prompt: cut, title: physician, consult thyself in misc. flash fiction

Power, most acutely power over others, seems to be our universal human allergen. We all react so badly to power. With concentrated enough dosage, we begin to lose some of the most useful tools that come standard with a basic human model like cooperation, empathy and imagination, just as quickly replaced with utterly unbeneficial traits like complacency, hoarding and cruelty.

Power’s allergic reaction leaves us needing to lock things in exactly as they are, so we can hold down that power even beyond our laughably-brief life-spans. Stockpiling things meaningless in small amounts and beyond absurd en masse like stock options or freeze-dried military rations or yachts. More than the tiniest iota of power and it’s like our brains become engulfed in flame. We start feeling like infallible gods and never want the intoxicatingly-ruinous sensation to end. Even as that fire consumes everything good in our too-frail hearts.

Power, as awful as it is, seems an unavoidable side-detriment to any organization of more than a few human beings, though. The crafting of a simple wheel-barrow involves enough people for a power-dynamic to form. The amount of anarchy required to eschew power entirely would leave us with pre-Stone-Age technologies and I’m a fan of automatic ice-machines, so that’s right out.

Bureaucracy, most acutely bureaucratic grid-lock, seems to be the only effective treatment we’ve discovered for the allergy thus far. Sure, some will come along and say we need to tear down this or that existing power and then everything will be better but, invariably, the dilettantes just create some new power then will abuse and be abused by the New Hotness as much as the reactants that came before. Whether they were monstrously-childish libertarians who did that dance on purpose or were instead naïve idealists who discovered the terrible truths only after the fact is immaterial. The song remains the same. Power reacts, absolute power reacts catastrophically. However, with enough bureaucracy, there’s hope. Power diffused, curtailed, cut down by paperwork and rules in opposition to a thousand other powers… religious, government, business, weird fraternal orders, fan-clubs, whatever… similarly constrained, bureaucracies seem to be the best controls we have available for this planet, where power will always exist and always drive us goddamned bananas.

I’m no sociologist, I’m a library aide. I’d look to more than myself for final answer, but I at least have a potential solution to it cooking in my brain. We need even more bureaucracies, redundant bureaucracies, bureaucracies in indirect and diametric oppositions to each other’s goals, diluting and restraining the power any one homo sapien can possess. With enough layers of organization, we can spread out the powers and shrink the reactions small enough where they can be drowned in a bathtub. In-between the stopped gears of all the oppositional forces, we’d be freed together.

Our only problem is that some people are so crazed they think this adverse reaction is actually a good thing so we will require many more specialized mental hospitals and real goddamned soon.