The paradox of power.

The principal of least interest is a power concept in communication used to point out who is in a dominant position versus a subordinate position in an interaction between two people. The way this concept works is fairly simple. Wal-Mart is a large corporation that has numerous options to choose from when it comes to suppliers. Wal-Mart can therefore be picky about who it wants to buy supplies from. The suppliers of the world on the other hand (the smaller they are), are desperate to sell their products on the market and Wal-Mart can even make them sell lower than they normally would just to make some money by the supplier. The supplier will lower their standards of worth just so they can sell something. If they don't they'll be turned down by another company willing to do it for less. In sense all these suppliers are desperate to sell and Wal-Mart is easily capable of buying as it chooses. Wal-Mart has the power because it has the least interest in each individual supplier due to the fact it has options.

Another example closer to home in our everyday lives would be someone attractive and charismatic due to cultural and temporal standards. So, we have a person who people would really like to date because they seem very desirable based on aesthetic qualities like good physical appearance and/or charisma. This person has many options to date as they please and don't care for a deep commitment to anyone for long because they always have the ability to have more options. The rational approach to counteract this is to realize first that they have less interest in us than we do in them. The next step would be to create the illusion that we are less interested in them than they are in us. This makes us mysterious in a sense and they suddenly call more, and we have to make sure not to call back more than they call us in order to seem less desperate. This eventually gives us more power, because we've played our power card so they desire us as much as we did them and eventually we're on the same playing field. From here we can hope they develop emotional attachments on some level and want us as much as we wanted them.

What I just summarized is the rational approach to dealing with someone we desire that doesn't desire us as much as we do them. It's no surprise that attractive women (in my culture) tend to end up with bad boy/assholes in many cases, but the reason is because these men really don't think all this through the way I outlined in the rational approach. These men are just being themselves. Only a man who really cares would rationalize all these things I outlined and that means he's not a bad boy and he's trying to play out the principal of least interest in his favor. The bad boy would actually be happier with the attractive club girl because he doesn't care anymore than she does. The truth is however neither of them is very happy in their relationships and interactions overall because they're both emotionally broken on some level (can't find emotional stability). Taking this a little further I'll point out that this is the most extreme version of two people. People can play these games at several levels, and attraction can vary as well as "bad boyness". So, let's just say we all play variations of this on several levels.

In my last writing I spoke of the power paradox, which is a concept I came up with to point out the flaw in the principal of least interest. Basically, the rational actor is seeking to maximize their benefit by playing all the loopholes around the person who cares less. By doing this they can eventually get them to want them back. However, this power paradox I point out is that the rational actor has over rationalized a desire that may not have been that important to begin with or in their interest. In doing so the rational actor has manipulated their own actions and personality into one that isn't their own in hopes of achieving someone who doesn't really like the true them for who they are. The thing to question isn't how to get this person I want, but why do I want this, and is this really going to make me happy if I get it?

There are two points I'd like to bring up in why we may desire such a thing in the first place. Both of them have to do with what shapes our thoughts. They are history and language. In history we have the late nineteenth century creation of sexology that took all the forms of sodomy and categorized them while defining their purposes and drives. After this we had Freudian ideas that taught us that sex drives everything we do. Finally we have evolutionary psychology that teaches us everything comes from the drive for either reproduction or survival. This history of ideas shapes our thoughts to believe we should seek out sex as the center of interactions and even those that aren't directly sexual are due to some kind of competition over what people who aren't sexually attracted to each other will battle over. The problem I have with these ideas is they've taken our humanity and categorized it, while putting precedence on certain motives. Do we desire these because they existed and the sciences discovered them, or do we desire them because the sciences invented them and told us they existed? I won't deny there are sexual tendencies, but I believe they exist as part of a far more complex series of things that make us who we are. I believe sex is accompanied by feelings of emotional attraction and a desire for happiness and emotional stability with the people we are drawn toward, and not just a feeling of getting off to reproduce for the species. Sex is just one of many drives drawing us toward other people and all those other things accompanying it are so complex we may never find them all out, but it's the teaching of sex being at the center that makes us act on it as so.

In language we find that the meaning given to words allows a distinction between those we're attracted to with certain priorities over others in some situations. For example when we make new friends, we don't meet someone, exchange numbers, talk a few times, and then ask for the label of friendship. We usually find that we manage to run into someone regularly in the same places we like to hang out and hang out together more and more till suddenly we find we're acting out things friends do. After a while we look back and start asking when did we meet, and when did we become friends? In a dating mentality however, we meet someone, exchange numbers, talk a few times, and after a few dates see if we can be something special with a label like boyfriend/girlfriend. This brings me to the point that the principal of least interest is only capable of coming about, because we're first taught some people are primarily just for sex, and secondly that we have to label them as relationship or not relationship. We have an interest in making them something because we've been taught to desire them a certain way already, and if we can't have that way we start trying to rationalize how to get it. The problem then becomes, can we escape historical meanings of words and categories? If I give you a rose, has passion not already been ingrained into the rose's meaning? I can't take the meaning out of the rose because culture already agreed to put it there and I as an individual can't take it out in my lifetime.

The only options we have left when seeing there's no way of removing already made meanings of things on our own, and that rationalizing our power will only lead to a paradox of it, is to not give the rose if it feels wrong to give the rose. If my rose won't be accepted as special because you already get them from so many others then I just won't give it to you. You may come begging for my rose if I gave you one before and won't now, but as soon as I see that I'm just another option instead of special, there's no reason to waste my roses here anymore. The reason is because I don't need to desire something just because I was taught to if it makes me feel bad. If it makes me feel bad once after we already shared a comfortable experience there's nothing left to share, because this is already turning into a game of power struggle. My desires only need to go places they make me feel good and wanted by my interactions. If friendship makes us feel good and the label develops itself then friendship should be our primary goal and not sex or a relationship. Those things can come after people prove their friendship.

What we find is there doesn't need to be a paradox. We are either cells of the same organ or we aren't. Those who exist within the group that take care of each other will be given the respect of the group. To speak at a more political level when referring to large corporations, it's not till the suppliers who can respect each other mutually and want each other the same can merge at levels that make them greater, that they can start having more say of what the corporations of finished goods request of them. We're in an age of globalization, and many newly developed countries are trying to take steps to keep from being exploited by cutting themselves off from trade. At the same time the most developed countries citizens don't want to open their borders to immigration, freer trade, and expanding monetary systems. I believe we can't stop the inevitable and instead of trying to hold back, we need to push forward harder the thing that will happen anyway, which is regionalization of continents. The countries that border each other should care the most about each other, and consolidate their resources and economies. Instead of trying to keep each other out, we need to let each other in. It's not until this happens that suppliers will consolidate as well as corporations more perhaps. It was because of globalization that industrial jobs started moving from the United States elsewhere, and when the workers of the world try to create unions they're shut down because these corporations can just move again to other countries. If we move forward toward the inevitable, and people have to work under these larger consolidated systems it unites the workers of the world too, because these companies will no longer be able to run to the next country if most of them are regionalized into economic unions. If the world comes down to a few economic unions, all the workers within those unions can work together to unionize themselves finally, because they mutually respect one another and as workers and will all have the power to create a club big enough to balance against the giants that have nowhere else to run.