If we are seek a sense of universal motive in human behavior, whether we are referring to the behavior of people in collectives, or as lone-individuals, or as investigators or jurors in a adjudication of a crime, we must refer ultimately to the human drive for power, especially power that is expressed socially in terms of human relationships and symbolically in terms of the manipulation of the elements of one's life world.

From the standpoint of the anthropological relativity of knowledge in the understanding of human behavior, I would make a strong claim that all human purposive activity that involves even a minimal degree of intentionality and planning, is primarily and ultimately motivated by what amounts to a drive for power, whether this is expressed in social contexts or in personal ways. Therefore, almost all organized human behavior, and even much behavior that appears otherwise disorganized, is behavior that can be explained, motivationally speaking, in terms of the need for power and the sense of satisfaction that is gained from power.

This claim being made, it becomes incumbent to define "power" in a way that is relevant to our argument. In a fundamental sense, I would say that power is the ability to control change in a deterministic manner, especially as change relations to other people and to social relationships. In social terms, power translates into a sense of status and a sense of control that is gained from the ability to determine a course of events, especially as these events affect other people. 

The drive for power can be largely unconscious, and yet remains a prime mover in the organization of behavior. Because the sense of status and control that is achieved from power is symbolic, it becomes a powerful psychological motivator and inducement for behavior, so powerful in fact that it may override almost any other drive or human need that may be claimed to occur. Because power is at the basis of  the symbolic transformation of the human psyche, as the source of will and driver for purposive determination, and because symbolic experience allows for the flexible encoding and analogical transference of value and meaning from one form into a variety of alternate forms, the drive for power is very plastic and very malleable and itself can be sublimated and transformed in very different and often interesting if not completely frightening ways.

The drive for power has one central weakness--it is largely a vicarious and fleeting, impermanent experience. Once having achieved power through the actual determination of an outcome, the experience, status and sense of satisfaction gained quickly dissipates, lost in the stream of on-going experience, and hence, as the sense gained from the achievement of power sinks back below the surface of conscious awareness, the need to regain this sense of power arises back up in however a rationalized and convoluted a manner.

It is apparent too that the drive for power is largely an insatiable and unending need, and the achievement of power induces an even greater need for gaining more power. We can speculate therefore that at the core of the need and drive for power, especially when this appears to occur in an extreme or inordinately large degree, is a deep seated and fundamental sense of dissatisfaction and insecurity of one's own sense of ego identity in the world. This sense of deep dissatisfaction I believe comes from the experience of the loss of control, and the achievement of vicarious or displaced symbolic control, in one's early years of development, mediated as these experiences are by significant others and the often uncontrollable vicissitudes of one's effective environment. We might relate this deep need to a sense of separation, loss and rejection experienced by an immature ego, especially in relation to significant others, and the inability to effectively compensate for this sense of loss by replacement with others or displacement onto healthy forms. We may suggest a fundamental sense of discrepancy in the personality and character of an individual human being, bifurcated between a largely unconscious, libidinally driven, power hungry persona, and a weak and fragile sense of ego that is incapable of controlling the "controller." 

In making these remarks I do not separate qualitatively or distinguish clearly between what I would consider to be normal cases and examples of the need for power and what can be considered clinically or criminally pathological drives for power. The differences seem to be in the degree to which this drive for power becomes the controlling factor of one's behavior, and the manner in which this drive is symbolically transformed and transferred onto a larger set of relationships in the world. In this sense, writer who lives through the characters and plot structure of a novel may be working with similar drives as a dictator who lives through the suffering and repression of an entire nation, or a sadistic sexual psycho-path who lives vicariously through the torture and cruel suffering of their victims.

What this drive for power is critically linked to, at least in terms of human systems theory, is what I have elsewhere referred to as the symbolic transformation of human nature that is most marked by the idea of world openness and the lack of instinctive or other forms of natural constraint upon human behavior. Human behavior is invariably transformed and becomes symbolically expressed and mediated. Because it is highly plastic and highly volatile, it is capable of being manipulated symbolically in a wide variety of ways, often in ways that may be considered extreme, bizarre and naturally perverse. Human behavior frequently shows signs of symbolically transformed perversity largely not encountered in the natural animal world. Our tendency towards aggressive action and violence, especially in group contexts, is therefore probably not the show of an instinct for natural aggression arising for instance from intra-specific agonism, nor can we attribute it to some genetic predisposition per se. Rather, it is evident, that human aggression in the forms it takes and in the ways we are familiar with it especially in modern social contexts, is largely the result of the lack of natural mechanisms of control over human "nature" and the consequences of the symbolic transformation of this "nature" in ways probably not intended by nature.

The plasticity by which this drive for power can be shaped in so many divergent forms, and the degree to which the symbolic displacement and transformation of human character can take, even to the point of overriding what can be considered natural sexual urges and other natural drives for food, a stable body temperature, etc., is indeed quite remarkable, and I believe a very strong case can be made for the influence of hormones and also the release of endorphines and other psycho-active agents as a by-product of the quest and actual achievement of a sense of power. These "psycho-somatic" side-effects of the drive for power may be the essential component that predisposes humanity to a chronic abuse of psycho-tropic drugs and narcotics and what is considered by some the universal need for the achievement of alternative states of consciousness. This need for periodically experiencing alternative states of consciousness, however induced, including various forms of hallucination as well as hyper-suggestive states of trance and other "out-of-body" experiences, seems to me to be a consequence of the symbolic possibilities of the active human brain that quickly finds tedious and monotonous the pace of normal experience.

If we watch animals in their sleep, we an have little doubt that they are dreaming and that the subjective experience of their dreams is very like the way in which we experience our dreams. Dreaming serves therefore a very fundamental purpose for the active mammalian brain. The functions of dreaming are not well understood, but must have a lot to do with the reorganization of the brain, the filtering and integration of new experience, and the symbolic processing of new experience in relation to old experience that is stored as forms of memory or possibly posited in the neural encoding of the brain itself. But it becomes equally evident that dreaming for human beings takes on an entirely different level and order of meaning than it does for instance in dogs, and that for human beings, states of waking consciousness can at times become confused with dream states, the two commingling at the edge of conscious awareness. Not to revisit old stereotypes, but in severe schizophrenics we find people who are awake and yet who are as if in a dream world of their own making. If schizophrenia occurs in dogs in a manner and degree we find it in human beings, it would be a surprise to me as I've not seen a dog yet I would call schizophrenic. But then we can assume that dogs are more instinctively bound to nature, to a closed Uexkullian world of "dog nature" than human beings seem to be.

It is not my intention here to rhetorically belabor a scientific argument with only anecdotal evidence and an appeal to common sense. I would say that the drive to some kind of power is resident in many forms of animals, particularly in animals we refer to as active predators. The capacity to control the outcomes of events in the world are a direct extension of the capacity to control one's own behavior in response to events in the world, however this is achieved, whether by instinct or by symbolic construction. Biological survival, and an "instinct" to live, especially for animals, is predicated on the capacity to interact with a world in terms of one's behavioral controls. This "instinct" even supercedes and hence precludes any drives toward reproductive success, which in its way can be considered an extension and further expression of the self-same set of instincts for survival. We may call it a "natural" will to live or will to survive. This drive exists within us whether we are challenged by our environments in any critical manner or otherwise. It seems often in ordinary life, many of these kinds of rudimentary challenges are removed by design, by cultural preference and by social directive, and often as not, with little to replace it in any ordinary sense of lived experience. But whether suitable contexts exist for its expression or not, the need for its expression may continue doing its own thing regardless.

There is one last point that I must question in relation to this thesis about the universality of the human drive for power and the symbolic transformation of human nature, and this has to do with what can be called a preoccupation for death and, possibly the fear or at least sense of symbolic marginalization that comes from the experience of death, the threat of death, or even just the existence of death. A perverse fascination with death, with killing and the dead, seems to psychologists to be a pathological expression of innate curiosity in life, and of a need to control one's experiences of life. The preoccupation with death and dying seems to me to be a rudimentary expression of the drive for life and survival. In living systems, and especially I think in living systems as sophisticated as human systems, there can be no greater expression of power than the control of life or death over another living being, for death is not just final, ultimate, irreversible, but, I think often overlooked, it represents in a fundamental sense a "win" in a kind of zero-sum game of living and an essential form of competition between organisms. In this sense, the taking the life of another, whether this is done on a field of battle, in a robbery, or as a consequence of a psycho-pathic perversion, represent what might be referred as a presymbolic affirmation of one's own life experiences and chances for success in life. This is by no means a justification of why it is humans so commonly and frequently take the life of other organisms, not just humans but of many forms of life, and appear often to be fascinated by this scenario in their life such that they would want to watch it over and over again played out in movies or on television or in the news media. It is rather merely an attempt to understand how it is that we can be thus fascinated by such a perverse and seemingly destructive interest on such a basic level, and an at least tentative explanation of why this just might be so.

Perhaps needless to conclude, the drive for power is in all of us and may become expressed in many different ways. Many ways are in fact constructive and healthy, and many other ways are obviously not. To become psychologically and behaviorally caught in a particular trajectory of development of this drive for power and its behavioral and social expression in the world, versus some alternative pathway, is critical to answer and yet probably so complex and multivariate that it is impossible to answer in any final way. Whatever trajectory we achieve in the course of our life, and in the course of events in our life, we get caught into what can be called a "circle of power" in which one set of events leads to another, to social consequences and reactions, that in turn drive the need for power to even greater heights, and power can become both psychologically and sociologically amplified thereby.  I'm exhibiting my need for power in writing this overwrought essay, and, if you have read thus far, you are probably exhibit some will for power in reading it to the end. The proverbial slave exhibits power through the dependency of the master on the slave's powerlessness. The will to power takes many forms symbolically in human behavioral response in the world. It is shaped, harnessed and made available to the world by the society in which we are a part and in which we enact our parts.

It is something of a mistake to cast the drive for power as an abnormal or pathological characteristic of human nature, and to portray it only in terms of sociopaths and other criminals. The drive to power characterizes all human beings both equally and in uniquely individual ways. We all manifest this drive, more or less, along a multi-dimensional continuum of its expression in terms of strength, direction and transformation of affect, aggression, activity and rationalization. 

I am of the opinion that human achievement motivation (McClelland et. al.) that in the modern global system is primarily expressed by means of money, that translates into resource acquisition and appropriation, is what can be called a structurally and socially normalized extension of fundamental human power motivation, and the neverending quest to make money and to get rich is merely one more culturally and socially sanctioned form of the manifestation of the drive for power.

I think, as a refrain, that it is easy to overlook the motive of power in our lives and in our world, especially if we are caught up in the grip of power and its circles in our lives. We can repress our confrontation with it, attempt to stifle, manipulate, alter or even extinguish it, not only in ourselves but in others around us. We can especially rationalize its ends and means in our life in practically any manner we choose to see it in, thereby justifying it to ourselves in a satisfactory way if not completely to others in the world. We can act out the drive and fantasies that the need for power manifests itself in, and we can vicariously displaces and project it out onto the world in all kinds of ways. I would even say, that in some social settings, the drive for power can become so manifest and so overwhelming in social life, that it must needs thereby be denied or ideologically justified in a collective manner that not only "makes sense of it" but serves to neutralize or remove any possibly negative consequences that apperceptive realization of its possibilities (and potential horrors) might bring. As it has been said recently, the fish rots from the head down. I think it is in this regard, in a sense of projective symbolic displacement, much easier to recognize the true intent and designs of power in others than to see and acknowledge how it may play out in our own lives. Our ability to symbolically manipulate and transform power is a form of power itself, uniquely human it seems.

General Systems Essays, Vol. II