That’s Men: The drive to power and destruction exists in all of us

A month or so ago when I was walking along the canal near my house I noticed boys smashing the windows of a factory that had recently closed.

The factory had been operating for many years and, for all I know, some of their parents may have worked in it. Certainly the factory, a fairly inoffensive building, was part of the outside furniture of their childhood. But the windows of that shut factory drew them like magnets and the destruction went on until somebody bought the factory and boarded it up.

I thought of them when reading about the destruction of Vernon Mount House in Cork. This historic and beautiful privately owned house was part of the heritage of the nation but, in spite of warnings by global, national and local bodies – including the county council – it had been left inadequately protected against the teenagers who broke into it at night. And so they destroyed it.

And then I thought of the pleasure you can get if you are walking through the fields with a stick in your hand to whack the heads off thistles as you pass by.

Drive for power

What have the factory, the house and the thistles got in common? As human beings we have certain drives, sometimes described as

basic needs

, and they never really leave us alone. They include drives for survival, belonging and so on. What I think is at play here is a

drive for power

.

Everybody has a need for power, and we meet the need in a lot of different ways. Competing and winning is one. A job well done is another. Creating something good, in the arts, say, is another. And another is destruction. It’s an act of power with which we are all far too familiar.

It is tempting to say that an act of destruction – the torching of Vernon Mount House, say – has something to do with teenagers rejecting the world of constraint and order, and acting out that rejection.

But the drive to power exists in all of us and, unfortunately, the drive to destruction does too. Sigmund Freud explained it in his outline of the three ever-present parts of the personality.

One is the Id which wants what it wants right now and couldn’t care less what it destroys in the process. Indeed it will happily destroy people or places.

The other is the Superego which condemns this kind of behaviour and lays down rules, regardless of whether particular rules make sense or not.

And in the middle is the Ego, the one we identify with most often. The Ego tries to keep the other two in check and, as you don’t need me to tell you, it doesn’t always succeed.

The Id will always “out” in the right conditions. Put it into a situation of war or into a mob, for instance, and out it comes.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter a lot: knocking the head off a thistle is no big deal as it gives a little flash of destructive pleasure. Even smashing the windows of a closed factory doesn’t matter a lot in the great scheme of things, ugly as it may look.

Sometimes our drive to destruction does matter a lot. Destroying beautiful monuments, or destroying helpless people in war situations or on a deserted street late at night; these matter a lot. And to me the clue that these represent the destructive impulse breaking loose and expressing itself is the laughter that you will sometimes read accompanies these acts.

We don’t really like to think of these things as part of us. We like to push them out there beyond our familiar boundaries as belonging to somebody else, to people who are not like us.

But they are, indeed, part of every one of us. If we accept that, we will take more care to protect the people and places that really matter to us. And if we leave either of them unprotected, we will be less surprised when they fall victim to the human desire for destruction.

Padraig O'Morain is accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His latest book is Mindfulness for Worriers. His daily mindfulness reminder is free by email.

pomorain@yahoo.com Twitter: @PadraigOMorain