Tolkien And Power

 

Tonight, we were running our fireplace, and enjoying our winter night activity of watching a movie. Every holiday season we go through the Hobbit series of movies, and the Lord of the Rings movies, all by Peter Jackson. Tonight, we were watching The Return of the King.

 

I paused the movie and commented to my wife how J. R. R. seems classically Christian in his view of human depravity. Humans are not born good, so they are easily corruptible. Tolkien verifies this view of mine when he points out that men, more than elves, dwarves, hobbits, or wizards, were so quick, so gullible, so greedy to accept and to take the rings of power from Sauron. Humans are easy for Sauron/Satan to deceive, bribe, flatter, threaten and ensnare.

 

The flawed attitude, of the arrogant sinner that will easily succumb to being tempted by devils, is that she assumes she is unique and superior to others—that she can eat forbidden fruit, without it rotting out her soul.

 

The cautious outlook of the incorruptible, virtuous believer and follower of the Good

Spirits is that he knows he is a born sinner, and that he cannot dare to eat the forbidden fruit, because it will eviscerate his soul and personhood. He knows he is no better or less vulnerable to submitting to proffered temptation from devils than is any other poor soul. His incorruptibility is not based on his inability to surrender to Satan. It is grounded in his understanding that he is only, innately to willing to work for Satan, and that the only way to withstand the Tempter is to say no from the get-go and never relent on refusing to work for Sa. His humility is realistic, and he understand his own limits.

 

The moral about the One ring of power is that no mortal or almost no mortal (Aragorn, Sam and Faramir did not take the ring, but Frodo and Boromir could not relinquish the Ring of Power.)  human, dwarf, or hobbit, could handle absolute, centralized power at all or for very long without being corrupted and destroyed by it. Power does corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

 

If power is centralized in society, it is absolute and corrupting in hierarchies, in institutions, in collectives, in mass movements, among tribes and tight cliques.

 

Is the solution then that each virtuous person must be powerless to be good, to become good, or to remain good?

 

No, that is no solution. Just look at a mass movement, cult, or gang: the demagogue, the guru or master criminal each has all the power, and the followers have none. Most followers among these fell groups are powerless, nonindividuating, pure joiners, pure groupists.

 

We all exist. To exist is to come into the world with a life force or soul, and each soul, as a nonindividuated 8 year-old, has about 7,000 units of power. As a self-actualized 35 year-old, that is a living angel, and servant of the Light Couple, that woman would wield about 350,000 units of power.

 

A guru, with 500 minions without a unit of power amongst all of them, would have given the guru all their units of power, so the guru now operates with 3,500,000 of centralized power, and is able to wreak havoc upon the world.

 

We have a dilemma that surfaces here. It is obvious that each human is born with 7,000 units of power. That individual lives in a world of over 7 billion other people, each carrying around their 7,000 units of power apiece. How is power to be dispersed and utilized without upending society and ruining lives?

 

So, we have people born with power, and all of them must or should wield power, so how do we keep power good, loving, civilized and decentralized, so that power is not centralized and sickens the elites wielding it?

 

First, there is no perfect solution, and even a very good solution can be distorted, worn down and perverted after a few decades or a couple of generations. People so easily forget what hurt their grandparents.

 

My solution must start with my moderate presuppositions of ethical and ontological import: the middle is the way.

 

Applying these axioms to the power problem. I desire that the ethical person is neither all-powerful in his position of authority, by class, by institutional rank, by being leader of the pack, its guru, or its demagogue; nor do I desire that good people wield no personal power. The power is in the community and in the spiritual realm: if it is not wielded by self-restraining good people, in the right way, it will be accumulated and abused by corrupt power monopolists that have assembled all this personal power, robbed from those around them.

 

A vast upper middle-class citizenry must wield power in a way that keeps power decentralized and productive: Who are these citizens? They are, each of them, the supercitizen, that anarchist-individuator, upper middle class citizen, following and working for the Light Couple, wielding each her fair share of power and influence in running society on every level in unison with and in cooperation with  300 million other Americans each wielding their  share of personal power, with none  being allowed to or desiring to hold onto the powers deserved by others and to which these others alone are entitled to, and for which they are responsible for wielding wisely.

 

This is not a perfect utopia, and things can always go wrong, but this system should work fairly well for decades, perhaps centuries, especially if guided by the Father and the Mother.

 

Each individuators-anarchist supercitizen would wield about 350,000 units of power as a member of his constitutional republic, a capitalist society with small but limited, powerful, effective government and other societal institutions.