Imagine if you will that you are sat in a pizza restaurant one evening having a meal, you notice that although there are a lot of people busy at the ovens, the place is virtually empty of live souls. What you haven’t noticed is that every few minutes a guy comes in with a turquoise square box with foil lining and picks up two or three bags and boxes and exits the store to the car he has waiting (or she has). There’s nothing remarkable about any of this, people are working this well-oiled machine and for the most part it is working. This is all young for me, I was used to going to get hot food, apart from if it was Chinese food in NI because that could get delivered, now everything is delivered, and the young do the work. The chefs are young, the delivery drivers are young, but more importantly the girl in charge is young. I’m in a student town, I suspect these are all students doing this labour. Before you read on, remember this is not an attack on a person, it is merely a thought based on an observation, as always I am willing to be completely wrong.
I’ll describe our would be supervisor, or maybe team leader is the correct term. She is, I would assume, about 21-22, and there’s nothing wrong with that when it comes to her position of power, nor is there anything wrong with the fact that she is a woman (I think she is anyways). What may be wrong, and this is only from my, possibly biased, possibly old, perspective, is that she looks nothing like somebody who wants to be taken seriously. She achieves this goal, and the response is an elicited, garnered, decided upon, crafted, one because a lot of effort has gone into designing every facet of her appearance, nothing is left to nature and nothing is ordinary. This is not really an emo, as emo’s have a certain sexiness in their expressive vulnerability or capture a cartoon-ish type of non-aggressive aggressiveness (does that make sense?), this is something else altogether, a juxtaposition. Her hair is red, the sort of shocking red that borders on being visible at night in a dark room, her nails are all different colours and designs, she is pierced everywhere including a nose ring that has two downward protruding spikes of about an inch long that cone down into points and are a shiny gloss black, her eyes have been made up to look like they are from a character in a Japanese manga comic, and her lashes protrude so as to be like peacock tails, her facial makeup is stark, alarming, arresting, it sets you onto the back foot just to look in her direction. Her clothes are mismatched very deliberately, combining D.M boots in a punkish style with the sort of just over three quarter length suit trousers that you’d expect an executive to wear. Nothing about her attire suits her not too overweight, but thoroughly nonathletic, body shape. The sleeves of her tee-shirt are very short revealing strange tattoos on arms possessing zero muscularity, they are sort of a delicate chunky, if that makes any sense?
Everything about the look of this girl (who can be sure?) is designed, manufactured, thought out, tested repeatedly, and I suspect arrived at after many tries in front of the mirror, to create an idea of her and who she is in the mind of the person stumbling upon her company, one that she can then be upset with, or can feel like a minority because of. What I’m saying is that this is a rouse, a subterfuge, a disguise, a facade, a false flag, bullshit, a loud cry for a uniqueness that belays any real talent that may lay below, it is a fence between expectation and reality because the character she creates in your mind is one that immediately gives her an advantage over you. Now what could be the purpose of this? I would contend that some young people have noticed that there is a great utility in beginning as the offended party, that putting their interlocutor into a place where they are apologetic by society’s expectations, expectations that none of us can any more claim to be unaware of, they may find themselves in an advantageous place to be. What I mean is that during the interplay of equals, and with an understanding that any potential physical advantage used to intimidate is not at all acceptable or useful in a provider-consumer relationship, and further seeing that purchasing power, therefore financial power, is mooted by the fact that each customer is already tacitly in the transaction and so without extra power in the dynamic, we would expect that the customer would in fact have some assumed power over the vendor. To negate this, since the customer is likely me, and I cannot be allowed to dominate even in any minuscule way, this young person, the girl, seeks this advantage with her presentation.
Now some people see the situation differently, they might wish to say that this girl is merely expressing herself and that is strength, something to be admired, the real her coming out, and that may be true (like I said, willing to be wrong), but… I often think that this proposed presentation is a way of hiding weakness rather than expressing strength or commitment to a fashion or a persona, and I feel justified in thinking this way because more often than not when I engage with the person I realise a sense of intellectual ineptitude or emotional immaturity marching quickly into the situation. To use your look to deliberately affect the dynamic of interplay before a word is spoken is a tactic, one that indicates that you may not possess the sort of intellectual confidence that will carry you, and that might be something to worry about sometimes. I also imagine though there are times when the words “I don’t know” or “I am unable” or “I cannot” could enter the vocabulary of the young person and not be seen by the person they are delivered to, or felt by the person delivering them, to be somehow weak. What I’m saying is that it is often the case that a lack of competence is masked by an abundance of confidence (the Dunning-Kruger effect), but this is not that, this is a lack of willingness to face any possibility that a falsely perceived weakness is present, using the tactic of arresting the power dynamic. Both are forms of power plays, the first is aggressive I suppose, it gives notice and challenge, it puts the other on the back foot by playing on their own doubt. The second is to play on a different aspect of power, a new awareness of the socially unacceptable, the restrictions upon what way we can interact with people. It is in the recognising of this aspect where the customer, normally positioned as the powerful in the situation, is subjected to their own internal social policeman putting handcuffs on their primary preference to react to the ridiculous as ridiculous. I am socially aware I believe, against bullying both physical and intellectual, but I draw the line when we stop recognising the necessity of power dynamics in human interaction because what else is there? To propose that all are equal, and to make it so by having non-codified rules based on restrictions understood as social movements is not at all useful. Let’s say that I wish for you to provide, and you wish to profit from provision, then you are making me an offer and I am making you an offer, our particular situations dictate the power dynamic, not us. Let’s say you have a bottle of water for sale and I want some, but I am surrounded by other people who have bottles of water to sell also, and they all have but one customer, me. Let’s also contend that there are taps with fresh drinking water available all around me too. Who has the power, It’s me right? But put us in the desert, increase the amount of customers and decrease the amount of vendors, a completely different dynamic of power plays out doesn’t it?
We can also pitch this into the intellectual sphere, a student at any stage has to be assumed to be a vessel that is empty but is willing to be filled, a tutor, or an intellectual, must be a full (ish) vessel that is willing to help others to become more full. What are the chances of learning or developing if the attitude of the empty vessel is that it is already of the same weight and volume as the full one? This is the central point of this piece, that it is only when we recognise where we do not have power that we may move toward a position of power. When I was a Corporal in the Army I knew I had got there by being a good tradesman, I had not gone the same route as an infantry soldier of the same rank, so my attitude when it came to performing the necessary military functions of a Corporal was to acquiesce to the greater ability to play that role at any time I found myself working with another corporal that had gone that route. I would be the king of my castle when I was in my castle (tech workshop), and merely a part of the machine when I was not.
My power depended on my situation, not on my rank. I feel that validity is the biggest problem, it is no longer a thing to be part of but not at the fore of, each special snowflake has been brought up to believe that he/she/it is a leader, and has something important to add. Social media has acted as the catalyst of this, it has allowed each person to be the locus of their own world, and I don’t disagree that we all should be that at times, it’s just that there must be times when you realise that you are not an object of perfection simply by being. In the past I’ll grant you that being marginalised and invalid socially was a particularly bad thing, but just like with bullying we have maybe swung the pendulum too far the other way a smidgen. What I’m saying is that it is harmful, and it stunts development of the self, to be valid in every situation simply because to learn or develop in any way requires a lack of validity. You cannot get good at a thing without first realising that you are not good at it, you cannot become powerful without first knowing how weak you are now, you cannot intellectually achieve without pursuing knowledge that you know you do not have, you cannot build the body beautiful without feeling like you need improvement, you cannot self-improve without a certain amount of self-disappointment and so on ad infinitum…
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