The End of Power (42 page)

The challenge is to find ways to inhabit the middle of the curve in a time of massive and rapid change. Our tolerance—how broad a band in the middle of a curve we are prepared to accept—will vary. In economic life, both monopoly and ruinous hyper-competition are sub-optimal, but the stakes are usually not life and death; ultimately we can live with a broad range of situations, even if we want improvement. When politics becomes so scattered that it nurtures extremisms and violence, the stakes are more urgent. When the world's military order gets so scattered that pirates, terrorists, militias, criminal cartels, and rogue states can defy the armies of powerful nations, the stakes could not be higher.

Our horizon is crowded with great issues such as nuclear proliferation and climate change that simply cannot be resolved if the world system becomes increasingly destabilized, riddled by fractures, and hampered by a steady decline in its capacity for collective action. The decay of power is complicating such issues—especially as more countries pursue nuclear programs or gain the ability to invent sophisticated cyber-attack worms and target opponents at home and abroad. The weaker power of the dominant actors is complicating the search for solutions as well; we no longer have one or two superpowers that can simply enforce their terms on the rest of the world.

Collective efforts such as maintaining peace, deterring terrorism, coordinating economic policies to stimulate global growth, fighting disease, stopping climate change, allocating scarce resources, fighting money laundering and fraud, and protecting endangered species are global public goods. In other words, they are the kinds of results that benefit everyone, including those who did nothing to help bring them about. This sets up the classic dilemma that social scientists call the collective action problem.
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No single player is able to bring about the changes on its own, yet all players have an incentive to wait around—expending no resources—until some
one else does the work for them. In the end the change is never achieved, even though everyone stood to benefit from it.

The decay of power exacerbates the collective action problem. It is already happening in the international arena, as more and more “small” countries veto, foot-drag, demand special consideration, or generally undermine the efforts of the “big” nations in one area after another. Meanwhile, the big nations themselves have more channels available to work at cross-purposes. The twentieth-century response to the demand for global public goods was to create international organizations, from the United Nations and all its specialized agencies to the World Bank, IMF, and regional groups. But too often now these institutions are merely scrambling to keep pace with the booming demands and evolving threats in the areas they are supposed to oversee.

One response is for a coalition of powerful nations (“coalition of the willing”) to bypass international organizations and take action directly, as the United States and others did in Iraq. Yet even that possibility is affected by the decay of power: first, because other nations are increasingly able to resist or interfere with any such coalition's plans, but also because political coalitions tend to be more and more fractured, and public opinion less and less committed and patient, even within these leading countries. Wave after wave of the dilution of power—and not just in politics—comes crashing in to make the problem more complicated. The same country whose government and military is trying to bring about change in some faraway place, leading a coalition of nations in that effort, may also harbor foundations and charities that direct money and information to its opponents and host the computer servers that relay their point of view and mobilize new adherents. As the scope grows for small players to make investments, lead campaigns, donate money, and start media outlets that give them power, the benefits—pluralism, democracy, initiative, a sense of meaning—also create new obstacles to confronting crises, finding purpose, and getting things done.

No matter the arena, the decay of power generates risks that could lower social welfare and individual quality of life in the short term and prompt a backlash or even a disaster down the line. Beyond the political paralysis and the other negative consequences we've examined, there are five concrete effects of the decay of power that pose significant risks.

Hobbes and the other classical political philosophers said it from the beginning, and their insight—recall
Chapter 1
—remains true. For many individuals the acquisition of power is—or seems to be—an innate urge. But in the construction of societies, power is a solution to the problem of disorder. We consent to the power of the state because it is supposed to guarantee the minimum level of stability and predictability we need to lead fulfilling lives. Rules from business regulation, libel laws, and ballot access to international treaties all aim to calm the unpredictability of life and ward off the risk of chaotic disorder, even anarchy.

What we concede to these institutions—and the people who lead them—and what we demand that they deliver in return have changed over time and among societies as human values and expectations evolve. The More, Mobility, and Mentality revolutions have led billions to expect and demand more. And we have better tools for accountability. Yet the core promise of power—that it produce order—remains the heart of our consent. The decay of power discussed in this book threatens that promise in a way that political rivalry, business competition, conflict among nations, and even world wars in the twentieth-century sense did not. The implications are obvious: while few societies become and remain anarchic for long periods, it is not that hard for a society to become paralyzed by too high a level of power decay. This can turn even advanced and mature democracies into stagnant entities incapable of responding to the challenges and demands of the twenty-first century. As noted, Europe's inability to respond in a timely and effective way to its devastating economic crisis offers a painful example of the corroding effects of the end of power. With even more perilous consequences, so does our inability to act decisively to limit the emissions of greenhouse gases that are warming our planet.

Centralized and hierarchical organizations held sway for more than a century for a reason. Political parties, large corporations, churches, foundations, bureaucracies, militaries, prestigious universities, and cultural institutions accumulate experience, practices, and knowledge within their walls; they archive their successes and inculcate habits, culture, and operational routines in their employees or members. None of this transfers into a world of diffuse power without some—or a lot of—loss. The possibility
that political parties can be replaced by ad-hoc “movements,” temporary electoral coalitions, or even single-issue, nongovernmental organizations (the “greens,” “pirates,” “small-government”) is appealing to the millions of voters everywhere who are fed up with the corruption, ideological stagnation, and disappointing government performance of many political parties. But while the flaws of most parties are often unquestionable, their demise implies the disappearance of important reservoirs of highly specific knowledge that are not easy to replicate by the alluring newcomers—many of which tend to be what Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt called “terrible simplifiers,” the demagogues who seek power by exploiting the ire and frustration of the population and making appealing but “terribly simplified” and, ultimately, deceitful promises.
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The same holds for the experience of large firms as employers and investors. Micro-enterprises, pop-up stores, venture funds, social networks, and the like have a hard time replicating a large firm's accumulated intellectual capital. The radical decentralization of knowledge—from Wikipedia to open-source software development to MIT course material available free online—is one of the most exciting trends in the dispersion of power. But the ability of these new sources of knowledge to match internal R&D or preserve institutional memory is inconsistent at best. Our individual choices about education and employment are not necessarily better or more sustainable in an environment where power is too diffuse. Excessive institutional fragmentation can be as bad for creating and wisely using knowledge as are the stifling environments that obtain when power is overly concentrated.

Social and political causes today have “followers” who “like” them in the ether of digital media. On social media platforms, hordes of Facebook friends or Twitter followers can create the illusion that a group promoting a particular cause is indeed a powerful force. In some cases that may be true. While the role played by Facebook and Twitter in the Arab Spring might have been overstated, there is no doubt that social media did boost the capabilities of the antigovernment forces.

But that is not the most common experience. For most people in the world, Web-based social or political activism represents little more than the touching of a button. Perhaps, a bit more meaningfully, they will make a small donation—for instance, $5 to the Red Cross after an earthquake or
another natural disaster—by sending a text message to a designated phone number. That is not insignificant, but it doesn't constitute the kind of risk-taking activism that propelled so many of the great social movements. Author Evgeny Morozov calls this new, low-involvement and low-impact participation “slacktivism.” It is, he says, “the ideal type of activism for a lazy generation: why bother with sit-ins and the risk of arrest, police brutality, or torture if one can be as loud campaigning in the virtual space?” The problem with slacktivism, he argues, is not so much that it is made up of tiny low-risk contributions—after all, each of these is genuine in some way; rather, there is a risk that the obsession with online petitions, numbers of followers, and “likes” will divert potential supporters and take resources away from organizations doing the higher-risk and higher-reward work: “Are the publicity gains . . . worth the organizational losses?”
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As echoed by Malcolm Gladwell, this emerging counterpoint to the fetishization of social media illustrates the danger of irrelevance created by the decay of power.
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The ability to endorse a cause, start a petition, or even do something more concrete such as set up one's own online storefront on Amazon or eBay, or send money to a selected recipient a world or a neighborhood away, is on one level liberating and individually fulfilling. Yet the proliferation of small players and short-term initiatives brings the risk that actual, forceful, coalitions directed toward specific social goals become impossible to orchestrate. Call it the collective action problem gone subatomic.

While millions of online activists may raise the social visibility of myriad issues, they also create a level of “noise” and distraction that makes it very hard for any single cause to retain popular attention and support long enough to gain substantial and permanent strength. Hyper-competition can be as deleterious to civic and political activism as for private companies faced with a profusion of competitors that forces each one of them into small size and limited power.

Moreover, the more tenuous the grasp on power of leaders, institutions, or organizations—in other words, the more inherently slippery power becomes—the more likely they are to be governed by short-term incentives and fears, and the fewer their incentives to plan for the longer term. Government leaders elected for increasingly shorter periods, corporate leaders with their eyes on the next quarterly results, generals aware that the success
of armed interventions depends more than ever on the support of a fickle public that is less tolerant of casualties—all of these are examples of how time compression constrains the options of the powerful.

At the individual level a paradox of the decay of power is that it may give us more tools for living in the moment, even as it compresses the horizon of our choices. This is happening at the same time that it becomes crystal clear that most of our domestic or international problems are immune to quick fixes and that their solution and alleviation require sustained and consistent efforts. Patience may be the scarcest resource of all in a world where the decay of power continues unabated.

Power and its institutions have been with us for so long, and the barriers to power traditionally so high, that we have composed the meaning of our lives—our choices about what to do, what to accept, what to challenge—within these parameters. Big changes with uncertain consequences often breed alienation—the estrangement or distancing of people from each other, or from what used to matter to them, or, in extreme cases, even a certain separation from their own sense of self, the identity that defined them in their own eyes. Think about what happens when a company is sold, merged, or restructured, or when contending theological interpretations lead to splits within a church or when profound alterations in the political order redistribute power in a country. Changes in the power structure, the traditional hierarchy, predictable norms, and well-known rules inevitably lead to disorientation and heightened anxiety. They may even lead to
anomie
, which is the breakdown of social bonds between an individual and the community. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim described anomie as “a rule that is a lack of rule.”
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The bombardment of technology; the explosion of digital communication and online opinion, distraction, and noise; the decline of automatic acceptance of traditional authorities (president, judge, boss, elder, parent, priest, police officer, teacher) feed a disequilibrium with broad and poorly understood consequences. What are the social, political, and economic consequences of the fact that, in 1950, fewer than 10 percent of American households consisted of only one person whereas by 2010 that number had climbed to nearly 27 percent? Families are also power structures and there, too, power is decaying: those who have it (usually the parents, men, and older members) nowadays face more constraints. What does it tell us
about trust in society that numerous social science studies have documented a decreased number of confidants among citizens in developed countries, as well as a corresponding rise in feelings of loneliness?
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