Pyramid Power: it was a big canard during the 1970s, when I was growing up, and every charlatan from Mumbai to Hoboken was trying to sell miniature pyramidal structures to wear on our heads, to increase thought-capacity beyond the once-thought 10% we were supposedly using. Or to put over the goldfish bowl if little pet Goldy had the sniffles. It was supposed to sharpen razor blades, if you left them under its pointy apex overnight. There was some mysterious force, once known by the ancient Egyptians, and newly rediscovered that could do anything from fry eggs to cure cancer. I remember wanting one such devise. I was young, was often bullied, had no luck with girls, and my parents always got to watch what they wanted on TV.
It was a power advertised even on the back of the dollar bill – that creepy eye at the very top making me feel like I was always under surveillance, even at my most private moments. I wanted the ultimate toy, a talisman against the magic that was being used against me, humbling me past what was natural and acceptable for a suburban kid. Of course, I knew little about the humility and exploitation others faced, no matter how much the popular music I was listening to at that time made reference to it, and protested it. The singers sang about the plight of every disenfranchised population, from inner-city school children to poor villagers in Viet Nam, getting roasted in chemical flames dropped from helicopters manned by our honorable airborne divisions.
But the true power of the pyramid was the force of gravity, pressing down and outward to greater and greater widths to a foundation supporting the whole enterprise. It is actually a gradation of foundations, all the way down, that offers a tremendous stability and ability to endure centuries of the forces of weather and entropy.
Our social structures are pyramids as well, everything from governments, armies, leisure clubs and organizations, corporations – the ever-widening and layering of one management strata upon another, upon which all sit restlessly on the heads of those who often expend the most effort, and possibly produce, at least in its most raw form, the most value.
It’s a habit we seemed to have held onto from medieval times and before. We seem to like these forms of power relations, in spite of the fact that we also claim to love democracy, and to value freedom and equality. If I am prone to the rules of a corporation, in order to satisfy company standards, prove one’s professionalism, in order to maintain employment, feed myself, have a place to live, and that involves most of my waking time, then the whole notion of freedom is called into question. I can leave the corporation, all corporations, become self-employed, live off the grid, but the whole structure is so much a part of the way we live, who we have grown to know ourselves as, what we have been trained to be, both genetically and through acculturation.
We struggle with the rules, at least those of us who are among the more rebellious ilk, until we learn to internalize them, lest we are driven mad by having to adhere to a number of arbitrary behavior patterns that run against our grain. We take it on as we might a workout routine, or the Japanese Tea Ceremony. It becomes ours, which we then begin to dress up with so much ornamentation. We become hierarchical beings, its prophets and priests in full immersion.
Many things rely on our ability to organize ourselves in this way. Capital, for instance, would not exist without this form of traverse dominance. We would also not be able to bond in organized action they way we do today, whether it be in war, or in large scale projects such as landing on the moon. We would also not be able to have the kind of international trade we enjoy today, which engenders, for instance, the consumption of tropical fruit in temperate climates during the winter season, among other things.
But some of the functions implicit to our being hierarchal are not so nice. The fact that a man like Harvey Weinstein can assume that he is entitled to satisfaction of his desires with anyone he pleases, due to his position of dominance in the structure, is not an aberration or sickness of the hierarchy, but just another brick in the wall. He has not only the personal financial resources to make other people happy or miserable at his whim, but also the currency of connections with everyone on his level of strata and below, enforcing a near lockdown of every pathway in his vicinity. Yes, the pyramid is entitlement all the way down.
Let’s not assume Weinstein was always a wretched individual. He’s been involved in making some great movies, even films that show a particular ethical intelligence. No, something else happened to him perhaps that happens a bit to us all as we begin to internalize the system – he has become consumed by the mechanical and gravitational values of the system, the mechanical processes it comprises, i.e. the spirit of gravity, to such an extent that he has forgotten the values of his own that he had brought into the system to begin with. After all, it makes things easier.
Lesson number 1: just because you have entered the established order, and have mastered its rules, doesn’t mean you need leave everything else behind. It may take a certain amount of naiveté to maintain a desire to emulate the values of our heroes. I remember going through a very cynical period, during my coming of age, in which every value was turned upside down, but now that I am getting older, whether it be because of my settling down, or my brain shrinking, I want more and more to be like them – not the real people who we find out they actually were, but those idealized people, who are nice and wise at the same time, and seem to know what to do. At the same time, one needs to be patient with oneself – having values, one’s own deepest values, and living with them, isn’t easy.
On this end of the spectrum you have someone like Colin Kaepernick, who had nothing to gain and everything to lose, by beginning his protest. He was near the very top of the hierarchy, and instead of letting it own him, he turned against its mechanical force and began to do what is right. He has suffered for it, though he has the resources to cushion that suffering. But one should not forget that he is swimming upstream against gravity, against the very structure he had become a iconic part of.
Weinstein is the property-obsessed libertarian/libertine, whereas Kaepernick is the nomadic and quixotic anarchist rattling against the windmills of the machine. We can know, comfortably or uncomfortably, who we aspire to align with, and who we may align more with in actuality. Even our working metaphors (climbing the ladder, waterfall, etc.) are imbued with the spirit of gravity and the power of pressure – why is it we assume that it takes a force, constantly applied and directed, in order to propagate productivity? This attitude goes back to the days of slavery, and continues to contaminate our thinking in everything from politics and education, to our work and everyday living. It is part of the weight of the pyramid, the power of it, which if we are going to advance ethically, as we have technologically, we need to work diligently and thoroughly to tease out each of the poisonous barbs of or beloved systems, and even our behavior, everywhere that they breed and are hidden.