I’m trying to return to the book I started writing a decade ago, and doing so has pulled my awareness of and relationship to the events of 2026 into the larger consciousness the book is struggling to address: What is power?

Can we broaden and expand this word? Can we merge it with collective awareness—you know, the idea of working together? Can we expand our awareness beyond the sense of dominance: power with, rather than power over? Yes, power with, in the “love thy enemy” sense, but without the cynicism and ignorance that usually accompany the word “love."

When we think of power, as I discuss in the book, the word itself commands that we carve the concept into something isolated and wieldable: a sword, a gun, a scepter. Power means power over. There is no basic concept of power—seemingly no word for power in the English language—that also means collaboration, collective participation: people working together, individually empowered at the same time that the larger whole is empowered.

Even when we examine the dark side of power—as in, power corrupts—the examination seems to hover as a warning rather than open up to larger awareness. Consider, for instance, this 2017 article in The Atlantic by Jerry Useem, titled (fasten your seatbelts!) “Power Causes Brain Damage,” which discusses a concept he calls “hubris syndrome.” The essential point the article makes is that people who gain a significant amount of power over others lose the ability to empathize with—or mime, as the article puts it—people in general, the lesser mortals who must follow the boss’ orders. Why am I suddenly thinking of Donald Trump, the world’s “Power Jesus”?

Let’s break the automatic linguistic link right now between power and dominance. True power enlarges the whole; it doesn’t isolate.

This inability to express or feel empathy, it turns out, is serious. It isolates the powerful into their own stereotypes and egotistical certainties, which lessens their ability to make good, or even rational, decisions. (Right, Donald?). And hubris syndrome isn’t merely psychological; it’s also physiological.

Citing neuroscience research, Useem writes:

And when he put the heads of the powerful and the not-so-powerful under a transcranial-magnetic-stimulation machine, he found that power, in fact, impairs a specific neural process, ‘mirroring,’ that may be a cornerstone of empathy. Which gives a neurological basis to what (psychologist Dacher) Keltner has termed the ‘power paradox’: Once we have power, we lose some of the capacities we needed to gain it in the first place.

Useem quotes authors David Owen and Jonathan Davidson, who define hubris syndrome as “a disorder of the possession of power, particularly power which has been associated with overwhelming success, held for a period of years and with minimal constraint on the leader.” Its 14 clinical features, he adds, include: “manifest contempt for others, loss of contact with reality,........

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