Keys that Unlock -- The Power Paradox, by Dacher Keltner

5 October, 2017, Knox Book Beat, The Berkeley Times
“empathy, giving, gratitude” and “telling stories that unite.”

 At the UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center (isn’t it exciting that we have one right here?), Dr. Keltner has been researching not only power, which “shapes our every interaction,” (the “personal is the political,” don’t cha know) but compassion, awe, love, beauty and “how our emotions shape our moral intuition.” Wow!

 Dacher Keltner’s book, The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence, describes not only behaviors that truly increase one’s “enduring” power, which comes from “empowering others in social networks” by increasing “the greater good;” but how the powerful (and, in America, particularly the wealthy) often lose real power through abusing it (inner corruption resulting in bullying others).He then ends up with a deeply moving section on “the price of powerlessness,” which I would have put earlier in the book because it is so familiarly depressing in its depiction of “physical and emotional distress.”

When I moved into my housing complex, part of our contract included a clause that we could be disciplined or evicted if we bullied other tenants, including, but not limited to, “comments or conduct intended to intimidate, humiliate or isolate people in a way that causes physical or emotional distress.” I had never seen a definition of this “demoralizing and counter-productive” behavior; but I had certainly observed, felt, and on some occasions enacted it.

In this season of declining light and apparent Machiavellian “force, fraud, ruthlessness and strategic violence;” Keltner gives us the antidotes of “empathy, giving, gratitude” and “telling stories that unite.” Read chapters One, Four and Five first; then “Power is Given, not Grabbed,” “Enduring Power Comes from a Focus on Others” and “A Fivefold Path to Power.”

Unless, of course, you’d rather not “learn in your own particular way how to transcend the power paradox and to find delight in making a difference in the world,” improving all your interpersonal interactions and genuine self-esteem at the same time.

;-) (smiley-face wink emoticon)