whether we believe in that reproductive miracle or not, it is useful to seize the nature of power as we do that of Immaculate Conception, an autogenous phenomenon — though one that can also be a product of willed imitation — and then we come to recognize more and more that, for its full savoring, power need not burden itself with such banal undertakings as social responsibility or restraints of morality. Every day, atrocities of once unimaginable dimensions remind us of this fact, events that are traceable to that moment when one individual, already in a rarefied existence of his own, salivates over an exquisite moment of fulfillment as he watches his victims, mostly already existing in that half-life of social invalidation — the other half being mortgaged to the fear of the unexpected — squirm in awe of his efficacy of control. Surely it is not a merely fabulous projection that sees such an individual, alone in his or her hermetic world, suffused with an inward smile of satisfaction: “Now, you lot, I have you in my power. At this moment, I, and I alone, know, and am about to decide, your fate.”

I no longer recall the title of the film that was made of the Red Brigade in Italy, after the abduction and murder of a prime minister, Aldo Moro, who was out of power at the time. If we may leave aside the dubious politics of that assassination, and the movement of which these formed a part, what remains ineluctable is the study in smug self-righteousness of his abductors as they proceeded to decide the fate of their prisoner. Blame the director, if you wish, for failing to extract a sense of ideological necessity, inevitability, in the decision that was taken to eliminate him.What came through instead — perhaps it was the director’s intention anyway — was the sense of a “hallowed space” as the dominant environment of the revolutionary cell, an evocation of the unreal that was accentuated by the real psychological extract, the autonomy of power, conveyed in the demeanor of these mostly young individuals. This all-pervasive extract was, in my view, the exercise of power. These individuals, separated from a world that they genuinely despised, or affected to despise, were lodged in the hermetic enclosure of absolutism. A limited environment, yes, but an environment that they totally controlled, and of which they were the privileged janitors. This was what mattered most. They were not deciding the fate of an individual, not even of a symbol, I felt, but were simply engrossed in the exercise of secretive dominance, and this was what lent that film its bleak and pathetic intensity. One was transported into another world whose basic commodity, evenly shared within the circle of the Chosen and celebrated with all due ritual and solemnity, was simply — power. Unnamed, unacknowledged, power was nonetheless the palpable fetish of worship.

Well, theorizing apart, the young executioners, imbued with a sense of a “holy mission,” or simply wallowing — albeit with all appearance of deep reflection — in the pure ambience of power, left the Western, capitalist world in no doubt whatsoever about their essential product: a climate of fear that enveloped the moneyed, their relations, the remotely connected, the political class, the middle class, and, occasionally, innocent victims of what military language loves to gloss as “collateral damage.”

I must continue to insist that we do not underestimate the relevance of a material base — even justification — of the “holy mission” in all of this. However, even the most evidently objectivized base of the “holy mission” is often complicated by the sheer relish that is experienced in the control of others. It is not possible to reject absolutely the notion that one — just one in four, in ten, in two dozen — may be governed by no more than an impulse to secret, furtive dominance, the fulfillment of that individual by a moment of self-abandonment to this mysterious essence of power. I know, because I have met some such individuals. So, I am certain, have others in this audience. For now, I could do worse than attempt to burrow into the core of this commodity, one that has remained a puzzle to psychologists and philosophers — Hegel, Hobbes, Nietzsche, and all — and, as with all riddles of the human condition and social impulses, leaves one with more questions than answers. This is not a matter of obscurantist speculation. Rather, there is an almost obsessive quest for some clarifying clues when one has been a participant in the kind of deadly struggle that ensues when one individual, a single mortal with no discernible exceptional qualities, convinces himself that it is his mission to bludgeon a populace of some millions — ten, twenty, forty, a hundred or more millions — into submission.

So now, directly to that conundrum — power — just what is that? We know what it does. For a start, power takes away the freedom of the other and replaces it with fear. Still, that does not answer the ontological question. What, we may ask, is the common factor, the ingredient that guarantees a trill of nervous apprehension in, on the one hand, an audience watching Dr. Strangelove and, on the other, the citizens of Maryland with a sniper on the loose? Power, of course. The primitive fear of being controlled. It does not matter whether it is an invasion from outer space or power wielded from a subterranean command post: some alien force is about to take control of us, to dominate — and, if necessary in the process, to terminate our existence. We never stop to think — or, at best, a secondary consideration is whether such a force might be for the good, that humanity might indeed be improved by such a takeover. Volition, to which we desperately cling, is the very definition of our mature completion as social beings. The basis of rejection that registers itself in an audience seated at a theatrical or cinematic representation of the megalomaniac has always been the antithesis of human volition — power!

We have known it also described as a sexual substitute or an aphrodisiac, but this only begs the question. Victims of rape often take a different position. Next to the horror of bodily violation, a frequent admission by victims is of the humiliation of being totally subjected to another’s control. And the more sadistic the rapist, the greater his urge to exact an acknowledgment from the victim of submission to his dominance. Sexual gratification is of course at the heart of such violations, but pre-eminent is the satisfaction of dominating another, making him or her totally subject to his whims, some of which may not even be sexual in nature. In whatever proportion we choose to present these cravings, there is no question that a sense of power generates its own satisfaction, and is an important element in the drive toward rape. So, once again, back to the question — just what is power?

Is it perhaps no more than a deadly mutation of ambition, one that may or may not translate into social activity? Any fool, any moron, any psychopath can aspire to the seizure and exercise of power, and of course the more psychopathic, the more efficient: Hitler, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Sergeant Doe, and the latest in the line of the unconscionably driven, our own lately departed General Sanni Abacha — all have proved that power, as long as you are sufficiently ruthless, amoral, and manipulative, is within the grasp of even the mentally deficient. So, power is really neither efficacy nor a mandatory facilitator of vision or political purpose. Of course the pursuit of power may be impelled by vision, but power in itself is not to be mistaken for vision. On the contrary, true vision may eschew power, may totally repudiate power, seeking to fulfill itself by that hardy, self-sacrificial route that does not lean on the crutch of power. There are individuals in every field of human endeavor who have pursued their vision, and in a multiplicity of fields — to the benefit of millions and tens of millions around the world — without that promiscuous facilitator named power. And power, let us stress just once more, need not be an individual aspiration; it can be no more than mere participation in a collective exercise, a variant that is the intriguing and proliferating arm of hegemonic obsession of a unit within a totality.

Since I do not believe that we shall ever arrive at a satisfactory explication of power, I have settled for that functional one — that is, a definition that enables us to proceed to the social neutralization of this affliction whenever it rears its head. After all, the manifestation of raw power is an encounter that is inevitable right from infancy, and through the normal course of existence — be it in a rainstorm, the force of lightning, or an earthquake. Even the casual wind that takes down a rotten branch or a roof or two is a manifestation of the hidden force of Nature that suddenly exercises its authority from time to time, and without any intervention from man. Nature, therefore, sometimes reveals herself as a pure expression of power — and it is perhaps somewhat more than an anthropomorphic conceit to suggest that man, in those activities that incline him toward the exercise of dominance, is merely attempting a crude appropriation in response to that elemental attribute that is an expression of the very forces that surround and threaten to overwhelm him, not least of which is mortality.

In short, power is, paradoxically, the primordial marshland of fear, from which emerges the precipitate of man’s neurotic response to mortality. Therein he proceeds to attempt to match himself with the force of Nature, that agency through which the various apprehensions of God, Super Being, or whatever name— including Death — are filtered. You cannot, however, contain within yourself the elemental force of death, godhead, a thunderstorm, an earthquake, or a volcano, never mind the comparison of some energetic types to a whirlwind. Those who take such metaphors personally are subject matter for traditional psychiatry, and it is for this reason that ancient societies devised a number of ritualized scenarios for the banalization of power. As a dramatist, I have myself experimented with a number of rituals toward that end. Here is one — designed, however, only for the formal, not the shadowy counterpart of manifest power. It takes off from the French play-wright and exorcist Jean Genet.

A glitzy brothel, most appropriately, is the setting for Jean Genet’s ritualization of the insatiable collaborator — power — in his play The Balcony. There, the power-obsessed come periodically to act out their fantasies. Here now is a summary of my variation on Jean Genet:

Suppose we modernized Genet’s rather primitive stage mechanics to embrace the very latest in special effects, à la Steven Spielberg. Society would proceed to offer its ruler a chance to erupt with the earthquake, soar on flues of the thunderstorm, and become virtually one with the convulsion that attends the birth of new planets. Encased in a Virtual Reality capsule, a super Jacuzzi, the Maximum Leader would dominate the universe every day before breakfast. As a finale — and here I must acknowledge the inspiration of the innovation of that late leader Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, who soared with the sunrise and disappeared into the clouds every morning on his nation’s television — the Leader would watch the daily waste of his bodily functions morph into a celestial orb — the sun, no less — rising over the horizon, approving the beginning of a new day for his people.

After such an immersion in the utter sublimity of galactic power, any mortal must emerge with nothing but contempt for the mere pittance of awe and terror that are the normal dues from his miserable subjects. He would leave them — us — to wallow in our now unappealing state of… unbroken freedom, and the absence of fear.

I am persuaded that this is a ritualistic offering that no man-eating dictator, with the innate theatrics of that breed, could ever refuse.