Power and "Spirited Away"

Last night I watched "Spirited Away" for the second time. (My 9 year old daughter is a little obsessed with it at the moment.) It's a masterfully done allegory where a little girl who, full of anxiety as she moves to a new home and school, enters an imaginary world of spirits and magic. The strangeness of the place is frightening and her parents are rendered helpless, so she must rely on her own inner resources to make her way. While there she activates her own powers of intuition, compassion, persistence and voice. It's a powerful tale.

It's a tale about power. A tale for our time, as we watch how those with inordinate power have impacted us all destructively. I woke up this morning, with thoughs of Spirited Away in my head and then found myself angry about this whole "bailout" of the financial industry and about the Obama DOJ's defense of Bush's Unitary Executive claims. I won't go into the details of these, because I'm thinking of it at a different level. If you want a clear explanation of the financial debacle read Matt Taibbi's piece in Rolling Stone (when did Rolling Stone become a source of such searing journalism?) Glenn Greenwald is a primary source for following constitutional issues and he's on top of the Unitary Executive question on his blog at Salon.com with a good opening look at the Obama administration here.

What I woke up thinking about this morning was the simple concept of the consolidation of power. In every good story of human drama, we find that the key to ratcheting up drama is an imbalance of power and the key to calming things down is re-balancing power. In Spirited Away, this is no different. Characters are used against their will when they give up their power. In this case, their identity. You lose your voice to speak truth to power when you sign away your name. In order to break the power imbalance you must take back your name, your idenitity.

In the U.S. we've given our power over to the concept of a "free and unfettered market". In selling this concept, there are those who have convinced us that The Marketplace will naturally regulate itself and will work out any imbalances that might come from misrepresentation of products, destructive aspects of management behaviors or production processes and inequities in resource distribution. This thing called Demand couple with Competition with assure that all goes well.

We've been mesmerized by this spell for over two centuries, ever since Adam Smith argued that The Marketplace, if allowed Compete free and unfettered, would advance broader social interests, even as all the activities were motivated by self-interest.

Really? How's that working out for us? What we've seen with our latest round of economic crisis is that self-interest really doesn't serve the broader social interests. Even as hundreds of thousands of people lose their jobs the very people that set the financial collapse in motion believe they deserve exorbitant salaries. Our political leaders, even in the face of how much damage these people have wreaked, still believe that "we can't let them fail."

There is no such thing as a free and unfettered Market. That's because The Market is us. We are The Market and we are not unfettered. Built into this idealized concept of a Free Market Economy is the concept that we all act in our own best interests. Has there ever been a time in history when humans have proved to be so infallibly sensible?

Humans are a beautiful thing in all their flawed glory. Only, the beauty of it can only be capitalized on when we acknowledge and work with these flaws rather than deny them and act like they don't exist. We need to own the reality that we tend to be greedy and narcissistic. We all know the saying, "Absolute power corrupts absolutely." And that's what happened with our financial systems. We allowed too much unchecked power to sit in the hands of a few. We know, deep down we all really know, that none of us will remain unadulterated if given too much power. Being the in position of power skews one's perspective and if we view the world from that perspective for too long, we convince ourselves that our view is the one true view and that only we know best.

What bothers me about this Big Bang Bailout thing that we've going isn't the massive national debt that it breeds, it's that instead of breaking up the power, we're consolidating it. We're declaring that "they're too big too fail" and watching smaller financial institutions fail in their wake, thereby increasing their fundamental power base. We're reinforcing the power position of the very people who abused that power. We're like the abused spouse who returns home after a trip to the hospital. We need an intervention. We need to regain the identity that we signed away when we fell under the Adam Smith spell.

This country was founded by revolutionaries who stood up to the abuse of the age-old monarchical powers of Great Britain. These rag-tag colonialists spoke truth to power and fought to get out from under. They told us that "all men are created equal" with the right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." They didn't say that we had the right to pursue happiness no matter the cost to others. Yet, we celebrate those who have pursued inordinate amounts for themselves in the midst of the homeless and the starving and those without health care. We idolize those that hoard resources, especially when they share a token amount of it. We buy into the idea that all the other people are suffering because they just don't work hard enough or follow the rules or have enough self-control. Yet, we know that this is not true. We know that chance plays a larger role in anybody's success or demise than any other factor.

Chance doesn't respond to The Market and doesn't even notice Competition. That profound phrase, "There but for grace..." is profound for a reason. People are born into inequitable situations with inequitable interpersonal qualities and inequitable turns of fate can beset them. Some are more able to expound their sense of self worth than others, even when we all know that no one person is really worth more than another. Some can twist an arm harder than others and we don't band together to stop them even when we know that allowing them to get away with it means they will someday twist our own arms. We promote these people and when we do, we promote these qualities. We allow them to step into positions of power and when we do, we allow them to put us all at great risk.

What do we do when that risk is realized? Do we dissipate their power? Do we resolve ourselves to prevent such an aggregation of power again? No. We bail them out and tell them they're indispensable. We still haven't reclaimed our identity and broken the spell. I guess we, as a nation, all need to be spirited away before we can take back our names and do what it takes to enforce a just balance of powers.

I find these thoughts leading me to another piece of story in "Spirited Away". It has to do with how the girl is clear about what she really needs, what is most meaningful rather than being distracted by temptations that might make a particular moment feel good. There is a link between this clarity she has and her ability to reclaim her power. Perhaps next time...