Yom Kippur begins at sundown today. This is the holiest of holy days in the Jewish calendar, the Day of Atonement, or more precisely, the Day of Cleansing. As this is traditionally thought to be the day when God writes down a person’s fate for the coming year in the book of life, it is good policy to ask forgiveness and make amends for all past transgressions, to set yourself right with the world. To put themselves in the proper frame of mind, celebrants spend 25 hours in intense prayer while fasting and refraining from most normal activities. This preparatory fast is followed by a special and rather long prayer service in the synagogue. So important is this holy day in Jewish culture that, for many secular or not-particularly-observant Jews, this day may be the only one of the year that they attend synagogue.
Here is a bit more of the orthopraxy monster essay that just keeps sprouting appendages…
But then again… maybe these aren’t appendages, appendices… Really, I suppose the whole point of this blog is to say that we need praxis. There is work to be done and you, generally and specifically, need to stop dorking around in mind space and go do it. No matter your physical or cognitive abilities, there are things that desperately need doing and that you are able to do. Go do them. Now.
This praxis, this doing of work, is atonement, by the way… it is actual at-one-ment, becoming one with the world.
It is also cleansing. Of ourselves and of our culture and of the messes we’ve made of the world.
In any case, here is a brief look at the power behind the praxis… I think it sounded much better at 3am when it sprang out of my dreams and, imperfectly captured, onto paper… but still… make of it what you will…
It is said that power corrupts. What we mean by that is that power over others tends to remove moral boundaries. We usually do not mean that powerlessness is corrupting. But it is. The lack of power is just as corrupting as a surfeit. Because when we talk about corruption, we are not talking about power…
Power is ability. It is efficacy. It is the capacity to effect change. Power is potential work, the ability to take care of needs and wants. In the real world, not the world of ideas and labels, power equals the capacity to do work in a system. Taking that capacity from others, taking their power, does not make you powerful, does not make you more able to do work. You don’t even get their power. You are still an ineffectual parasite. You are not powerful if you have no ability to do work.
I have seen philosophers struggle with this because, well, they don’t work. But also they can’t see a world without hierarchy, without rank, without unequal distribution of the means to meet needs. They don’t understand how this lens of inequality distorts what they are able to perceive on the world. They talk about power over being corrupt but power within is what gets things done. Power within is ability while power over is forcing other people to use their own ability for you.
But they’re not describing power. They are talking about hierarchy, about the unequal distribution of means in this culture. You can be someone who can do nothing, who is unable to effect any sort of change or work, but if you have arrogated all means — all resources, all tools, all time, all lives — if you have stolen these means from other lives, then you are able to withhold what they need and force them to do your work. However, this does not make you powerful. It makes you a good thief. You are good at stealing the work of powerful, able people.
This is not power. This is hierarchy, rank, inequality. This is theft. Parasitism.
The corruption that we are talking about is this theft. We have, I would say intentionally, confused power — ability — and force — theft — and this is the corruption. And it corrupts both sides. Obviously, taking labor, taking time, taking lives is corrupting. But having your life stolen is also corrupting. It forces you to act in desperation in order to meet your needs, to wrest back whatever life you can by any means.
But it’s worse than desperation. This system is an inversion of morality in general. It is a general and pervasive perversion. This system is designed to reward the thieves — the elites who steal work from others. Those who we name the best of us are those who do the least good. The people who do the most good are scorned if they are seen at all. Good is bad; bad is good. Good is punished; bad is rewarded. Work is stolen and the thieves name themselves powerful, the effectual agency behind all change, when they have done nothing and can do nothing, when they are, in fact, powerless. In this topsy-turvy system, we’ve lost all ability to sense right and wrong, good and bad, benevolence and harm. After all, if the thieves are high status, then theft must be good. And everything in this twisted system is tainted by this corruption of values.
Those with high status in this system are the least able to do anything themselves. They are powerless within themselves. What they have, by virtue of their rank and inheritance, is control of resources and the ability to withhold resources from others. They have property… And by controlling that property — all the means to meet needs — they can force us to do their work. This does not make them more able. It might make them less able. They are certainly not effecting any work themselves. They are taking work out of the system. They are reducing the work done because they are not doing anything. Additionally, because they are not doing anything, they are not in practice at doing anything. The less they do, the less able they become, until even if they try to effect work, they can’t. All they can do is steal our work, steal the effects of our our own powerful abilities.
This should be shaming. Instead, we reward these people with wealth and respect. Or at least the system rewards them with wealth — because they made it that way — and we pretend to respect them — because we are forced to. But this is the corruption. An elite in this system can not have a conscience— or even much conscious awareness — and a propertyless person can not be honest.
I’ve always deplored the phrase “rich and powerful”. The rich rarely have any power at all. But they want us to believe that they do. And we do believe… We give them our belief along with all our powerful abilities. What the rich have is property. Which is really just another sort of belief that we have given them. They have what we need to make our lives and they keep it from us in order to take our work. And we give them this. We allow this theft. But what if we were to take it back? The work. The belief. The means to make our lives. What if we stopped believing in hierarchy and inequality? What if we stopped believing in property? What if we remembered that power is the ability to do work? What if we remembered how powerful we are? And how weak are these parasites that name themselves rich and powerful!
We have the power. Because we do the work. And there is nothing anyone can do to stop us from walking away from this system of thievery and working for ourselves. Even force loses its effectiveness. They might kill us, but that doesn’t get their work done… However we leave the system, they lose wealth and status… Think on that. Does that sound powerful to you? It is not. And, deep in their subconscious, they know it is not. At the root of all their brazen force and blathering propaganda is the knowledge of just how weak, how powerless, they are. And they fear us.
Because we have the power. We can do the work. And our work is the change this world needs.
© Elizabeth Anker 2024
By My Solitary Hearth 
Not bad for thoughts bubbling to the surface at 3 am – although, I suspect you would feel far more ‘personal’ power if you had been able to still be asleep at that hour 🙂 What you describe is a reasonable reflection of how our society has worked since 1994. Few of us can understand why the majority of the nation continues to vote in leeches who suck the economy dry for their personal gain. The reasons are complex, but you touch on some of them here.
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