On Power and Effectiveness

 ”I Want to Kill You”

A patient on the psychiatric unit where I work threatened my life last week. In a cold, steely voice, this very distubed man looked into my eyes and said, “I want to kill you.” I believed him. I knew, given different circumstances, he could and would fulfill on that threat.

Surviving by Being Nice and Good

We live in a world that has seen far too much war, that has known too much tyranny, genocide, terrorism. I come from an unhappy family with a history of abuse, which formed the way I thought and behaved for years. It didn’t make me a happy person.  I learned to survive by becoming  good, sweet and loving. Above all, I learned to cut off my power as a human being. Underneath this was a sense of victimization, deep despair and helplessness in the world. I learned never to get angry, never to raise my voice or to be in any way like my powerful soldier father. Is it any surprise that I became committed to creating a peaceful world?

The problem with this as a way of being in life is that it’s not very effective. If you are committed to being a leader or to inspiring change, you can’t always be nice. Sometimes you have to be straight.  At times you have to say, in no uncertain language, what’s working and what’s not. I am finally seeing the tremendous price I  paid for cutting off my own power and effectivenss, and one might say, my aliveness, simply because I associated power with my father’s dominating ways.

Someone Has to Say NO                                                         

Power is neutral. It can be used for good or for ill. You can use it to do incredible things in the world. The mark of a great leader is to say “stop” or “no” and to say it while respecting everyone and treating them with dignity. When things are hard, someone has to say, “The buck stops here.” Or “The building is on fire—everybody get out NOW!” A great leader also has a vision of the future where we could live if we were to follow him or her.

I have come to value the traditional role of the warrior, one we have lost in our society with our recent emphasis on imperialist adventures and pre-emptive wars. The warrior, in traditional societies, is the one who defends his family, kin and clan when they are invaded and threatened from without. When we go seeking foreign wars, we get into trouble and succumb to the negative temptations of power that eventually leads us into all kinds of moral quagmires.  In these conflicted and troubled times, when a terrorist could approach at any moment with explosives strapped to their body, true peacemaking demands effective leaders who can stay “STOP!”  If a deranged person has set themselves to kill you, one would hope there is someone around with the courage to say “NO!” to them and to say it firmly, loudly and clearly.

To Be Powerful Is to Be Effective

Powerful peacemakers need to have the whole range of human skills and capacities available to them at all times and the ability to use them wisely and well, as the situation demands.  If we don’t now have such peacemakers available to us, we need to invent them or create them.