Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [85]
Arendt answers with one word: violence. “Under the conditions of human life,” Arendt writes, “the only alternative to power is not strength—which is helpless against power—but force,” an alternative enabled “by acquiring the means of violence” (Human Condition, p. 202). Violence is instrumental, using instruments like weapons to amplify the strength of a powerful individual. Weapons, therefore, cheat the definition of power and multiply the strength of an individual so that they may ape the effects of empowerment. Thus, one person with a machine gun can command obedience from a large group of people in just the way that a legitimately elected king or president commands attention and obedience upon entering a room. The instruments of violence, then, are a shortcut; an attempt to deliver the power that is found in group acquiescence by side-stepping the whole business of political approval in favor of cold, hard steel. In this sense, Arendt argues, “the extreme form of violence is One against All” (On Violence, p. 42).
The narrator of Hail to the Thief’s “Sit Down. Stand Up.” seems to rely implicitly on the implements of violence. The repeated refrains of “sit down, stand up” and “walk into the jaws of hell” are hardly requests—they come from a place of command which we can only assume is backed by the menace of violence. Yorke’s eerie delivery of the lines “We can wipe you out anytime” makes this threat explicit: unless you, the listener, do what you’re told, you’ll be erased. Faced with this situation, Mao Zedong’s saying that “Power grows out of the barrel of a gun” seems to ring true.
But Arendt disagrees: “Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent” (On Violence, p. 56). But aren’t Mao’s gunmen and the narrator of “Sit Down. Stand Up.” powerful in that they command obedience? It’s true, Arendt says, that “out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience.” But this obedience stems ultimately from the fear of violence and death, and not out of a plural political empowerment. In fact, Arendt states, “violence appears where power is in jeopardy” and “left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance.” This is because “no government exclusively built on the means of violence has ever existed,” as even extremely violent totalitarian regimes “need a power basis—the secret police and its net of informers” (p. 50). Even the most violent of governments must still have some form of political empowerment—somebody has to be doing the dirty work for the dictator and, as we have seen, that somebody’s action is the essence of any political power.
Go and Tell the Thief that the Sky Is Falling In
Revolution is Arendt’s example of how, though they are intertwined, power is separate from violence. In a revolutionary situation, the “superiority of government has always been absolute” when it comes to instruments of violence; tanks beat Molotov cocktails every time. But “this superiority lasts only as long as the power structure of the government is intact” (p. 48). Thus, “where commands are no longer obeyed, the means of violence are no use,” and the question of obedience to command is dictated not by the means of violence but by the opinion of resistance “and the number of those who share it.” When you and whose army end up joining the resistance, it is not long until power will shift hands.
But before that shift occurs, the temptation to violence is at its most extreme. As Arendt observes, “rule by sheer violence comes into play where power is being lost” (p. 53). No longer backed by the power of the people, violence, the means of destruction, becomes the determining end of government. It’s no longer a means to an end guided by the power of the people invested in the ruling party or person—it’s now only an extension of that ruling party or leader’s desire, ironic