It is certainly the case that power motivates people—to say it again—in that all social organisms, including human beings, desire some position near the summit of one or more of their local dominance hierarchies. But to reduce all human motivation to that! And then, worse, to posit that it is not only acceptable but morally righteous to demolish patriarchal structures (read: dominance hierarchies) because of their oppressive nature? There are many sources of motivation. Love is a motivator. Generosity is a motivator. The desire to create is a motivator, as is anger, resentment, hate, fear, surprise, disgust, guilt and pain. The desire to leave something behind for the world is a motivator. The desire to play, and to enjoy intimate relationships, and to long for, and to despise, and to regret, and to be honest, and to cheat – those are all motivators – and that hierarchies of accomplishment and skill, as well as power, can be built around all of them.
We know that people have an essential nature, although we don’t know its scope. We have partially separable biological circuits for fundamental motivational states such as hunger, thirst, defensive aggression, sexual arousal and stress-induced preparation for action; for complex behaviors such as play and maternal care; and for basic emotions, such as joy, fear, disgust, anger, surprise, and sadness. We know that we are basically social, and live, like our closest primate relatives, in dominance hierarchies. We know that many sex differences are innate, and that some of these become more manifest, rather than less, as the environments in which they are manifest become more similar, or equal. Our concepts and our social organizations are motivated in their construction and function by all of these things, and more.
It is wrong to take a radical social constructionist stance (all human actions and beliefs are the consequence of socialization) and to assume that single-motivation explanations are valid. It is either ignorant or irresponsible to reduce complex issues to simple abstractions, and to claim that reduction as knowledge. It is instead the most difficult of cognitive challenges to pick the right level of resolution at which to specify a problem. Generally, the right level is the one at which corrective action might be taken, carefully, with a careful eye to assessing the consequence of that action. This requires detailed, situation-specific knowledge. This requires specifying the problem to be solved with tremendous care (requires the proper diagnosis) and the then the willingness to analyze every level of the hierarchy (1) to discover where the problems lie, through careful examination and conversation and (2) to generate and test incremental (and sometimes radical) solutions in the attempt to repair the problem. This places tremendous demands on the ability to pay attention and to learn and to change and to negotiate and to shift perspectives (all of which constitutes the opposite of ideological certainty).
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