SENTIENT TIMES June/July 2002

Liberation Psychology and the Power Elite

By Royal E. Alsup, Ph.D.

The power elite in the United States uses bureaucracy as a social weapon to control the masses. C. Wright Mills, a famous American sociologist, outlined this triangle of power in his excellent book, The Power Elite. Mills’ ideas are clearly explained by J. Macionis:

“The term power elite is a lasting contribution of C. Wright Mills (1956), who argued that the upper class … holds the bulk of society’s wealth, prestige, and power. The power elite constitute this country’s ‘superrich,’ families linked through business and marriage who are able to turn the national agenda toward their own interests.

The power elite, claimed Mills, historically has dominated the three major sectors of U.S. society—the economy, the government, and the military. Elites circulate from one sector to another, consolidating their power as they go … Rejecting pluralist assertions that various centers of power serve as checks and balances on one another, the power-elite model suggests that those at the top encounter no real opposition.”

Mills warned us over forty years ago about this concentration of power, wealth, and prestige in the hands of the wealthy and powerful in American society. He wrote that the power elite refers to “those political, economic, and military circles, which as an intricate set of overlapping cliques share decisions having at least national consequences. In so far as national events are decided, the power elite are those who decide them.”

There are many wealthy people in the United States but they are not all members of the power elite. Advantageous positions for power, prestige, and wealth include the uppermost administrative positions in the three top bureaucratic organizations—the Pentagon, corporate America, and the executive branch of the United States Government. President Clinton had a lot of power when he was the President of the United States but as a former president his power has been diminished. Retiring as the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and moving into a main cabinet position as Secretary of State have increased Colin Powell’s power. The position or office holds the privilege of power not the person. Holding these positions or offices enable the elite to gain administrative control of our main bureaucratic organizations, so they are able to maintain their own wealth, power, and privilege.

In a pluralist democracy power, privilege, and wealth are distributed more equitably on several different levels throughout the democratic state. It is more inclusive than a state that is run by a few who represent the power elite. Even Robert Dahl, one of the stalwart supporters of the concept of pluralism, concedes that “the marked concentration of wealth, as well as the barriers to equal opportunity faced by minorities, constitute basic flaws in our nation’s quest for a truly pluralist democracy.” Liberation Psychology, in contrast, considers the individual’s total life-world and assists in the identification, and eventual meeting, of basic needs.

The presence of the power elite in the political, economic, and military bureaucracies is obvious in America’s War on Terrorism and the Middle East crisis. The oil interests (economic) are involved with President Bush and Vice-President Cheney (political) through their past connections in that field. Powell was the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for former President George Bush during the Gulf War. Recently CNN announced that Colin Powell (military) receives money from Syria for his oil interests. These interconnections make the triangle complete—war, business, and politicians are using the bureaucratic society to create a vicious circle of violence.

The military, economic, and political bureaucracies are organized, rationalized modern structures that dehumanize and undermine the concept of a pluralist democracy. The aim of bureaucracies is to achieve efficiency, predictability, calculability, and control. Bureaucratization of American society by the power elite that manipulate and control politicians, the military, and corporations puts the fulfillment of basic needs into the hands of few people at the top of our hierarchal democracy. The power elite is destroying the possibility for our citizens’ achievement of their basic needs for justice, power, freedom, self-determination, nonviolence, love, belonging, attachment, trust, hope, safety, security, competence, uniqueness, gender, culture, creativity, and spirituality. The bureaucratization of American society by the power elite indicates that pluralist democracy and the basic need fulfillment of the masses is not predictable, calculable, or controllable and is too inefficient for modern society.

Max Weber, a German sociologist, de-scribed the characteristics of bureaucracy in the early twentieth century. Weber emphasized that mutually inter-dependent elements create the process of rational-ization. He stressed that the West has its particular brand of bureaucracy, which has super-rational structures that promote organizational efficiency. These structures dehumanize the people in the bureaucratic nation-state by creating an environment of meaningless work that entraps them in an “iron cage.” The following six key characteristics, paraphrased from Weber’s work, are the traits of an ideal bureaucratic organization.

Specialization

The bureaucratic organization prescribes limited duties that alienate the worker and administrator from the finished product. Being goal oriented, the organization demands that the worker carry out a specialized task that is only part of the whole process. This fracturing fragments the worker’s self and disrupts their basic needs of belonging and creativity. A division of labor of specialized tasks demands that a worker be efficient and controlled, with a set scope of work described by a rational job description. The specialization and fracturing create a value of duty that externalizes a person’s values. His or her locus of control changes from internal values and thoughts to an external locus of control of values demanded by bureaucratic duty and job.

Hierarchy of Offices

The hierarchal order makes the office on the lower level accountable to the office on the higher level. Offices on the higher level assure the efficiency and control on the lower level by supervising and overseeing the process from top-down. This creates a whole psychology of enslavement, dividing the self and damaging the basic needs of freedom, self-determination, and trust. Hummel’s (1994) research confirms that the rational organizational structure of the bureaucracy dehumanizes and causes alienation by destroying the fulfillment of basic needs.

Hierarchy lends itself to people violating people with less power on a lower level in the organization. In the famous Milgram study on obedience, 65 percent of a sample of ordinary Americans was willing to deliver dangerous levels of electric shock to an innocent person because an authority figure directed them to do so. The person who was supposed to receive the punishment in these studies was out of sight but within hearing distance. The punished person faked intense reaction to pain when the shock was increased, and even fell ominously silent. The person administering the pain could hear the fake suffering and, although disturbed about hurting another person, continued to increase the punishment to severe levels simply because the boss of the study commanded it.

Hierarchy privileges the power of a boss over a worker, a psychologist over a client, or a teacher over a student. Hierarchies distort the power needs of all parties involved by giving a false sense of superiority to one and a false sense of inferiority to the other.

Rules and Regulations

According to Weber, “formal rationality means that the search by people for the optimum means to a given end is shaped by rules, regulations, and larger social structures.” Weber stressed that bure-aucracies would come to dominate, dictate, and control every aspect of our lives. Calling this process “the rationalization of society,” Weber meant that bureaucracies, with their rules, regulations, and emphasis on results, would increasingly govern our lives.

Over emphasis on formal rationality causes irrationality to appear, such as sabotaging the goals of the organization. Lack of basic need fulfillment for creativity, hope, trust, and attachment often causes workers to unconsciously sabotage the goals of the organization by behaviors such as inefficient work habits and high levels of absenteeism. Abraham Maslow’s manage-ment studies indicate that disgruntled workers will be inefficient at their jobs. When needs are not met, workers become disgruntled and deficit motivated.

Technical Competence

Bureaucracies use technology to replace workers in the pursuit of efficiency, predictability, and control. Technology replaces the soldier in the use of “smart” bombs. The need to make killing more efficient brought technical experts to the military to design and build bombs with better calculability and predictability. Here we see the power elite triad at work—the military contracting with business to build better bombs, making the politician’s war more competent. Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, brags that the smart bombs used in the Afghanistan war made the bombs in the Gulf War look stupid. Efficiency, calculability, control, and predictability—the hallmarks of bureaucratization—again legitimize genocide and war in the Middle East.

Bureaucracies also use technology to observe their workers, maintaining control and efficiency. Businesses often use software technology to monitor that their workers use the Internet only for work-related business. This use of technology to spy on us erodes our basic needs of trust, hope, love, and nonviolence. Some states and cities use cameras at cross walks for surveillance. Bureaucratic politicians and courts of law back these business and corporate practices to spy on its members and citizens, part of the action of the power elite. Sadly, we are giving up our human needs for freedom and liberation to the technological competence of our country.

Impersonality

The characteristics of bureaucracy can create beneficial results. Efficiency, predictability, calculability, and control allow bureaucracies to carry out incredible amounts of work and to organize great masses of people, like China and India, for instance. However, the impersonal bureaucracy armed with its rules and regulations demands that workers repress their human emotions and needs in order to keep their jobs in the marketplace. The needs of the business or organization are primary, subverting human needs and dehumanizing the workplace.

Organizational narcissism, which demands that the goals of the organization do not take into account the needs of the worker, uncaringly and unwisely implements the demolition of human values, pollutes and destroys the environment, and supports war as means to further their own goals. All the while, bureaucracies assure us that scientific management and grand technology will provide for us a utopian world. The ridiculous message is that big business and big military will save us by destroying all life on Earth.

Formal, Written Communications

“An old adage states that the heart of bureaucracy is not people but paperwork” (Macionis, 1995). The organization relies on the centrality of memos and paper trails rather than being person-centered or worker-centered. The paper chase has been improved by e-mail; new nonhuman technologies have improved the efficiency and predictability of employees. We currently see how the technology of a paper shredder helped the Anderson Accounting firm to destroy evidence of their misdoings. We can see how fraudulent formal writings and written communications can have a horrendous impact on our society by looking at the two big scandals in our business world. With our tax dollars, we are still paying for the Savings and Loan fiasco in which the brother of the President, Neil Bush, had a role. In the Enron situation, non-owner managers hurt thousands of employees and share holders by covering up their fraudulent practices through written, formal communications. How much is the Enron Corporation scandal and its fraudulent manipulation of energy prices in California related to our oil interests in the Middle East, and do those interests make us impotent in negotiating a peace settlement between the Palestinians and the Israelis?

In conclusion, bureaucratic America is transporting an efficient, reliable military and economic machine all over the globe, dehumanizing the world by destroying basic need fulfillment and locking all the global inhabitants into a meaningless “iron cage,” turning us all into “happy robots” (C. Wright Mills).

The bureaucratic society goes beyond the political concepts of left or right, conservative or liberal. The bureaucratic politicians, Bush, Powell, Rumsfeld, Sharon, and Arafat, use impersonal rules and roles to destroy our hopes for peace. The sacredness of human life is shattered as these political and military leaders rationalize that a few civilian men, women, and children have to die in any war. They are cold hearted and irrational in their calculatedness and efficiency. The bureau-cratic society, like the bureaucratic organization, demands that we cannot let our emotions or our hearts guide us. Carrying out war is “business as usual” that is based on a terrible lack of concern for all humanity.

The irrationality of nationality is demonstrated in genocide, which is the root of destruction in the bureaucratization of America and the globe. It is at the heart of the Middle East tragedy. In the Palestinian and Israeli violence, we see that the roles, rules, and regulations of the bureaucratic society and the power elite tries to dominate and squelch individuals trying to bring peace and nonviolence to the situation. One Liberation Psychologist standing tall in the irrational madness that is the war between Palestine and Israel is Shimon Perez, the Foreign Minister of Israel, who deserves the profile in courage award for standing apart from the bureaucratic state to advocate cooperation and peace. With his courageous stance, he is promoting the human need fulfillment of self-determination, hope, attachment, and nonviolence. Perez has the intuition and wisdom to know that we are unhappy robots locked into an iron cage of military, economic and political bureaucracy, and we are losing our freedoms and rights to bureaucratic societies and nation/states.

Royal E. Alsup, Ph.D., is a Licensed Marriage, Child and Family Counselor, co-founder of the Humanistic and Trans-personal Psychotherapy Center in Arcata, California and adjunct faculty at Saybrook Graduate School in peace studies, conflict resolution, creativity and shamanism. Royal be contacted at Royalalsup@aol.com.

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