Definition of Power

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

For the reader re the discussion about power, force, etc., I think it has degraded to the point where it will no longer be of much interest to anyone except as gossip. But for a while, it was all right as these things go. So I hope the discussion has made you think a bit and savor the pleasures of pondering different angles.

As to what I wrote, I am happy with it (as forum blurting, of course, not as finished work  ) and I stand by it.

D, in particular, seems really happy with what he's presented.

Now the ball is in your court. Read and come to your own conclusions.

I know you have good minds--all of you--otherwise you would not read OL. 

 

Even if you end up disagreeing with something I wrote, I have little doubt it will be a considered disagreement. (But, hell, I'm right even if I say so myself...  )

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

22 minutes ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Brant,

In my stepson's treatments in the past, I remember a psychologist prescribing meds for him. (Kat and I since have put a stop to all of it.)

But I looked it up just to make sure. Lookee what I found:

Can Psychologists Prescribe Medications?

I live in Illinois.

I knew I remembered seeing it.

Michael

 

Jesus. At least they can't do lobotomies, yet.

Absent your examples what force and it's nature that they can use?

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

27 minutes ago, Brant Gaede said:

Absent your examples what force and it's nature that they can use?

Brant,

You mean like with prison psychologists?

Dig, hombre, and ye shall find much.

 

Michael

[Dglgmut]

I'll continue adding to the topic: there is an implicit threat of violence all around us, regardless of the greater power structure. Our nature dictates that disagreeing with the mob is potentially life threatening. So there is influence in numbers, even if there is no reasonable suspicion of potential violence.

 

Another problem to work through is the precariousness of power, or mass influence. A dictator does not directly influence the populace, mostly it is the populace that influence each other. Like in most aspects of society, there are positive feedback loops. Being able to influence one person makes it easier to influence a second, because the trust garnered from the first is observed by the second. Now you can gain influence not as an individual, but as the head of a collective. Now it is not just an issue of trusting you, but of trusting the collective; as well as fearing the collective, rather than just fearing you.

 

So sociopolitical power is best thought of not as the power of an individual, but the power of a representative of a collective. In a democracy, the majority represent the collective, in a dictatorship the dictator does. This is not necessarily the end of the line, though, as power can be derived from a more primary representative to a higher order representative. From the majority to the press, for example. The press has power because it appears to represent the people. The universities represent the people too. Both these representative roles have been established through a pattern of public approval. Once the pattern is demonstrated--the correlation between what the press prints, the universities teach, and what the public believes--the representative status is attained and the methods for demonstrating the pattern can be replaced with methods for steering the ship.

[Brant Gaede]

9 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Brant,

You mean like with prison psychologists?

Dig, hombre, and ye shall find much.

 

Michael

Well, the Rev. Jim Jones used some physical force, especially at the end, but basically held psychological sway over his followers. Was that sway force if abstracted out?

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

12 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

Well, the Rev. Jim Jones used some physical force, especially at the end, but basically held psychological sway over his followers. Was that sway force if abstracted out?

Brant,

In my way of doing it, force was definitely involved in the entire processes of Jim Jones. What a nasty piece of work that asshole was. (He even studied Hitler all the time.) Way before the Jonestown "mass suicide" (as if that were voluntary by everyone), Jones had mysterious deaths follow him around like the Clintons do. He also liked to wave a gun around in front of his followers. And other things. There were plenty of tells of force for those who looked.

(btw - He was a Democrat and really red progressive.  )

Jones used all his persuasion skills to aim directly at compliance, and when he did not get that from his subjects, he aimed his persuasion at acts of physical violence and sex with the unwilling. He mostly used a gigantic bait and switch form of story model. But at times he used raw intimidation with a naked threat of violence right there in front of his victims.

When persuasion is used in the service of violence like this, in other words, within this context, I say force is a fundamental part of a whole and persuasion is just one component. Force is not a persuasion technique like was presented in the discussion earlier. It is reality, with the reality of the violence manifest in the future, and it is represented by a story model that leads up to, then completes a physical act of violence.

This is not a story model of persuasion (and I can provide a bunch of those), but instead a story model of an act of violence. It has a beginning, middle and end. This way of abstracting goes back to Aristotle, who considered a proper story to be a whole thing--with a beginning, middle and end, and not a series of unconnected events. Aristotle's observation applies to story models.

(btw - If the term story model is a bit confusing as opposed to story, I once read an excellent analogy from a book on movies and neuroscience called Flicker: Your Brain on Movies by Jeffrey Zacks that makes it clear. Think of a toy commando built out of a single piece of plastic. You can't change it. You can just put it here or there. This is an analogy for how a story works. But think of a toy model of a commando. You can move its arms, legs, waist, and so on. You can't change the overall shape, the whole, but you can change posture details where the movable joints are. This is analogous to a story model.) 

Whether the physical act occurs or not is beside the point with a story model built around force. The story model is about perpetrating an act of violence and that's the form the force exists in. The act of violence does not exist without the beginning and middle happening first. (A random act of violence can happen suddenly like when someone snaps and loses his mind, so there is no story model in that case, but in the stuff Jones was doing, force was always embedded in the model.)

This is waaaaay different than a marketer who detects a self-limiting-belief kind of resistance in a prospect to what he is offering, and knows what he is offering will be a boon to the prospect's life, one that the prospect will be grateful for in the end. Even though exaggeration, bait-and-switch, future-casting, and other similar persuasion tactics may be involved (that some might call sleazy and deceptive  ) to get past the initial resistance, force is not involved anywhere in that story model.

Story models are the way the human mind groks everything, especially danger. Causality is another way of saying story model when you think about it.

On a simple, non-human level, if you see a lion roar then start running toward you, you kinda know that you are the main course in its next meal within that particular story model, and you know it without too much sophistry.  It doesn't matter if you escape. Your demise was a fundamental part of the event. It just didn't complete.

In other words, predatory killing (of you in this case) is a fundamental part of a predator story model. The lion won't kill you without first noticing you, signaling (or not depending on its mood), and running toward you. There is no way to think about that event and say force is absent until the actual killing. The model--as a whole thing--is about nothing but killing (and eating). The noticing is about that. The roaring is about that. The running is about that. And so on.

This works identically in human relationships, albeit humans are far more complex than lions, so there are many complex story models.

As an amusing aside, one way we practice these models to become skilled at using them (and become experts) is through gossip. Not our finest hours, but still true.  

Michael

[Dglgmut]

Something else:

 

If it is true that human evolution largely happened during a time where people survived in groups of 150-250, then we can say it is probable that power dynamics are natural to us. Though we are physically not part of a collective, abstractly we are, and this abstraction has real world implications. 10 people are much more productive as parts of an organized group than they would be if we combined their individual productivity without such organization, as Adam Smith taught us. So even though there is no direct empirical evidence that a collective is anything more than an abstraction, we do have indirect empirical evidence. For this reason there is an inherent weakness in the ideal of freedom of association.

 

This reminds me of something my favorite comic, the late Patrice O'Neal, said about prison... I can't find the quote, but it was essentially that in reality, opposed to what we see in movies, there is no quiet loner in prison that everyone leaves alone.

 

There are natural leaders and natural followers. Dominance and submission are inherent in human relations to varying degrees because the freedom of association is a new privilege and certainly not absolute. Safety is a basic human need, and safety must emerge from a lack of safety. Safety depends on organization, and organization under unsafe conditions is how social power first emerges.

 

If we accept that power dynamics are natural and unavoidable, we still have to deal with the scale. We are now associated to some extent with millions of people whether we like it or not, and this is vastly different than the societies of prehistoric man. Although not everything good is natural, and not everything unnatural is bad, unnatural things and behavior should be held to a higher scrutiny than that which is natural because we have finite time and resources to investigate every aspect of our lives, and we can assume that unless a change is immediately necessary, it is safer to avoid negative change than to pursue positive change.

 

Since wars happen on unnatural scales, and avoiding/winning wars is necessary for our survival, we must accept some unnatural level of association if only for the benefit of a common military. Anarcho-capitalists would argue that it is possible to fund and man a military completely voluntarily. The point here is presumably to avoid power dynamics, but if we assume that is impossible, since organization without power dynamics would necessitate a state of general safety, and that safety cannot be attained without prior organization, then we should attempt to identify the inherent power dynamics in such a system before can compare it to the current system.

[Dglgmut]

I want to keep coming back to this until I can get some kind of clarity. Again, the purpose being to understand where power comes from and how it works so I can at least know whether there's anything that can be done to help minimize the abuse.

 

Power, influence, persuasion: these are all of the same substance as far as I'm concerned. The difference in meaning may be the difference between a drip and a flood, but it it is a difference in quantity. Persuasion doesn't seem to fit with the others until you consider that the power of holding a gun to someone's head comes from their belief that you are willing to pull the trigger. Maybe you are meek, and they have experience with killers. The real difference between persuasion and influence is that persuasion is always intentional, while influence may be coincidental.

 

There is something else that helps clarify what power really is... that is status. In acting, status is something that actors consider to inform their actions. Holding a gun in a scene would typically make you high status, unless your scene partner is playing a really badass character; but even so, you'd be higher status with the gun than you would be without it. Status is really what we're talking about when we talk about social power. The Universities and the press both have status.

 

What about a dictator? Does he just have social status? What about all the guns and the "force"? It doesn't seem like it could be true that a dictator is merely high status, but that is presumably how he attained that power originally (unless it was passed down to him). I believe the way this is all tied together is that the violence and the threats of violence are not used to attain or maintain status in absolute terms, but to destroy anyone else's ability to attain status. What you have in a dictatorship could theoretically be an icon of the people, but more likely than not their is some fear being exploited. That fear does not elevate the leader, or the person at the top of the social hierarchy, it just stamps out all competing hierarchies.

 

This is  why power in America is more insidious. The Universities and media earned incredibly high status in absolute terms, which has lately declined, obviously. What they are doing with that status now is using it to attack their competition, because of their decline... but their decline did not start for this reason, it started because they sold out.

[The Unabashed Pragmatic]

Power comes from the ability to deceive.  Religious leaders are probably most infamous for using deception to make people believe in them and follow them. Though anyone can do this if they put their mind and time and energy into it.  Politicians do it, dictators, etc.  Think of the power grabs and money grabs taking place because of Covid, Global Warming, and other such scams.  They are literally changing the world.  Power is the ability to harness minds and make them do what you want.  Daniel Dennet has a great analogy of this: 

 

He likens the phenomenon of power to a type of parasitic bug that gets inside of a cow and takes control of it, making it do what the bug wants.  Awesome speech!

 

[Brant Gaede]

42 minutes ago, The Unabashed Pragmatic said:

 

 

Deleted

[The Unabashed Pragmatic]

4 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

Deleted

Dunno why, but the YouTube link I've pasted in just won't work.  

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Works for me.

[Dglgmut]

I haven't watched the video yet, but something I want to get to is a description of power as given by Foucault, that Thaddeus Russell invoked in his recent appearance on Michael Malice's show. The gist is that power "flows," as Thaddeus said, from top to bottom as well as from bottom to top. Meaning that even though the king has power over the peasants, he still fears the peasants and thus they have some power over him.

 

The error here is in the definition of power or, more precisely, social power, which is why I find it necessary to define. We have enough information from this description to know that the concept is not clear, but I still have to work on exactly in what way that is. It is evident, however, that the "power" that flows from top to bottom is not the same thing as the "power" that flows from bottom to top. We can also know that the power from top to bottom is the one which we are concerned with, because the one being afraid of the many is self-explanatory.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

14 hours ago, The Unabashed Pragmatic said:

He likens the phenomenon of power to a type of parasitic bug that gets inside of a cow and takes control of it, making it do what the bug wants.  Awesome speech!

U,

I've read a few things by Dennett and seen a few of his videos. He's very intelligent, but there is a flaw at his core. He belongs to the  Dawkins people who branded their form of religion as science and set themselves up as the high priests.

I might comment after seeing the video, but in general, I see religion more in these terms:

Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society by David Wilson

Religion has been social glue ever since man came down from the trees. 

In the scientism version, religion has been a parasitic meme.

It's a weird form of Original Sin (meaning humans from the beginning were flawed with this moral lapse). But there is a cure for this Original Sin? Sure. Just follow Dawkins, Dennett & Co. and they will lead you to the promised land.

 

btw - Does Daniel Dennett even exist? Or ever exercise free will? According to what I remember, he has some weird certainties about this. Ah... the trappings of faith... they bring such comfort...

 

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Let me amend my previous post.

I started listening to the lecture.

Dennett laid out five scenarios of what religions might turn into in the future. Why five? Based on what? He couldn't be bothered to say.

Then he laid down the law, with a title slide and all: "All but one of these (at most) is wildly wrong."

That's one hell of a presupposition to accept on faith: that in the future ALL religions will morph into the same thing.

That's easily refuted by a simple question, why has that never happened in human history, including now, and why are there no indications that this will happen?

I want to keep watching, but the premise logic... man... I can't get into it.

Signing off on that one...

Sorry...

Michael

[Jon Letendre]

4 minutes ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Let me amend my previous post.

I started listening to the lecture.

Dennett laid out five scenarios of what religions might turn into in the future. Why five? Based on what? He couldn't be bothered to say.

Then he laid down the law, with a title slide and all: "All but one of these (at most) is wildly wrong."

That's one hell of a presupposition to accept on faith: that in the future ALL religions will morph into the same thing.

That's easily refuted by a simple question, why has that never happened in human history, including now, and why are there no indications that this will happen?

I want to keep watching, but the premise logic... man... I can't get into it.

Signing off on that one...

Sorry...

Michael

He knows because he is in the cult that is trying to make it happen. So is the Pope. And he too has been acting hard to make it happen, explicitly equating Catholicism and Islam, explicitly pushing One Religion. In their New World Order there is planned One (Luciferian) Religion.

[Peter]

Disconcerting to me is all the celebrities who are Scientologists. Why? Because they are not scientific but  those Thetans utilize the word in their unproven religion.  

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

11 minutes ago, Peter said:

Disconcerting to me is all the celebrities who are Scientologists. Why? Because they are not scientific but  those Thetans utilize the word in their unproven religion.  

Peter,

Just in case you don't realize it, scientism and Scientology are two different religions.

Michael

[Peter]

Just now, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Peter,

Just in case you don't realize it, scientism and Scientology are two different religions.

Michael

Ah. Thanks. I had to translate that, but Data helped me. I have watched two episodes of "Picard" and it's OK. CBS all access is free for a month if you can figure out how to get on it. I tried and finally got on thru Amazon Prime where I have an account.

[The Unabashed Pragmatic]

3 hours ago, Dglgmut said:

I haven't watched the video yet, but something I want to get to is a description of power as given by Foucault, that Thaddeus Russell invoked in his recent appearance on Michael Malice's show. The gist is that power "flows," as Thaddeus said, from top to bottom as well as from bottom to top. Meaning that even though the king has power over the peasants, he still fears the peasants and thus they have some power over him.

Precisely.  As Rand said, " A leash is a rope with a noose--at both ends."

 

[The Unabashed Pragmatic]

1 hour ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

U,

I've read a few things by Dennett and seen a few of his videos. He's very intelligent, but there is a flaw at his core. He belongs to the  Dawkins people who branded their form of religion as science and set themselves up as the high priests.

I might comment after seeing the video, but in general, I see religion more in these terms:

Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society by David Wilson

Religion has been social glue ever since man came down from the trees. 

In the scientism version, religion has been a parasitic meme.

It's a weird form of Original Sin (meaning humans from the beginning were flawed with this moral lapse). But there is a cure for this Original Sin? Sure. Just follow Dawkins, Dennett & Co. and they will lead you to the promised land.

 

btw - Does Daniel Dennett even exist? Or ever exercise free will? According to what I remember, he has some weird certainties about this. Ah... the trappings of faith... they bring such comfort...

 

Michael

Yes.  Agreed. And Dawkins is a Statist, too.  But Dennet makes a perfect argument and analogy in that a bad ideology infects the brain and drives the individual toward whatever the leader is laying down.  

People often say our brains are like computers.  This is drivel.  It's the other way around.  Computers are like our brains, though a cheap imitation at best.  Ideology is the software people upload onto their hard drive and RAM, the brain, and the software runs along.  The software is written by the writer to command the computer what to do.  It's the same analogy.  And when your software us a bug... well, you can guess the outcome.  Choose your software wisely.

[Dglgmut]

16 minutes ago, The Unabashed Pragmatic said:

Precisely.  As Rand said, " A leash is a rope with a noose--at both ends."

But this isn't true, if it were then reality would also be a noose. The king may fear the peasants, he may also fear a wild animal, he may also fear a patch of ice in his path. These things all inform his actions; they all influence his choices.

[Jon Letendre]

29 minutes ago, Dglgmut said:

But this isn't true, if it were then reality would also be a noose. The king may fear the peasants, he may also fear a wild animal, he may also fear a patch of ice in his path. These things all inform his actions; they all influence his choices.

I don't recall which character in The Fountainhead says that about leashes, I think it was Wynand. His/her point was that not only the slave but also the master loses their authentic self in the relationship. The nooses "execute" the self at each end.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

1 hour ago, The Unabashed Pragmatic said:

But Dennet makes a perfect argument and analogy in that a bad ideology infects the brain and drives the individual toward whatever the leader is laying down.  

U,

I don't find that to be a perfect argument. Ideologies are not agents. They are tools that agents use.

(Unlike Dawkins, I do not give memes agency, in other words, I do not identify a meme as a living organism that acts to survive and propagate--and throw in a little blah blah blah to cover the absurdity of this idea.) 

There is a very good discussion of this by Howard Bloom in Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century. So let me talk about that a bit.

 

Howard Bloom - the negatives

First, let's get the negatives out of the way. I can't stand Bloom's jargon, especially since I come from a Randian worldview. The idea of a collective organism and the implication that the individual only has value within that collective is like running my fingertips through a box filled with double-edged razor blades. However, I am a conceptual thinker, not a jargon-limited thinker and there is a level where Bloom's conceptual penetration into what happens in collectives (including living species) is breathtaking. I'll give one example below, but there are many and the insights are awe-inspiring.

The other negative is Bloom's rabid Trump Derangement Syndrome on his YouTube channel. That's his right, but his wholesale adoption and emotion-laden regurgitation of anti-Trump talking points are disappointing, even irritating. Not because he hates Trump. It's because he turns off his brain and opens his goddam mouth to hate Trump. I think he still believes Trump is a puppet for Putin. His TDS is on that level. How can a man of Bloom's intellect go wallow in the epistemological mud like that? But he does.

Fucking humans, those suckers never act right, even when they're on a roll.  

 

Howard Bloom - the positives

Setting that aside, Howard Bloom is brilliant if you allow the light from his thinking in.

(Apropos, in addition to evolution and other science-related matters, Bloom has been part of the motor behind the successes of huge rock stars like Prince, Michael Jackson, Bob Marley, Billy Joel, Paul Simon, John Mellencamp and others. But that's another story dealing with imprinting and understanding the common mental bases of individuals within the human species that can be triggered when people gather in large masses, which they do because they seek a mental/emotional/spiritual experience that can be gotten only in large groups. He lays it out in a very fun manner in his recent book, Einstein, Michael Jackson & Me: A Search for Soul in the Power Pits of Rock and Roll.)

Now about Dawkins's memes and the human species.

 

The Global Brain concept versus memes

In Bloom's ideas about collectives, which he takes all the way down past lifeforms and into atoms, he identifies 5 kinds of elements that act in a prewired manner for the good of the collective, which means for collective learning and evolving. A collective that does not learn enough to survive within an environment and adapt to the changes within its environment soon stops being a collective and becomes waste material. 

(Don't let the atom stuff turn you off. Bloom mostly deals with living species from single cell organisms, including the parts thereof, on up to human beings. The five elements he mentions coexist in a network of permanent conflict and cooperation with each other, but they are welded to each other at their core through networks. If one of the five elements dies out, the whole collective tends to dissipate. The evolutionary purpose of this system, so to speak, is to improve individual members in general and destroy the inferior individuals, being that if the individuals get stronger, the collective does likewise.

In Randian jargon, Bloom is talking about the nature of integration. And then he slaps the word "brain" and other terms on it, but the essence is still how integration works from an evolutionary lens

As an aside, Bloom only deals with the prewired part. Humans have volition, so humans can override these five elements to make space for individuals that the prewired system would have killed off. And, oddly enough, they do it through networks of conflict and cooperation--including the Internet--just like everything else that came before.

 

Example - the five elements

For the five elements, here's a quote:

Quote

... a collective learning machine achieves its feats by using five elements. This quintet of essentials includes: (1) conformity enforcers; (2) diversity generators; (3) inner-judges; (4) resource shifters; and (5) intergroup tournaments.

 Don't forget that this also applies to the sum of mankind's knowledge, which is, in essence, an effort by countless individuals who worked and work within a collective in these different capacities. Not one person has to invent counting, the alphabet, and so on. There is already a wealth of stuff to learn that has been formed by countless individuals for each brand new baby. And, if all goes well, the baby with grow up and add to it all.

This topic is way too long to get into here, but Bloom goes in depth with what is wrong with Dawkins's meme idea. It just doesn't work across these five elements. Notice that a religion can be toxic in the way Dawkins and Dennett claim, with war and so on, but it also can lead to so much peaceful cooperation among all these diverse elements and situations that free-market capitalism can emerge. How are both possible if religion is nothing more than a parasitical meme?

Also, Bloom goes into bickering--creative bickering and otherwise--which is baked the whole shebang. This happens, say, when conformity enforcers collide with diversity generators--but even between different conformity enforcers and different diversity generators.

(btw - Online forums and social media are great places for creative bickering.  )

When these five elements get way out of balance within a "collective learning machine" (which includes living species), bad things happen to said machine. Integrated wholes need cooperation and they need conflict to continue to be integrated.

Here is another quote by Bloom from the end of the book when he is talking mostly about human beings and when these elements get out of whack.

Quote

We’ve seen how the group brain uses opposites—instincts which tear us apart and equally powerful instincts which yank us back in stride again. Diversity generators drive us to be different. Conformity enforcers compel us to agree. We taste the fruit of paradox in creative bickering. The referees are sorters … sorters of three kinds: inner-judges planted in the tissues of our bodies and our minds; resource shifters couched in mass psychology; and intergroup tournaments determining which tribe or species wins the contests between social teams.

Life, as Aristotle knew so well, is a matter of avoiding the extremes. Conformity enforcers are necessities. But they are mass-mind throttlers when they grab hold totally. Diversity generators are equally essential. But taking them too far can destroy a civil culture and devastate once-vigorous centers of humanity. Inner-judges—from depression and elation to those hidden in the tissues of our psychoneuroimmunology—make us effective modules of a collective thinking machine. But they can also turn us into preachers of mass murder or morose and suicidal beings. Resource shifters can work to motivate or can be pirated to pour the wealth too heavily on those who manage to usurp authority and who block the contributions of allegedly lesser beings. Intergroup tournaments work well in business, but can destroy men by the millions when weapons are their chosen means.

I could go on and on about this, but what little I did mention just now awakened a thirst in me for rereading this book.

 

Throwaway thoughts

Since my main interest is fiction writing at the moment, finding this book was one of those joyous discoveries that sometimes happen to authors. I stumbled across five archetypes for the five essential parts of collectives, just like Jungian archetypes mostly work for the essential parts of individuals. Each one can be a character or a character can be made up of several. Or even new archetypes can be dreamed up.

As I go deeper into my work on writing fiction like Rand, I am going to have to wed all this stuff with her techniques and see what is valid and what isn't. (Sorry... This last stuff is just throwaway thinking as a reminder to myself.)

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

1 hour ago, Jon Letendre said:

I don't recall which character in The Fountainhead says that about leashes, I think it was Wynand. His/her point was that not only the slave but also the master loses their authentic self in the relationship. The nooses "execute" the self at each end.

Jon,

Here's the quote in context. It is by Wynand near the end of The Fountainhead while reflecting on how his pursuit of power as a primary led him to betray the things he most valued.

Quote

When he left the penthouse, it was safe to go out: it was dark. He passed a newsstand and saw late editions of the afternoon papers announcing the settlement of the Wynand strike. The Union had accepted Scarret's compromise. He knew that Scarret would take care of all the rest. Scarret would replate the front page of tomorrow's Banner. Scarret would write the editorial that would appear on the front page. He thought, the presses are rolling right now. Tomorrow morning's Banner will be out on the streets in an hour.

He walked at random. He owned nothing, but he was owned by any part of the city. It was right that the city should now direct his way and that he should be moved by the pull of chance corners. Here I am, my masters, I am coming to salute you and acknowledge, wherever you want me, I shall go as I'm told. I'm the man who wanted power.

That woman sitting on the stoop of an old brownstone house, her fat white knees spread apart—the man pushing the white brocade of his stomach out of a cab in front of a great hotel—the little man sipping root beer at a drugstore counter—the woman leaning over a stained mattress on the sill of a tenement window—the taxi driver parked on a corner—the lady with orchids, drunk at the table of a sidewalk café—the toothless woman selling chewing gum—the man in shirt sleeves, leaning against the door of a poolroom—they are my masters. My owners, my rulers without a face.

Stand here, he thought, and count the lighted windows of a city. You cannot do it. But behind each yellow rectangle that climbs, one over another, to the sky—under each bulb—down to there, see that spark over the river which is not a star?—there are people whom you will never see and who are your masters. At the supper tables, in the drawing rooms, in their beds and in their cellars, in their studies and in their bathrooms. Speeding in the subways under your feet. Crawling up in elevators through vertical cracks around you. Jolting past you in every bus. Your masters, Gail Wynand. There is a net—longer than the cables that coil through the wails of this city, larger than the mesh of pipes that carry water, gas and refuse—there is another hidden net around you; it is strapped to you, and the wires lead to every hand in the city. They jerked the wires and you moved. You were a ruler of men. You held a leash. A leash is only a rope with a noose at both ends.

My masters, the anonymous, the unselected. They gave me a penthouse, an office, a yacht. To them, to any one of them who wished, for the sum of three cents, I sold Howard Roark.

As I was copying this and rereading it, a thought came to mind.

Damn, Rand is a great writer...

In my search, I came across Rand using leash as a metaphor, but with a different meaning--the same one over and over: the goal of collectivist efforts in uniting people is to prepare mankind as "one neck for one leash."

Michael