Strength

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“A powerful person is one who brings the past to an outcome, settling all its unresolved issues. A strong person is one who carries the past into the future, showing that none of its issues is capable of resolution. Power is concerned with what has already happened; strength with what has yet to happen. Power is finite in amount, strength cannot be measured because it is an opening and not a closing act. Power refers to the freedom persons have within limits, strength to the freedoms persons have with limits.

Power will always be restricted to a relatively small number of selected persons. Anyone can be strong.”

— James P Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

There are many gems in James P. Carse’s masterwork (almost all of them missed by Simon Sinek’s threadbare cash-in, The Infinite Game, by the way) but the distinction he draws between power and strength is fantastic.

Think of power as accumulated, finite resource; a historical acquisition that is depleted by use, the way a battery loses its charge or a hydro-dam runs out of water.

Strength is prospective: it regenerates energy rather than using it; is somehow anti-fragile, a muscle that grows the more you exercise it and give of it.

The personal sacrifices one makes in the name of a wider cause; the good deeds you do when no-one sees, without asking for return; the reputation you build for honest dealing: There is a good Maori word for this sense of strength: mana.

It is also the time and effort expended to acquire skills, expertise, experience and resilience: the callouses you’ve grown, the toughened hide, the give in your frame, the system redundancies you have acquired. These confer strength not power.

We talk a lot of power structures as a kind of pervasive and necessarily pernicious thing: those that are just acquisitions of hoarded resources, used by their owners to tilt the scales and preserve an unfair advantage, fair enough; but those ones are, in the long term, decadent. They eventually crumble. But not all social and political networks are like this: many are strength structures — mutually reinforcing systems of reciprocal collaboration that are quite different.

See also

• Power structure

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