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Excerpts from Power (2021)

Ecologists have been telling us that “small is beautiful” since the 1960s, but trends have gone in just the opposite direction, resulting in the flourishing of the Superorganism. Nobody designed this vast, intricate web of global interconnectedness, and no one can control it.

If we are indeed in an overshoot phase, we must do what we can to avert or minimize a die-off event.

Power is essential; without it, we would be literally powerless. But one can have too much of a good thing. How much power is enough? How much is too much?

With fossil fuels and electrification, and thus greater mobility and instant communications, we have indeed become a human “hive.”

Whether in family, school, work, or politics, we’re all immersed in the pathologies of power. If we’re lucky, we learn to navigate these waters without being harmed irreparably, and without harming others. Many are not so fortunate.

The power to communicate aesthetic pleasure and thereby to feel profound affinity with other people, including individuals of other species, propel human culture forward in ways that are hard to measure, but that are impossible to ignore. These are powers that provide hope for our future.

There are probably downsides to humans’ specialized powers (extreme intelligence, a highly developed ability to communicate, and proficient tool use). We humans tend to emphasize the advantages of these traits, but it’s always important to look for hidden costs.

One might think that everything that could possibly be written on the subject of power already has been. There are thousands of tomes that discuss subjects related to power in one or another of its many manifestations, and hundreds with the word power in their titles. But no book that I’m aware of has systematically examined the sundry forms of power, and investigated how they are related, how they arose, and what they mean for us today.