Rules of Power

I didn’t expect her answer. I’d made a habit of asking my elderly patients and their spouses how long they’ve been married and what their secret to a long marriage is. Generally the answers are sweet, thoughtful, or a little cliche. Her’s was none of those things. Her husband of decades was lying in the gurney, his sense of self and reality shredded by Alzheimer’s. My question seemed to drop her mask, and she told me her story.

She was married young. Like many women of her time, she didn’t pursue an education because she would be a wife and a homemaker. But her husband was unkind- verbally abusive, controlling, and condescending. She wouldn’t have stayed, she said, but she had no way of taking care of herself. She had no education, no skills outside of her home. “So now I tell all the young girls to get your education!” She had spent her marriage powerless. Once she told me her story, it seemed like she no longer felt the need to play the role of concerned spouse. Her demeanor towards her husband changed to spiteful, even harsh. I couldn’t help but see the irony. The powerful had become the powerless, and now, confused and weak, he was completely at the mercy of the woman he had mistreated.

My dad told me recently about a book called The Rules of Power. It outlines timeless rules people have used to gain and stay in power. Things like: never admit fault, and always have a scapegoat- not particularly ethical, but effective I guess. Her story got me thinking of another, less acknowledged, rule of power.

You can’t keep it.

No human or country in the history of history, no matter how powerful, has kept its grip on it. It is as elusive and ephemeral as it is tantalizing. The parent who has complete control and power over the young child will one day be old and weak, and potentially at the mercy of their now grown child. Political parties in power for a time get voted out in another time, or overthrown completely. Weakness is the bookends of our lives. The weakness of infancy and childhood, the weakness of old age and death. We are only ever strong for a moment.

The question then is this- since power never lasts, how should you use it when you have it? Remembering that those you have power over now may one day have power over you, how should you exercise it? If we heeded the lesson of history, indeed of our own biology, we would remember the powerless become the powerful. The powerful become the powerless. Use the power you have thoughtfully and graciously, and never to the harm of those weaker than you. Treat the powerless as you would hope to be treated when all your own power is gone.

Because some day it will be.