Applied Spider-Man Theory

'With power comes responsibility' is Spiderman motto and a well observed rule that we can observe sometimes in our society throughout history. There are maybe though exceptions and to find these exceptions, I would like to explore to what extent is that motto true. If it was entirely true, would the Green Goblin really go on rampages like he does ? Well, that might not be the best of examples, since he is held responsible for his actions by Spiderman, and punish, maybe not accordingly in a fair way ( a lot of times Spider-man would be too nice to the different people who impersonated the Green Goblin, from my point of view).

Anyway, first we have to start with a definition of power, and I will use classic sociological theories to do so. First of all, any power is characterized by an inter-dependent relationship. You do need two people for one to exert power over another one and there must be a need for these two to be in such a relation. For example, it could be two lovers, in which case they are dependent on each other for their feelings to be kept alive.

First question that arises then is that most relations are asymmetrical at a given time, meaning that someone will always make a decision that the other(s) will have to follow. There is nowadays a view that power is unfair, but it is bound to exist in the sense that if two persons try to exert power on the other, they would nullify each others decision and nothing would move. That's why that in the example of two lovers, the decisions would have to be balanced, either in time or in the theme of what has to be decided.

Now that we know that every inter-dependent relations will have a power relation, we have to observe in which way the power goes. One has power over another one, if he controls some uncertainty to come. I hold a gun to your face, I'm dependent on you because I want your wallet, you are dependent of me because I'm holding some uncertainty about your future ( life or death). It does not have to be a threat but the uncertainty control can be a reward. I ask you to clean my shoes and you'll get a big fat check, I get to decide the quality of the cleaning.

The third element of power we need to find, if we want to see the verstehen, it is the will to make someone do something. It does not have to be conscious, but it has to be accepted. Back to lovers: I want new shoes and someone in love with me offers them to me. I can accept them and offer back gratitude or more or I can refuse them and reject the person courting me. Have I exerted power in both cases ? In the first one, I would say that I did, as I have accepted that I hold a way to make someone do something for me, in the other one, even though I made someone do something I have reacted in such a way that it will not ( hopefully) happen again. In the second case, I have not exerted power, but the image the other had of me did and as such, he forced himself.

Now, what are the different types of power we can observe in society?

The first one is the power of Coalition. Meaning that many can form peer pressure, or threats to make someone do something. Unions are a good example, though it has to be noticed that they are trying to counter another form of power. They do though exert a form of pressure to act in a certain way in an inter-dependent relationship by holding cards over the future.

The second one is Hierarchical Authority. I have a boss, I have to obey him. We both work for the same institution, but this institution has given this guy the power to tell me what I have to do otherwise he will ask that some sanctions will be applied to me. He represents the power of the institution into which I am a part of, and as such, it is not directly the person who has power.

The third one is the power of the person holding an Information. In social sciences, informations ( and it is slightly similar in physics) can represent anything. So someone holding money for example, holds information that will make anyone do something. A better example might be, in theory, the University professor ( in a perfect world) who can ask his audience to be quiet, otherwise he won't share what he knows.

The fourth one is the Mastery of a process. Imagine that a prisoner is given the right to serve whoever he wants in a prison, well, people will have, to some extent, obey him otherwise they won't be sure what they will be served. He is not an authority, as he was not given power, but is one in practice.

The fifth one is the power of the Expert. Everybody knows this power: the doctor who can prescribe you a good drug or tell you everything is alright and you should go to work. The lawyer who tells you you'd better settle or loose in court, even though in your mind you are totally right. The architect who tells you that another floor will really not fit the general symmetry of the building.

The sixth one is the power of the Network. It is a vicious power that everybody to some extent uses. You know a guy who knows a guy so you can do something that someone else, who knows no one, can't do. The person with the network, does not have a power of coalition, because it is not a fixed group, he does not have to be an expert or an authority, but he is just a pal with the person who has some power.

Finally, there is the Manipulation. It is all the form of power that are based on simple manipulation of the pathos of the other. The other one is in love with you, well you don't have to go and get your coffee anymore. The other one is stupid and get enraged easily, well you have heard that this guy you hate told something against him in his back and he better get his ass slapped. Someone you never met does not know you're bluffing when you say your his boss's son, he will also get your coffee.

Now, all these powers have limits and consequences. To have limits and consequences, the power relation has to be observed, felt and understood. If I went to see ' Eat, pray, love' 5 times with my girlfriend because I'm telling myself I love that film, the power my girlfriend has over me is probably limitless. If I suddenly become a pure existentialist in front of man holding a gun in front of my face and decide I might as well die here, he can shoot, but he won't have made me handed in my wallet.

The thing is that sometimes, we see the power and dislike it, but without observing what gives this power its limits. The limits of power are a lot of times set by the responsibility this power has in an inter-dependent relationship. For example, a King of France has an almost absolute power over his kingdom. He has so only though as long as he can hold his kingdom together. Now if he starts going crazy on spending and taxation and people do not recognize their country anymore, they will find a way to fight this power. The opposite is kind of true, someone who has a lot of power, but use it in such a way that everybody in the relationship is happy, will hold to this power very long. If women are portrayed as the weaker gender, men will have to be polite and courteous because they are the protectors. If now women want to be seen as equal, men do not want to hold the responsibility anymore.

With the loss of power therefore might also come the loss of responsibility, which might be the vicious side of this story. Imagine the owner of a company. He gets to decide who works where and what salary they'll have, and if he abuses of that power, like the king, he would be in trouble. But now, a CEO, who does not own his company, is not responsible for anything, as he would point at the shareholders and say that they hold control over future uncertainties. These shareholders though, will point at the market and consumers to say that they hold the control over the future uncertainties of the company. Everybody has some power, meaning that everybody is responsible, meaning that nobody is.

We can find this disappearance of power and responsibilities in a lot of strata of society I think. Certainly in politics, in economy, in class inequalities. The best way to avoid the costs of power is obviously the tendency for synopticon. The synopticon is the process of everybody looking at one person. This person will look as holding a lot of power, and yet it is only because everybody looks at him that he will look as being responsible. A National football trainer would look responsible for his team, but it is just because he is the one put up front by the team and the owners of the club. Mubarak is also good example of someone who looks like he is in power of a country and held responsible for the inequalities in this country, but he was just a front figure for a whole clique.

People are afraid to look powerful, because they do not like the cost of power, the responsibilities. They prefer to put up masks. If you want to make something positive for the world though, you do need to have power over what goes wrong. I don't know on this one if I really prefer Spider-man over Superman.

You and I do nothing to help

We are all doing meaningless work for a meaningless future. We work to be comparatively ridiculously paid to buy entertainment and stuff we already have, to feel slightly better. Better than the neighbor who has slightly less, better so we are closer to the neighbor owning slightly more. I do not know if we can be proud of ourselves, of what we give to our children. We give the over-production of an earth with limited resources for increasing inequalities.



Society is built on the illusion that it is, like our portrayal of nature, a system, that works like a machine, that is controlled, that is sustainable by our reasoning, by the fact that we all live our lives. We live in the politics of daily life, in office politics, in family politics, and those are already hard enough without complicated it by taking a step back to understand the whole picture. There is an analogy between the whole earth and computers: we know how to work with them, it does not mean we know how they work. Earth and society are the result of a long history of processes, life world and system world being constantly in relations.



Society though is essentially wrong, when we compare it to some of the pragmatically perfect societies that we have thought off and keep thinking about. A few people around the world, through time, at least since the French Revolution, have imagined perfect societies, not fake-utopia stuck in a strict space-time, but a few things have prevented changes and these obstacles to the general good are mostly due to the one percent of the population that owns most of the wealth. They get to decide how global politics work, so they do not loose too much.



It all starts with the illusion of national democracy. Nations having democracies are also the nations have integrated into a global economy. Global economy works by having some organizations calculating a certain output of a country, called economic growth, and depending on this evaluation, will lend them a certain amount of currencies. We have here actually a microcosm of any service company, where all the employees compete against each other, though all in their own private work, to be the one receiving the best title (e.g. manager, partner, associate, director-manager, combined with the belittling definition as junior or senior,...), so the best salary. Nations compete against each other and have to make some sacrifices on their prosperity, as competition leads to sacrifices in the employee's life out of the office.



The people paying are the citizens of the nations. It is also the illusion of democracy that politicians do not make concessions to rich people. A good example here is England where the media make the politicians, obviously meaning that politicians will have to rub the newspapers' owners on their good sides. American politicians have to rub the different hedge-fund owners, industry owners, intellectual property owners, on their good sides to receive the party contribution to insure good publicity ( paying for posters, T.V. ads, grass root workers). That is also why politicians have been asked to eradicate the word 'working-class' from their speeches, so there are no more distinctions and everybody can feel like a consenting middle-class.



Why do we accept this? It is mostly for the same reasons that most people do not participate in work-unions anymore: it is the worst way to receive a promotion. What kind of factory owner would accept a worker who is ready to strike for some other worker's right. Solidarity is not productive, and this is how alienation works. Alienation from other workers is the best way to receive a slightly better salary, at the cost of the other poor soul. Same goes for the country… Why would countries unite against banks if they can receive a better estimation of their own growth ?



“What is the alternative?” is an argument proposed by the overall consenting population against any idea of change. And it is true, history has not proven many alternatives right. Of course, history is written by the countries which destroy the smaller countries. I said that Viet Nam had an interesting system and I was told that a famine in the 80's decimated the country. Of course, Viet Nam liberated Laos from the worst regime history has seen, with the help of the Soviet Union and North Korea. This desperate alliance from Viet Nam resulted in their outcast from the world. As much as there was a famine due partly to mismanagement, and the fact that the Americans created a fake market in the south during the war, the world never apologized for going to an ideological war with Viet Nam and letting them starve for an action that we would all approve now. Any socialist country was forced into poverty by the 'powerful' nations of the world (there are no powerful nations, just powerful owners of production backing up consenting nations).



We see this same portrayal of dangerous alternative in the image of Iran being 'utterly evil' or Anonymous being a destructive terrorist organization. I participate in some of the Anonymous forums, and I have to say that there is nothing terrorist about them, rather the opposite, they provide information that should be news in mainstream media. As an example, did you know that the mayor of Orlando made food donations to homeless people a crime? Did you know that the American government is legally forcing people to give testimonies against Bradley Manning (Do you know Bradley Manning? The guy who indirectly forced Western Governments to do nothing against the Arab Spring, who is being tortured at this moment in American jails).



Our capitalist society has produced great technological advancements, I am told. The problem is that even technological advancement nowadays is a decision made by big companies trying to make more profits, it has nothing to do with technological advancements improving our lives. Internet for example, this great invention, is now being reinvented so it will be entirely privatized. Even the dark internet ( the one accessed through Tor, I2P; the one that cannot be access through your mainstream browser) will not exist anymore, so all the big companies, and the nations working for them, will be able to control and destroy small alternate economy systems, like bitcoin. The game industry provides products that make us live faster and made my generation attention-deficit (meditation alternatively makes anyone smarter). Thank You technological advancement for your private transport raising the cost of public transports. Thank You technological advancement for always creating 'new' products where all the complimentary goods cost twice their real values. Thank you technological advancement for winning your battle against open source knowledge.



The world is now too big, too complex to provide an alternative, is another argument I am confronted with often. And I am afraid that it is true, that I have been brought up in the perfect environment to study mental environments (how do we come to think the way we do), when most

people have not had this luck. I do try to make most of it though.



We are all working for someone, and most of the time we do not know whom, even with the best of intentions. The German civil society does not understand they still work for a logical hegemony when it voted against nuclear energy. What they have voted for is lesser finance and support for research and investment into smart nuclear energy. Chernobyl incident killed 47 people since 1986. Why is this fact ( World Health Organization 2006 report) being left out of mainstream media ? The problem with nuclear energy at the moment is that we do not yet how to work nuclear fusion, so there is no waste and an eternal cycle of energy production, which theories actually find possible. This requires major investment, just like building nuclear reactors requires investments. Instead, the Germans have opted for 'sustainable energy'.



Sustainable energy is the lie of the energy industry, one of the best of the century probably. Why? Well lets take solar panels. Solar panels capacities work with processors just like our computers. Which means that they the industries come every two years with an effectively much better product, which means that all the old ones have to be thrown out and to be replaced. We have now a new consumption cycle for energy bringing in far more money than an eternal energy source could...



Am I a pessimist? Some politicians do go into politics so the future looks slightly brighter. Politics on the world scale works on compromises with the big companies, always threatening to outsource their industries, their labor, their revenues, or the little taxes they pay. So industries make promises to politicians. Politicians do not tell the people that they received promises from the industry owners about a slightly better future, because who would vote for a powerless politician? We are therefore left with the lies for votes. Or worse, with hypocritical liberals like Mrs.Merkel, having one of the most protective industries in the world, limiting competition in the country, and blaming the Greeks for helping their exports (a low Euro is good for exports...), telling the village Germans that the Turkish low-wage labor they have imported does not integrate well but hiding how much they need them.



I say nothing new, and yet most of the people I know do not want to do anything. Why? Fear of loss I would say. Of course fear of loss exists in everybody who has got something to lose. We are ready to make concessions only when we are more afraid of what we do not know. Naomi Klein's ¨shock doctrine” is a good example of a tool for change. An example of the shock doctrine is actually the United States, which never had a more conservative way of life (e.g. rate of women firefighter, decline in union membership, the freedom of liberal market,...) since 9/11. And this is not profiting the general population.



Another sociologist (most sociologists by the way are very left-oriented politically, except the crappy ones like A. Giddens), called Helmut Rosa observed that our society is accelerating. We compete to be faster constantly, which means effectively that we stress more and with stress disappears natural empathy. Our natural empathy disappears because of our entertainment as well. Accelerated games, accelerated films, accelerated television.



Television was problematic as the intelligentsia of the world for a long time did not accept this institution. It took the New-York Times's critics, and the fact that you had to pay for different programs (best Bourdieusian recipe to make a high-class taste) to make most of the society spend most of their evenings in front of it, myself included. Fact and fiction mingled to create the entertainment we seriously needed to not realize that we are the ignorant working-class, just like the poor workers of the third world, and that we accept our fate because we just do what we do.

Sociological imagination 1.7

I have hopefully completed my bachelor in sociology this week, so I thought this week's article should relate to sociology. I don't really know yet what paths my thoughts will go through, but I was thinking about linking different thoughts and ideas related to sociology, neuropsychology and social psychology to illustrate a small path towards emancipation. I don't think I'm setting myself an easy task here but being over-ambitious is my personal curse. Nevertheless, there is nothing wrong with being self-critical (paper from Berkley uni this week).

I will therefore start by explaining that in every interaction, there are tensions. It all starts with pulling or pushing, antagonism and attachments. You speak with someone, and some things will push you towards that person, some things will push you apart. Similarity is probably the most powerful tool for attraction, and the opposite is true as well. People will try to blend into a selected group. Now, from there, we can already see how networks of culturally-categorized groups are built. We cannot escape categorization.

As Aristotle observed some time ago, we tend to make universalizations to make the world more easy to understand, but for every rule we make we can find exceptions which is what we call particulirisation. And the new exception can make a rule. We have to accept this paradox of how we socially construct notions, that a notion is both an over-generalized rule as well as just a unique exception from another rule. That's why the quest for knowledge is an infinite path for a complete language.

Language is indeed the first and most important tool of our social life nowadays. It is the imperfect tool of communication. It is imperfect because somehow, and that's again greek antiquity knowledge of rethoric, any affirmation raises a question. Even a 'hello' raises the question of 'should I acknowledge you' as silence could have been the other answer. Blinding people from wondering about the possibility for other answers is a rule of power. Language is also the best tool to push or pull people.

The rules of powers are also multiple. Power is mainly the name for an imagined societal order which silences any other possibility of interaction. It is the instance where traditions take over innovations and it probably constitutes most of our days' activities. Power restricts everybody's movements. It conditions everybody and the degree of interaction to the extent that a 'Yes,sir' is a powerful answer, as it conditions superiors to keep their distance from a subordinate.

That's where the project of emancipation is difficult. As most interactions are restricted in languages of power, just understanding it is not enough to control it. Most changes lead to an unknown place where the script can either be directed by the person creating the change or by a clumsy consensus that re-establishes a more equal dialogue. It is like meeting someone from the opposite gender from a country you never heard off. How do you greet them and how much personal space should there be are unresolved scripts creating awkward confusion. Now imagine going to a shop and telling the owner you'll work two hours for him to pay for your grocery instead of letting money be the pillar of the script creating the power relation. That would create confusion and most probably distance, or the shop keeper can laugh it off to keep the usual degree of interaction but not allowing the possibility of questioning the power of money.

Our interactions with the world are constant to a degree we still do not understand. Wearing fake luxury glasses does not boost your ego, quite the contrary, you would score a lesser score at an I.Q. Test. That's why emancipation starts not by copying imagined 'superiors' because that just legitimises their position. Real emancipation is understanding one's position within a global network of categories and their power position. To do that in a good manner though, a very large degree of empathy is needed to understand everybody else's positions. Confront people with their own position in a grand scheme and they might understand why you ask for a little change.

Empathy is a hard game to play. To do such a thing, the more data you collect the better off you are. Understanding where a person comes from means understanding more about them than they do themselves. For example, if Argentinians, Canadians, Germans and Japanese work more than Costa Ricans, Texans, Greeks and Cambodians this is because there is a correlation with a sense of time and your distance from the equator. Just like 7,3,6,8,2,5,9 if asked to be put in order will be put in the order of the language you write. An Arab would more naturally write it 9876532. The way people read affect their entire behaviour.

Empathy requires actually more than understanding the persons motivation or point of view. It is trying to understand their real ideology. Zizek, a guy I like, defines ideology as the things people do without knowing why they do it. They do give a motivation, but even if they know it does not make sense, they still do it. For example people will smoke for self-destruction, everybody knows it is lethal, and yet the excuses are addiction, stress relieve, social habit and so on. Most smokers will deny their first reason to smoke is to die.

Now there are instances where stimuli can change someone's behaviour. Here, I am going to outline 7 types of external stimuli that have high chances of triggering positive reactions.

The first one is the simple principle of contrast. You're out buying shoes, you see two pairs you like, the seller tells you the first one costs three times the normal amount for a pair. You ask about the second and he tells you its one time and a half more expansive. You will most probably buy them there even though you know you could go to another store in town. You would actually re-evaluate your standards for the price after the first one is given.

The second principle is reciprocity. Reciprocity is a bitch. Someone you hate helped you, now you owe them. It is something engraved in them. That's why you should always be the first one to offer a gift.

The third principle is that if you ask someone to take a certain point of view, ask them to defend it writing it down and afterwards reading it out loud and they will internalize that point of view. That's why the Korean army had the only really successful brainwashing camps.

The fourth is sympathy. Someone mimicking you, associating himself with someone well regarded, known for being helpfull and constantly self-critical is impossible to hate.

The fifth is that everybody respects some form of authority they have never met. Everybody will trust some people blindly just because of their position or their good publicity.

The sixth is that rarety is always attractive. If you know you hold something no-one else has got, you will cherish it. Also, it explains why we we do not want to loose more than we want to win more. That's also why souls are so important.

The seventh, I find, is an interesting one. It is that in uncertain times everybody will be a sheep. That's why you want to point at someone if you are in need of help. You shouldn't wait for someone to break the pattern of inactivity of the herd. This is why if you have big groups unaccustomed to each others interactions patterns these groups will stick together. If they are directed to help for a greater shared goal, they will start to break their distances.

Now, as I said, the sense of time is an important factor in our lives. Even if we think that the world should go faster because we are confronted with people on television who do not spend real time doing things, we do not see that we are breaking and changing all the patterns of previous generations. At the same time, we are provided with internet which gives informations about anything. We do not have the patience to read as much as we could on it. Instead, we use the internet as a security for the invented motivations for our lives.

Accumulation of knowledge in itself is not emancipatory. First of all, you have to train your memory like a London cab driver. Our brain is a sensible receptor that can be manipulated. As such, people who have to learn more actually have or develop a brain which reacts faster. Other stimuli make the brain react. While the perfectly calculated satisfaction of classical music can give you peace for sleeping, playing jazz cuts off any sense of inhibition of thoughts in the brain to let free-expression through. Finally, meditation, training for extreme attention unto one subject for a long time, relaxes you more and is a great training for being capable of having a deep concentration in any activities afterwards. Those are only examples where self-discipline should give us better tools to deal with our multi-dimensional social world.

There on all thoughts can be collected and will interfere in all your activities to create hybrids scripts and thoughts. Creating attraction by knowing the comfortable script is a good beginning. From there on, asking questions and deviating the script lets you know the limits the person has set him – or herself.

Distance is the drive behind too many of the scripts and it is the best drive also for cementing power relations. If someone lets you know they have a private space they would like to respect, most people will take it badly and keep their distance from there on. A king cannot be talked to by the lay person. You don't need to have met the person you elect.

Distance might as well appear to be positive for us, without us being aware of it. No matter how universal the declaration of human rights is, we always interpret it so we can judge someone else, claiming higher moral grounds just because of our relative moral system. And everybody does it daily. How do we make sense of the world without judging? I don't have an answer for this one, except for the yet unreachable goal of constant empathy. Meaning knowing everybody through their lifes and the way people knew them. More than six billions people is too much information for anyone.

This is one of the moments when I would like to know my maths to calculate the moment when memory capacities could be powerful enough for empathy, one of my impossible science-fiction dreams.

Historical hermeneutics is the science of interactions, the study of the evolution of language and meanings. I don't know yet its value, I don't know to what extend history repeats itself. It does show though that we do lock ourselves in ways and that changes are always slow to happen.

Print, radio, television and internet have accelerated our exchanges of languages and information. I don't know if that is a good or a bad thing. Are we accelerating towards the better or not? As scripts get re-adapted constantly at the moment, I'm afraid material inequality at the moment rises as well. More levels of distances are put between the owners of the most important source of power nowadays (money). Companies, countries, wars financed by banks owned by hedge funds directed by a front man called CEO owned by unmediatised individuals who have accumulated power to cause beneficial change, if change wasn't against their own interests.

Scripts get changed constantly and we don't have the time to study the power relation they have created. We can study how an interaction is now and we can study how changes have operated in the past but predictions are still impossible. It is an impossible quantuum study that we operate unconsciously whenever we bring a new script into our life. We calculate the probabilities of others to take our point positively or negatively without knowing exactly how their standards are at a given point. And whatever works on an individual level can reflect on a group category, through universalization.

I don't really know what conclusion to bring to all this. I have just written down some little things I have learned and tried to integrate this year. It might have been helpful to me so I thought it might be useful to you as well.