nger is power.
This might be why Good People fear anger. We fear power.
Good People often eschew power. We’ve seen individuals with power abuse and violate other individuals in the home and in the streets. We’ve witnessed people with power disrespecting and belittling other people at work. We’ve experienced institutions and companies with power cheating and decimating entire groups of people in society. We’ve witnessed nations and ethnic groups with power invade and murder other nations and ethnic groups.
So we reject power as harmful, even evil. This is a mistake. Power isn’t the problem, it’s one form of power that’s the problem: Power Over. While there’s evidence that merely possessing Power Over – even temporarily and in laboratory settings – triggers bad behavior in humans I maintain that the real problem is abuse of Power Over, intentional or not. Power is merely a tool or resource.
Also, other forms of power exist, which aren’t only useful, they’re essential to creating change and a world that works better for everyone. In his enlightening work with The Co-Intelligence Institute, Tom Atlee explores three other types of power besides Power Over: Power With, Power From Within, and Power As. He also talks quite a bit about Wholesome Power. This is the kind of expansive thinking Good People should adopt and embody. Thinking of power in limited terms as only one form – which is inherently evil – deprives Good People of one of the engines of much-needed (capital C) Change.
I define power as “the ability to create a result.” Results are desperately needed. Good People who are trapped in Overheartedness aren’t moving us forward. Those who live only in peace, love and kindness aren’t moving us forward. In his excellent book Power and Love, Adam Kahane describes the importance of both Power and Love to move change – that to wield only one is to walk with only one leg. Drawing on Paul Tillich, Kahane defines power as “the drive of everything living to realize itself, with increasing intensity and extensity” and love as “the drive toward the unity of the separated”. He writes:
“love is what makes power generative instead of degenerative. Power is what makes love generative instead of degenerative.”
He reminds us that Martin Luther King said “power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic….this collision of immoral power with powerless morality constitutes the major crisis of our time.” Kahane adds:
“love without attention to or transformation of power can be, not merely sentimental and anemic, but reinforcing of the capacity of the already powerful to act recklessly and abusively.”
We must exercise our power. Of course anger isn’t the only source of power, but it is a high-octane fuel for Change. Think about moments in history, and moments in your own life, where anger moved stuckness and led to beneficial change. Think about where we’d be in the USA without mass protests and sustained, disobedient resistance to oppression: women probably wouldn’t have the vote, African Americans might still be slaves, laborers would be more abused, and LGBT people might still live in the closet. Righteous anger fueled many of these movements. In my own life, once I realized I was angry, realized it was OK to be angry, began to honor and respect my anger then choose new behaviors, I became more fulfilled, more successful – and less depressed.
In fact, to NOT be angry in the world today may be a sign of insanity. Despite our myriad triumphs and all the progress we have to celebrate, most of us live with a crippling amount of unnecessary oppression, injustice, invasions of privacy, and dishonoring of our sacred personhood. I believe that our numbing to this, and increasing apathy as we drown in a sea of irrelevant information, is something to be deeply concerned about. Many of us become paralyzed by anxiety or depression, which is arguably a reasonable and healthy response to the state of the world, but doesn’t move us to do anything about it. Anger is an appropriate response to oppression, injustic