----- Original Message ----- From: "joanna bujes" <joanna.bujes at ebay.sun.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Tuesday, December 03, 2002 9:37 AM Subject: Re: power
> At 08:50 AM 12/03/2002 -0500, you wrote:
> >Yes, and, moreover, there is no social relation that does not involve
power.
>
> Is love a social relation? I ask because in my experience love and power
> are orthagonal. You can't have both. Even in the relationship between
> parents and children, what the parents have is not so much power as
> responsibility.
>
> Joanna
=======================
Exactly Joanna. Love and it's spillovers, I think social psychologists call such phenomena limerance, are social behavior-perspectives that dissolve the desire of/for power in the sense of power-over. That's not to say we should all become Romantics by any means, but it does show there are lots of social sites where power is absent. Doctors, nurses and firemen/firewomen have power in the sense of power-to but we'd be hard pressed to insist that they exercise their power-to for the sake of power-over.
Ian