The Drive for Power and Conceptual Inertia

Among the many psychological forces contributing to the precarious state of civilization today is the drive for power. At the international level, throughout the ages, this drive has expressed itself primarily through preparation for and conduct of violent conflict, as it still does today in most of the world. In a world armed with nuclear missiles, this behavior creates an increasingly ominous threat to civilization if not to humanity itself. The precarious state of civilization today is due to the inability of leaders and people to develop effective alternatives to violence as the final arbiter of power struggles. Since our behavior is largely guided by how we conceptualize the conditions of existence, the inability to alter our concepts fast enough to take account of rapidly changing conditions of life has been termed by Anatol Rapoport (1984) “conceptual inertia.” Thus from a psychological standpoint the drive for power coupled with conceptual inertia may be said to constitute the essence of the danger under which humanity labors today.

In a recent article in the New York Times Magazine, former President Nixon expressed the drive for power succinctly: “What moves the world for good or ill is power and no sovereign nation will give up any of its power—not now and not ever” (p. 7a). Since the policies of a nation are made by its leaders, this statement expresses the attitude of national leaders toward power.

In many of their personal attributes national leaders may differ as much as members of the population at large. To name some leaders at random, Herbert Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, Adolf Hitler, and Winston Churchhill seemed to be as different personally as can be imagined, yet they all shared a strong drive for power; otherwise, they would not have achieved their positions of top leadership. This presentation briefly reviews a few of the shared personal characteristics accompanying the drive for power that appear to be particularly relevant to our present predicamen