Where Does Power Lie?

In the A Song of Ice and Fire series, Tyrion is given a thought experiment by Varys, one of the more mysterious characters in the story. Here is the quote:

“In a room sit three great men, a king, a priest, and a rich man with his gold. Between them stands a sellsword, a little man of common birth and no great mind. Each of the great ones bids him slay the other two. ‘Do it’ says the king, ‘for I am your lawful ruler.’ ‘Do it’ says the priest, ‘for I command you in the names of the gods.’ ‘Do it’ says the rich man, ‘and all this gold shall be yours.’ So tell me—who lives and who dies?"

After Varys leaves, it is immediately suspected that the rich man would be obeyed by Shae, which says something. But Tyrion comes away with a somewhat more nuanced view, saying that it cannot really be answered directly, at least not yet, because there is not enough information, which implies an answer of its own. “All depends on the man with the sword.”

But Varys has his own response to that: “[Y]et if it is the swordsmen who rule us in truth, why do we pretend our kings hold the power? Why should a strong man with a sword ever obey a child king like Joffrey, or a wine-sodden oaf like his father? [. . .] Here, then. Power resides where men believe it resides. No more and no less. [It is a] shadow on the wall."

And importantly: "[Y]et shadows can kill."

In this post, I want to unpack the nature of power in society and discuss whether I think Varys is correct or not.

I

Embedded within Varys' view, which I am distinguishing from Martin's view, seems to be a contradiction. On one hand, he acknowledges the power that the sellsword has in the thought experiment. This is the classic logic highlighted by Mao, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." Whether it is a gun or sword or some other weapon, there is an obvious logic to physical force. On the other hand, he highlights the obvious contradiction in society, where we see Kings, priests, and rich men as powerful, not the men who actually have swords. This is the contradiction in society, not in Varys' worldview, and he is right to point it out. However, I think he is overzealous in his dismissal of power as a mere "shadow on the wall." Even his acknowledgement that "shadows can kill" is not sufficient to account for the reality of physical force and its relevance to power in politics.

The question then becomes, how do you account for the fact that power resides where "men believe it resides" and also for the fact that it has grounding in the physical world?

Part of the problem is the poetry of the language being used. When writing a novel, authors tend to skew more toward continental philosophy, rather than analytical philosophy, and this can strip away clarity. If we want to understand the issue, we need to make clear that we are going to use a more analytical approach to ensure that clarity. It will sound a lot less pretty, but this is important for the sake of accuracy.

In a previous post, I clarified what power was, and I will repeat that here to highlight another aspect of that concept. Power is the ability to influence the behavior of other people, to get them to do what you want them to. Because of this fact, power is inherently a sociological thing. You are interacting with other people. As such, we must have a conception of society in order to understand power to its fullest extent.

I also talked about hard and soft power. Hard power is made up of positive and negative incentives, and soft power is made up of persuasion, usually through emotional appeal. But it is worth asking how these levers of power are implemented. Are they implemented by individual people, by institutions, by systems—and how are these things maintained over time? Understanding that human beings are a social species is fundamental to answering these kinds of questions.

II

Societies are groups of individuals that are engaged in sustained interactions with one another. This usually takes the form of institutions and informal systems that emerge as a result. Institutions are social structures that shape and constrain human behavior. Systems are often less formal and are the highest order social structure that develops between institutions when they interact with one another.

In the context of this post, I want to focus on the development of institutions and how they create social roles and then ascribe associated characteristics to the people within them. Before doing so, I want to outline my basic thesis: power is made up of two components: physical grounding and social construction. These two components meld together to create a whole that is greater than either standing alone.

Physical grounding establishes power in the physical world and is actualized in the form of incentives. There are two kinds of incentives, positive and negative. Positive incentives involve giving people what they want, so they will do something. Negative incentives involve giving people what they don't want, so they don't do something.

Social construction establishes power in the social world, and is actualized in the form of consensus and soft power. Soft power is about persuasion through argument and especially emotional appeal. The reality of society is created by belief, and the reality of power is created by society. In this sense, what people believe about power makes it real, in the same way that what we believe about society makes it real. This is where Varys' point hits the hardest, but also where my rebuttal will come in the strongest.

III

The idea of physical grounding taking the form of incentives is fairly straightforward. It involves understanding that we are physical beings living in a physical world, and that we can take advantage of that in order to influence the people around us. Positive incentives can be used, like giving people physical things they need or want, like food or land or the means to acquire those things. Negative incentives can also be used to threaten or actualize a penalty like imprisonment or some kind of physical punishment; as long as the offending party does not want it, it will suffice (to an extent).

Soft power is about rhetoric, and if you want to see a more detailed exploration of the rhetorical side of power, particularly through art, then you can watch my video about what makes art political. I will link that in the description. What matters is that through the power of art, like songs detailing the exploits of a King, you are able to create a sense of legitimacy in the minds of the people he rules. This matters because human beings are a social species. The more people who believe in a given idea, the more persuasive it becomes, providing more weight to the enforcement mechanisms required to maintain the system in the first place. All societies are built on a combination of incentives and soft power, each leaning in one direction or the other.

This is also where it becomes obvious that belief is relevant to the component of physical grounding, and that physical grounding and social construction are in some sense inextricable. Soft power is the power of belief. The mere fact that people believe in the legitimacy of the system is what allows it to work. Belief is also relevant to incentive structures, and not simply because people are persuaded to take part. The most important way in which belief plays a part in incentives is through the social construction of institutions of power. This will be tackled in the next section.

Before we move on, I want to clarify that I am making some simplifications for the sake of time and clarity. One thing of note is money. Money is one such thing that is not exactly a physical entity that is given and taken, at least in a straightforward sense. Even if we are talking about dollar bills, or caches of gold, money is a medium of exchange—and the expectation is that it can be used to acquire the things that we actually want. We don't go to work for food, we go to work for a wage, and then we spend that wage on food and other things we need or want. This is important because belief is what sustains money. Money only works because we, as a society, believe that it will work.

There are other complications, as well, that I will brush over, like how belief factors into the notion of time. We have to wait for things over extended periods of time, which means our beliefs about what incentives are reliable become a complication.

All of these, I will be leaving to the side for this post. What matters is that belief is inextricably bound up with the physical manifestation of power.

IV

Power also exists in the form of social constructs, which is inevitable, as power is sociological, and society is made up of social constructs. A social construct is an idea, object, or practice that exists because people collectively agree upon it, rather than because of some inherent truth or natural order of things. Because of the simplistic frameworks of the past, social constructionism as it is traditionally conceived is grossly misleading and erected against strawmen, usually. No one is arguing for the inherent truth or the natural order of things, at this point, even if they argue for genetic influences on behavior, for example—but for our purposes, social constructionism will simply mean collective agreement, regardless of whether humanity is predisposed toward a certain practice or not.

You can make a distinction between conceptual construction, human behavior, and object construction. We create ideas, and then we follow through with action to make those ideas a reality, often including the shaping of objects in the world to fit our needs. In society, we regularly create social reality by generating ideas and acting them out. For example, I can throw a Halloween party. The party is an idea that I can generate in my mind and disseminate to the relevant people, and then we follow through by acting out the idea; this involves gathering food and other objects like costumes to make the ritual work. Notably, it is the belief in the idea that makes the reality of the party become true. Another level is the fact that Halloween is a holiday, and is therefore, socially embedded. A group of friends could just hang out for a night, or it could be a regular holiday.

Even more significant, is when we are talking about an institution rather than a single event.

An institution, as defined above, is a social structure that shapes and constrains human behavior. They can take various forms, like marriage, family, businesses, governments, and more. Any sort of structure that patterns human behavior in predictable ways will constitute an institution. When you go to work, you are expected to show up at specific times and perform specific tasks, in exchange for a wage or salary—and the aggregate of everyone's patterned behavior makes up an institution.

Institutions exist as a higher order entity in society. They pattern behavior according to some common goal, and they operate as a unit against and with other institutions, as if they were individual actors, themselves. When looking at society as a whole, we can call this a system, where, largely informally, a series of institutions have developed patterned relationships with one another over time based on interests and values, all in the context of the constraints of the system itself and the physical world.

A notable feature of this is how one's place within an institution ascribes certain roles to you. If you are working for a wage, then you are an employee, and if you are hiring the worker, you are the employer. Relationships are obviously a lot more complex than this, but the general idea holds across the board. Individual people who make up the institution acquire social roles and characteristics as a result of being a part of this institution. You can conceptualize these characteristics as a kind of relational property, as opposed to an intrinsic property. An intrinsic property is a characteristic that is inherent to the object in question, while the relational property is a characteristic that exists only in connection to other things. This is a concept that can be applied in physical reality, as well. Spatial relations are one example, where Europe may be west of Asia. The notion of being west is not an intrinsic property of Europe, itself. Indeed, Europe also is to the east of America. The reason there is no contradiction is because we are talking about relational properties, rather than intrinsic properties.

While the relational/intrinsic distinction applies broadly, it is especially prevalent in social reality. One man may be a father, an employer, a brother, a son, a neighbor, a tax payer, a voter, and more, all at once, all depending on his relationships with all of the people around him. And these connections can fluctuate over time, as well.

It is within this framework that power is manifest.

V

Individual people rarely act out significant power on their own. Even dictators depend on others. Ultimately, institutions, like the government or a business, act out power. This is because they exist as a higher order entity in human behavior, as a result of their defined purpose. They place incentives on people and, by extension, influence their behavior. But before we move on, it is worth discussing power in the context of institutions, as it acts inward and outward.

As for how institutions act inward, in the previous section, the patterned behavior of people as they take part in institutions is just taken for granted. At the very least, it needs to be acknowledged that power plays a role in creating institutions in the first place. In order to ensure that people's behaviors align with the necessary patterns of behavior, both soft power and incentives are relied on, with soft power usually supplementing the incentive structure in place. A business will have a wage, which is a positive incentive to come into work. As usual, I am providing a simplified picture. Oftentimes, there can be interactions between institutions, creating a system, which provides incentives to perform one's role. Laws against truancy are an example, which has the state acting as a negative incentive to reinforce a student's role in a separate institution.

Institutions also act outward. This is the easiest to understand. You can even model the behavior of institutions as individual actors behaving according to a single will. A government will have armies and will act as a single entity on the world stage. In realist conceptions of international relations, states are modeled as individual actors working toward their own self interest. Businesses also act as single entities, as they are defined around a single goal. Even legally, they are often treated as their own persons.

And like I described above, those within the institutions will acquire roles, and associated relational properties, that are ascribed to them as a result of the social construct that they are taking a part in. In the context of a Kingship, a King will acquire his role as a King because of his connection to the people around him. His role as a King will grant him power as a relational property, and it results from the socially constructed institution that is the kingship, which is in turn shaped by the ideas that the people believe in. A priest, as well, is a priest only in the context of his relationships to other people. And whatever influence he has over people will be entirely the result of their beliefs. A rich man has money. This is also dependent on the beliefs of people in society. It also helps us reintroduce physical grounding, namely incentives, to the conversation—and make distinctions between the King and the priest and the rich man.

The King will be distinct from the priest because he is situated in the context of an institution that has armies and therefore negative incentives that enforce compliance on those who do not toe the line. The priest seems to be Varys' actual shadow on the wall, someone who only has power because people believe he has it, the grounding being nothing more than soft power. It is the King, with his armies, and the rich man, with his wealth, that are able to ground their institutionalized power in physical reality.

Naturally, there is overlap, as well. The King has wealth through taxation, and the rich man can hire mercenaries. But there are predictable downsides. The King can lose wealth and fall to a revolting rich man. And mercenaries who have no belief in their cause but their pay check will be far more fickle than someone who believes that a King has Divine Right to rule. This is because the King has the soft power of tradition as well as armies at his back. And I would be remiss to forget to mention the Pope and his power during the crusade years. Power can be a strange thing, indeed.

VI

Now, what of Varys' thought experiment?

He asks Tyrion to place a sellsword in a room with a King, a priest, and a rich man, each asking the man to kill the other two on their own authority. Tyrion responds by saying that it depends on the sellsword. But this unfortunately implies that the one with the sword is the one with the power, rather than one of, or all of, the three men giving the commands. Varys questions why we say the King has power and not the sellswords who do the fighting. He uses this to jump to his famous line that "Power resides where men believe it resides. No more and no less."

The fundamental fallacy in Varys' reasoning is laid bare. He does not seem to recognize the implications of institutions as an ontological unit of existence. It is institutions, not people, who act on the populace. Through this acknowledgement, you are able to understand how a government is able to wield negative incentives. It is not one sellsword doing it, but an institution operating as a unified entity. This is important to understand because an institution like a government is not nearly as flexible as a single person. There is inertia behind it through the force of numbers and belief. Describing an institution, with its complex of beliefs that sustain it, is not the same thing as a man with a sword, or a single king giving a command, conceived of in isolation.

By extension, he does not understand that the roles that people hold in a given institution assign relational properties, including the power associated with them. Because the King does not seem to have any intrinsic power when plucked out of the social relations that give him that property in the first place, Varys makes the fatal error of assuming that this power must not exist with the King at all. So it goes with the priest and the rich man.

The thought experiment, itself, is flawed, because power itself partly depends on social relations. Once you strip people out of those contexts, their power can disappear, because their power is a relational property. At the same time, their power is not simply an illusion. We do not simply declare a Halloween party an "illusion" because it only exists as a result of our beliefs. We do not declare the government an illusion because it is the result of our beliefs. All social situations are the result of our beliefs. Instead, we have the theory of social constructionism to frame this. Our beliefs create social reality, whether that be a holiday-themed party or sustained institutions like a Kingship or a republic.

Of course, if a scenario like the one in the thought experiment happened, then the sellsword would have the power, but he would only have power in that particular situation. The problem is that you would not be able to extrapolate your conclusions out to wider society, where the King is surrounded by his Kingsguard and where the rich man had his mansion, etc. If we are trying to understand how power works in society, then we must understand power in society, not in some isolated room.

VII

Power is the ability to influence the behavior of other people. It is embodied in physical grounding and in social construction. Physical grounding takes the form of incentives, both positive and negative, and establishes one's ability to influence others in the physical world. Social constructs are ideas, objects, and practices that form events, institutions, and systems in a society. And institutions are constructs that shape and constrain human behavior, forming patterns, ultimately resulting from belief through conformity and soft power. Institutions act as unified entities, and they ascribe social roles, including relational properties like power, to the people who make up the institutions. Finally, power manifests through these units, regulating human behavior in society.

Varys' thought experiment falters because he fails to recognize that institutions exist as a higher order entity in society, even if they result from human belief. He also fails to recognize that power is a relational property that has a social reality, even if it is not intrinsic to the person declared to have said power.

So, where does power lie? It resides where men believe it resides. Except literally. It's not a shadow, it's not a trick, that's just the flexible nature of man and society. And certainly, it can kill.