One-Minute Elder
POWER, ATTACHMENT & SUFFERING
Why Our Politics Doesn’t Work
The Buddha says life comes with suffering. Not because life is cruel, but because we cling. We attach. We grip. We clutch.
What are politicians so fervently clutching?
Power.
Not electricity. Not horsepower.
Positional power — the authority to decide, to control outcomes, to move markets, shape policy, hire and fire, get richer, elevate and eliminate.
The power of the Senate office, the committee chair, the title, to get next to the “secrets” and the gossip, and the access badge to coveted events that others can’t get a ticket for.
The power to create enemies, go to war, rationalize your motives, and be suspicious of everyone around you. This kind of power comes with its own brand of paranoia.
Here’s when it goes sideways: when power fuses with identity.
Power stops being something you hold and starts becoming who you are.
That’s when power corrupts. That’s how power corrupts. When it becomes who you are.
One way to bear witness to our political climate is simply to observe how much energy is being spent seeking, defending, and performing power. Not stewarding it. Protecting it. Gaining more of it. Fear of losing it. Strategies to gain it.
Power begins to cause suffering the moment it shifts from stewardship to self-protection. When the question quietly changes from “What serves?” to “What preserves me?”
That shift has indicators: different parts of your brain light up, while others dim. And there’s obvious physical evidence.
Information gets curated instead of revealed.
Dissent becomes disloyalty.
Loyalty becomes transactional currency.
Language gets sharper. Listening gets thinner.
Compromise is labeled betrayal.
Complex problems get reduced to slogans because nuance threatens control.
But power must be protected, so power comes with chronic vigilance. Every headline is a threat. Every poll is a referendum on survival. Every opponent is existential.
There’s no rest for the mind or body. No exhale. No peace, equanimity, joy, and certainly no humor. Just look at the faces of the men and women in Congress and the Administration. What do you see? What do their words intend?
With power, there’s no place for love, forgiveness, or graciousness because they make you vulnerable. Adoration, appeasement, admiration, that’s what works to keep that power fuel going. Fill’er up.
But listen closely, attachment to power creates a constant internal hum:
A constant loud hum of paranoia, distrust, fear, suspicion, and obsession.
Don’t lose it.
Protect it.
Defend it.
That hum is the sound of suffering.
And here’s the paradox: the more politicians cling to their power, the more fragile it becomes. The higher the office, the thinner the ice. Isolation increases. Candor decreases. Moral compromise gets renamed “strategy.”
Their justifications become sophisticated. Apprehensions increase. Anxiety becomes private and palpable.
Power itself isn’t the problem.
Power as identity is.
And that’s why our politics are so dysfunctional: our politicians are so attached to seeking and holding power, afraid it will be taken away, which puts them in a constant state of suffering. Suffering shunts their focus from you, their constituents, to them, the scared and the anguished.
They believe that more power will rid them of their suffering. Just the opposite. The more power, the more suffering.
The tragedy isn’t that our politicians have power.
It’s that power has them.
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