"It Should Not Be So Among You"

Reflections on Hierarchy, Power, and Spiritual Warfare

Last week's reflections about Bob Sutton's book The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't reminded me of a paper I delivered at the 2013 Christian Scholar's Conference in a session about Christian anarchism.

My paper was originally titled "On Anarchism and Assholes: Social Psychological Reflections on Anarchism and The Principalities and Powers," but the powers that be didn't like the edgy title and changed it to "It Should Not Be So Among You: Social Psychological Reflections on Anarchism and The Principalities and Powers."

Taking its cue from The No Asshole Rule, my paper shared a spiritual and psychological reflection upon Sutton's observation that "power breeds nastiness." Some of these reflections eventually found their way into Reviving Old Scratch. What follows are the main beats of my CSC paper, slightly edited:

Power Breeds Nastiness

Recall the two tests Bob Sutton proposes to identify an asshole in the workplace:

Test One:
After talking to the alleged asshole, does the "target" feel oppressed, humiliated, de-energized, or belittled by the person? In particular, does the target feel worse about him or herself?

Test Two:
Does the alleged asshole aim his or her venom at people who are less powerful rather than at those people who are more powerful?

These rules capture how humans are easily corrupted by hierarchy and asymmetries in power. Even the smallest power differentials can have deleterious social impacts. For example, in The No Asshole Rule Sutton cites research by Deborah Gruenfeld who has studied the ruinous toll of hierarchy upon human character. In one study described by Sutton, Gruenfeld observed groups of three undergraduates asked to discuss a controversial topic. One of the three students was randomly appointed to evaluate the recommendations of the other two (placing them in a slightly higher power role). Later in the experiment the students were brought a plate of five cookies (intentionally an odd number!). Gruenfeld found that the "high status" students were more likely to take a second cookie, chew with their mouths open, and get crumbs on their faces and the table. As Sutton observes about Gruenfeld's study: "This silly study scares me because it shows how having just a slight power edge causes regular people to grab the cookies for themselves and act like rude pigs. Just think about the effects in thousands of interactions every year..."

It's observations like those from Gruenfeld's research that causes Sutton to conclude that "power breeds nastiness." This is something well-known to psychologists. Our minds quickly go to two of the most famous studies in social psychology, the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Obedience Study. Conducted in 1971 by Philip Zimbardo, the Stanford Prison Experiment was famously called off because the guards of the simulated prison, previously well-adjusted young college students, became abusive and sadistic when given power over the prisoners. And where the Stanford Prison Experiment illustrates the effects of power upon the minds of those wielding it, the Milgram Obedience Study illustrates the toxic effects of power upon those in subordinate positions, those lower down the power hierarchy. As many are aware, the Milgram Obedience Study revealed that the majority of people taken from the general population would give potentially lethal shocks to another human being, even over their cries of pain, if asked to do so by an authority figure.

In sum, power differentials corrupt both those with the power and those without it. This entire dynamic Philip Zimbardo has dubbed “the Lucifer effect.”

Resisting the Principalities and Powers
Having mentioned the Devil, let us shift away from power and hierarchy to talk a bit about spiritual warfare and the theology behind what the New Testament authors call “the principalities and powers.”

We all know the famous text from Ephesians 6. From the King James Version:

Ephesians 6.11-12
Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

The root of the word anarchy is the Greek word arche, along with the prefix an- meaning “not.” Arche is often translated in the New Testament as “power,” “rule,” or “authority.” Etymologically, then, anarchy means “against power, rule, or authority.”

Importantly for our purposes, arche is the word we encounter in Ephesians 6, the second part of the pair “principalities and powers” (archai kai exousiai) which occurs ten times in the New Testament (Lk. 12.11, 20.20; 1 Cor. 15.24; Col. 1.16, 2.10, 2.15; Eph. 1.21, 3.10, 6.12; Titus 3.1). And given that Christians are encouraged in Ephesians 6 to wage a battle “against” the archai—against the powers—spiritual warfare can be described as anarchist, as a battle not against flesh and blood but against the arche, against the principalities and powers.

For most of its history, anarchism has focused upon resisting the powers of the state, even in its Christian manifestations. Anarchist resistance to “wickedness in high places” tends to be externally and politically focused, how the church and the Christian relates to the State in its cultural, political, and economic manifestations. This is, no doubt, a foundational aspect of Christian anarchism: resistance to the power of the State when that power is oppressive, exploitative, unjust and violent.

But as a psychologist I’d like to focus less upon these external and political acts of anarchist resistance to focus on our internal struggle, the spiritual and psychological dynamics of how we live, embedded as we are, within power structures. I’d like to meditate on Bob Sutton’s conclusion that “power breeds nastiness.” I want to reflect on how spiritual warfare requires us to resist the corrupting allure of power that turns us into people we never intended to become.

In focusing on the inner dynamics of this spiritual struggle I’m taking a cue from the seminal work of the late Walter Wink.

One of Wink’s crucial observations is that the ancients and the Biblical authors did not discriminate between spiritual and political powers, that the two were intimately intertwined. Thus, in many of the NT texts where the principalities and powers are enumerated, political officials—rulers, judges, magistrates—are mentioned right alongside spiritual—angelic and demonic—powers. Wink’s observation is that in the ancient imagination every political power had a corresponding spiritual power, and that every spiritual power had a corresponding political power.

In this view, spiritual warfare is simultaneously a political and spiritual struggle. Every political battle on earth was also fought as a battle in heaven. And while this view may seem strange, it makes more sense if you contemplate how the ancients saw their Pharaohs, kings, and Caesars as divine beings, gods, and sons of god. At the very least, rulers were divinely appointed and sanctioned.

Following theologians like Bultmann, Wink argues that the dualism of the ancients, where spiritual powers are believed to exist above or over physical powers below on earth, is difficult to maintain for many modern believers. Wink suggests that we retain the dualism—the tight association between political and spiritual powers—but trade the Up/Down spatial metaphor of the ancients for an Inside/Outside metaphor. That is, power structures have an inner spirituality that animates and vivifies the external, organizational, and institutionalized expressions of power. Here is Wink describing this:

What I propose is viewing the spiritual Powers not as separate heavenly or ethereal entities but as the inner aspect of material or tangible manifestations of power...the "principalities and powers" are the inner or spiritual essence, or gestalt, of an institution or state or system; that the "demons" are the psychic or spiritual powers emanated by organizations or individuals or subaspects of individuals whose energies are bent on overpowering others; that "gods" are the very real archetypal or ideological structures that determine or govern reality and its mirror, the human brain...and that "Satan" is the actual power that congeals around collective idolatry, injustice, or inhumanity, a power that increases or decreases according to the degree of collective refusal to choose higher values. (Naming the Powers, pp. 104-105)

No doubt there are many Christians who would argue that the principalities and powers involve more than this, but I’d like to use Wink’s analysis as his focus on the “inner aspect” of power relations is particularly amenable to psychological analysis. In fact, I would argue that Bob Sutton’s The No Asshole Rule, the Stanford Prison Experiment, and the Milgram Obedience Study are very much about a demonic spirituality that is created by power relations, a spirituality with obvious psychological and moral force. To me, this seems to be a remarkable convergence between modern social science and the Biblical witness.

So, let’s push further in this direction.

Power, the Demonic, and Spiritual Warfare

My argument is that the corrupting influence of power relations shouldn't be reduced to how power is externally exerted with, for example, one group or person bossing or ordering around another group or person. Though, to be clear, coercion is a large part of what has to be addressed in resisting the principalities and powers. My interests here, as a psychologist, are drawn to how the inner spirituality, the animating ethos, of a power structure—that of a nation, economy, culture, organization or institution—becomes internalized by individuals. How the spirituality of the principalities and powers becomes the spirituality of the individual. When this happens, when the animating ethos of a power becomes my animating ethos, the spirit of the principality and power takes up resistance in my heart and mind. I become possessed, owned and enslaved by this spirit. And while Philip Zimbardo likely didn’t have demonic possession in mind when he described “the Lucifer effect,” his reference to the diabolical seems particularly apt and Biblical.

Exorcism, in this account, thus involves being able to name and recognize the spirituality of the power at work around us—in the nation, in the organization, in the economy, and even in the local church—and how that spirituality has taken up residence in our own lives, exerting a negative moral force upon us. This act of naming and recognition is a process of “discerning the spirits.” And once the spirituality of the power is named, in the world and in our own hearts, we create the capacity to externalize this spirituality, to “cast it out” and “exorcise” its demonic influence. Here is Wink describing this dynamic of naming and externalizing demonic influences:

Discernment does not entail esoteric knowledge, but rather the gift of seeing reality as it really is. Nothing is more rare, or more revolutionary, than an accurate description of reality. The struggle for a precise "naming" of the Powers that assail us is itself an essential part of social struggle.

The seer does not, however, simply read off the spirituality of the empire or an institution from its observed behavior. The situation is more complex. The demonic spirit of the outer structure has already been internalized by the seer, along with everyone else. That is how the empire wins compliance. The seer's gift is not to be immune to invasion by the empire's spirituality, but to be able to discern that internalized spirituality, name it, and externalize it. This drives the demonic out of concealment. What is hidden is now revealed. The seer is enabled to hear her own voice chanting the slogans of the Powers, is shown that they are a lie, and is empowered to expel them. The seer locates the source of the chanting outside, and is set free from them. (Engaging the Powers, p. 89)

What all this points to is how resistance to the principalities and powers is not limited to political resistance or activism. Resisting the powers is also, and perhaps even primarily so, an internal, spiritual, and psychological struggle. Resisting the powers involves recognizing, naming, and expunging the spirituality of the powers from our hearts and minds. This resistance is the work of the exorcist, the liberation of ourselves and others from the Lucifer effect.

How, then, are we to be set free from this spirituality that demonically possesses us?

I can’t begin an exhaustive analysis here, but perhaps we can conclude by taking a cue from Jesus:

Matthew 20.25-28 (NLT)
But Jesus called them together and said, “You know that the rulers in this world lord it over their people, and officials flaunt their authority over those under them. But among you it will be different. Whoever wants to be a leader among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first among you must become your slave. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve others and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

“But among you it will be different.” How so?

In the kingdom of God, Jesus says, there is no “lording over,” no use of coercive power. In the words of Mark Van Steenwyk, the Kingdom of God is an unKingdom. Similarly, John Caputo calls the Kingdom of God “a sacred anarchy.” And why is this? Because relations within the Kingdom of God are not mediated by power but by “no rule,” by weakness. Here is Caputo describing the sacred anarchy of the Kingdom of God:

The kingdom of God is a domain in which weakness “reigns,” where speaking of a “kingdom” is always an irony that mocks sheer strength…The kingdom of God obtains whenever powerlessness exerts its force, whenever the high and mighty are displaced by the least among us. (The Weakness of God, p. 14)

God chose the “outsiders,” the people deprived of power, wealth, education, high birth, high culture. Theirs is a “royalty” of outcasts, so that, from the point of view of the aion, the age or the world, the word kingdom is being used ironically, almost mockingly, to refer to these pockets of the despised...For this is a kingdom of the low-down and lowborn, the “excluded,” the very people who are precisely the victims of the world’s power. (The Weakness of God, p. 46)

As Lord of his kingdom, Jesus exerts a paradoxical power. As tells his disciples in Luke 22.27:

I am among you as the one who serves.

Those who lead shall wash feet. Among us, power looks like a man hanging on a cross. Jesus looked upon those who lord over others and declared unto us:

"It should not be so among you."