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.