Power Horizon*

On the whole, the nearer people and things are to us the more significance we are likely to accord to their effect upon us (inevitably, for example, children experience their parents as enormously powerful). At the same time we are of course surrounded by a complex apparatus conveying information and controlling meaning; the extent to which we are able to gain a critical purchase on this apparatus will determine our understanding of our world. In all these spheres we are encircled by an horizon beyond which the world is a mystery.

Global society constitutes a system of inexpressible complexity. It is like a huge central nervous system in which ‘social neurons’ (i.e. people) interact with each other via an infinity of interconnecting and overlapping subsystems. The fundamental dynamic of the system is power, that is the ability of a social group or individual to influence others in accordance with its/his/her interests. Interest is thus the principal, and most effective, means through which power is transmitted.

Here, already, is the starkest possible contrast with our conventional psychology: what animates us is not rational appraisal and considered choice of action, but the push and pull of social power as it manipulates our interest. It is not argument and demonstration of truth which move us to action but the impress of influences of which we may be entirely unaware.

[...]

A number of interesting consequences follow from the notion of 'power horizon'. One is the new meaning it gives to the concept of the 'Unconscious'. Unconsciousness ceases to be, as it is in Freudian theory, a property of individuals, and becomes an external, social phenomenon: we are unconscious of what we cannot know or have been prevented from knowing. At the most proximal level, parents may conceal aspects of the(ir) world from children, or exercise their power to forbid access to activities or information they deem unsuitable for their children, or indeed threatening to themselves. At more distal levels, we are nearly all unconscious of the origin and manner of transmission of powers which affect our lives in all kinds of crucial and intimate ways, not because of our own stupidity or wilfulness, but because they lie beyond the zone our gaze can penetrate.

A further consequence of our limited power horizons is, as already implied, the opportunities which are opened up for the more or less deliberate exploitation of our perspective. The globalization of the 'free market' is one obvious area where the ruthless malpractices of Business can be shifted beyond the horizon of those most able to object. Opposition to abuses of power in 'developed' democracies can be dealt with by media manipulation and appeasement while the most brutal exploitation of labour, etc., is shifted to places likely neither to fall readily under the eye nor to engage the feelings of the general public. What goes on in Burma, Brazil, Indonesia or Singapore is, for example, relatively easily maintained as a matter of indifference to the vast majority of voters in Britain. (It is true, of course, that readers of the broadsheets - often now sneeringly referred to as 'high-minded' - and viewers of televison's intellectual safety-valves, Channel 4 and BBC2, may be to some extent apprised of what goes on further afield. But, as one BBC political commentator elegantly put it 'the trouble is, it's a tabloid world' in which it matters little what goes into high minds.)

It is also worth noting how the limited reach of our personal memories through time hugely facilitates the recycling of fashion and the maintenance of obsolescence, the disruption of on-going organized resistance (e.g. the demise of unionism, whose ideological origins are by now totally obscure to most people), and the ability to veil in a fog of oblivion the savage iniquities upon which much of our social structure is founded (the manner in which those who robbed and murdered their way to property and wealth have managed since to clothe themselves in the regalia of honour, virtue and distinction, is a matter for unceasing wonder).

Power is generated within and through social institutions. The institutions of power operate independently of particular individuals and at varying distances from them, affecting them via almost unimaginably complex lines of influence that travel through individuals as well as through other institutions. A highly simplified diagram (from The Origins of Unhappiness3) suggests the basic structure through which power operates:

[Figure 1: The impress of power]

The further away from the individual person a particular social institution is, the more powerful it is likely to be and the more individuals it will affect. For example, the machinery of global capitalism has enormous effects on vast numbers of people in the world who are themselves in no position to be able to see into its operation. Fig. 2 attempts to give an impression of the pervasiveness of distal influence. Individual citizens have virtually no way of resisting the powers which bear down upon them - their only hope is to act in solidarity with others.

Apparently paradoxically, the nearer to the (average) individual an institution is, the less its total power is likely to be, though, owing to the distortion of his or her perspective, it will be experienced by that individual as more powerful. For example, as might be the case with employers, we tend in every day life to attribute considerable power to those whose ‘decisions’ most nearly affect us. However, it is rarely, if ever, that an employer ‘makes a decision’ in the sense of spontaneously exercising free will over us; it is far more likely to be the case that the employer’s ‘decisions’ are conditioned by economic events which operate at such a distance from us (as well as the employer) that we cannot even discern their basic properties.

[Figure 2: The impress of distal power]

Each of us is thus surrounded by a spatio-temporal 'power horizon' beyond which it is impossible to 'see'. The radius of this horizon will of course differ between individuals according to the availability to them of power. In a general sense, the better educated and well connected will have 'longer' power horizons compared to less advantaged people. Despite obvious benefits of class, however, the majority of us probably find ourselves in boats more similar than different - hence the ability of higher-order power to manipulate entire populations in terms of their understanding of how the world works.

The extent to which an individual can be said to ‘have’ power will depend upon the availability to him or her of power within the system, i.e. how much power is transmitted through him or her from outside sources. (I have tried to outline out what this model signifies for the experience of psychological distress in Fundamentals of an Environmental Approach to Distress.) Fig. 1 gives the impression that power flows only in one direction - from the more to the less powerful. This is of course somewhat misleading: it is possible both for proximal to influence distal institutions and for individuals to act back onto their environment. It is however the case that the flow of influence in this 'reverse' direction is strictly limited in scope and distance.

An individual can in this way be defined as an embodied locus in social space through which power flows. People are thus held in place within the social environment by the influences which structure it, and their freedom to change position or influence people and events is strictly limited by the availability of power within the sub-systems in which they are located. In fact, no significant amount power is available to the individual beyond that which is afforded by the social environment.

[Figure 3: Influences in social space]

Some of the complexity of social space is conveyed in fig. 3. A (rather stereotypically conceived!) family floats in social space, the direction of influence between its members and some proximal systems shown by the arrows and its relative strength by their thickness. Rather as if each of the smaller spheres were like a neuron or system of neurons in a nervous system, the ‘electrical impulse’ of conduction is power and the ‘neurotransmitter’ is interest. But the diagram leaves out infinitely more than it can illumine. Quite apart from the different ways in which power can engage or coerce interest, it is impossible to convey the way it flows through the system. Power does not originate within the individuals, nor within the institutions shown (e.g. work, school), but is generated much more distally within and between socio-economic and cultural systems whose all-pervasive influence defies intricate analysis4.

4. For a website packed with information about the scientific understanding of complex systems, try
http://www.calresco.org/

[*] Excerpts from Power, Responsibility and Freedom. This small book by the (very sociologically-informed) clinical psychologist David Smail offers a succint and accessible illumination of the structure of society and the place of the individual (and “his psychology”) within the landscape of social power. It provides an immense wealth of quotes and references to works in the fields of sociology, psychology, social analysis, political science, and even moral philosophy — especially as they relate to the interactions of global economic power and the individual's experience of self.