Aug 7, 2022 (medium.com)
How America Never Developed the Power to Grow Into a Modern Democracy
When you look at America, what do you see?
Authoritarian collapse, obviously. But in the years preceding it? School shootings. People dying for lack of basic medicines, like insulin. Skyrocketing prices for the basics of life, whether healthcare, education, finance, or housing. Old people who will never retire, and young people who cannot afford to start a family or have a home of their own. The middle class imploding. Incomes shrinking. Savings dwindling. The rich growing richer as a consequence of all that. A predatory way of life arising.
Here’s the unforgiving truth. In such a society, authoritarianism rising was inevitable. Not just because such chaos spawns a need for a tyrant to take the reins. But for a less visible, but related, reason.
What unites all these things?
If you look closely at America, you will see a society of vertical power. One whose sole organizing force is vertical power. What do I mean by “vertical power”? I mean that every stratum of society occupies its position on a hierarchy, and each struggles to keep the next down, instead of lift any other up. Vertical power is power over, vertical power systems maximize power over — and so American life is now one great power struggle over the next person, everyone locked in mortal combat with everyone else.
Think about the problems above closely. White people will not invest in healthcare for all — “let those dirty, lazy minorities pay their own way!” — and so the result is that no one has healthcare, thanks to vertical power games. The school shooter is lashing out at those above him in a hierarchy whom he feels have scorned and rejected him. The old are not allowed pensions anymore because above them sit a class of predatory financiers, who raid their retirement savings, to pump up stock prices. All these are forms of vertical power being abused. But they are forms of vertical power nonetheless, and America’s great unseen problem is that it is a society which only knows, allows, understands, respects, one kind of power, vertical power.
Vertical power allows us only two rules in life. Punch the next person down, so they stay down. And obey the next person up, so they don’t hurt you. Hence, American society is one of extreme submission, conformity, obedience, control, discipline, and punishment. What else do you call a place in which people die young for a lack of healthcare as some kind of just moral dessert? These two rules — punch downwards, obey upwards — made it impossible for America to develop as a genuine democracy. Instead, American society became a system of interwoven hierarchies, in which only these two rules were allowed to operate. Corporate hierarchies, political hierarchies, social and cultural hierarchies, economic and financial hierarchies. But a society of people punching down and obeying up cannot really be a democracy — a point we will return to shortly.
For that reason, because it was a society premised on vertical power, punching down and obeying up, a collapse into authoritarian at light speed was more or less inevitable. Think about it. It’s not just that such a society is a place of extreme obedience, conformity, and submission — though it is. It is that sooner or later, those so genuinely terrible will arise that they are willing to punch anyone and everyone downwards in the most horrific of ways. They’ll be willing to expand gun access — even as kids are shot. They’ll be willing to deny people healthcare and an affordable living — because they didn’t “earn” it. But because such people are operating in a system of vertical power, they will soon rise to the top. Vertical power systems, because they are built to maximize power over, select for ruthlessness, cunning, cowardice, and cruelty. And when people who have the most of all these qualities arises, they will rocket to the top of a vertical power system — and command it.
That is the sad and funny story of the last few decades of America, ending with now — the inevitable selection by vertical power systems of the most ruthless people, the ones who are most willing to wreck what little of democracy there is. A society like this is never really a functioning democracy, but a set of interlocking hierarchies, in which people were punching down, and obeying up, selecting the person who was the best at maximizing precisely that.
Now. What is the solution? The answer, if you like? I’ll share it with you, but you won’t like it, because, quite frankly — well, we’ll get to that.
Modern societies need a very different kind of power. Horizontal power. What is horizontal power? It is genuine self-governance and self-directedness. It is power to, power in, not power over. The power to realize one’s self, to fulfill one’s possibilities. Let me give you an example.
Imagine that the average American had public healthcare, affordable education, media, finance, safety nets. She wouldn’t be stuck to some meaningless, pointless job, which only fuels the engine of her own ruin, shrinking her life expectancy, corroding her society. Maybe he’d go write that book, make that film, produce that great discovery. She would have power to realize himself — not just power over others. And as a result, society would be better off, too, than if he were just in that crap job.
In that way, the progress and prosperity of modern societies now depends on vertical power, not horizontal power. Societies do not grow by waging wars for land anymore — which take vertically controlled armies — or by controlling colonies, another form of vertical power, or even by mass producing stuff in factories, yet more vertical power. They develop and mature now through the exercise of self-directedness at an individual level, the freedom to really make the most of one’s brief life — horizontal power.
The problem is that America does not do horizontal power. It does not understand it, have any affinity for it, or believe that it can exist, really. It never has. It is deeply uncomfortable with the idea of horizontal power — precisely because it is so attached to its history of vertical power. Why don’t white people want black people to rise? Why don’t people in cities care about people in rural areas — and vice versa? Why don’t people lift each other up? America is obsessed with vertical power.
That is why neither politicians, nor intellectuals, nobody, really, has any agenda or vision for America based on horizontal power, not vertical power — one that says, for example, “Everyone will be better off when each of us has healthcare, education, finance, because we will all make the most of ourselves.” Pretty simple, right?
An agenda for horizontal power is one focused on self-development, self-governance, self-directedness. One that frees people from yesterday’s toxic hierarchies, and the conditions they come with — you only get healthcare if you have a job, you only get the rule of law if you are white, you only get an equal wage if you are a man. But Americans are trapped in lives competing with each other for levels in the very hierarchies that now imprison them — instead of freeing each other from vertical power systems: the very things that selected, at last, an authoritarian who tried to steal democracy, and inspired a new generation of fanatics.
All that is a complicated way to tell you a difficult truth. Too many Americans don’t care about each other as human beings. Only as instruments, tools, means to the end of power. And until that changes, my friends, America probably isn’t going to make it.
Umair
July 2022