The More Power You Have

At the end of the last chapter, we arrived at a principle that sounds almost obvious once stated plainly: if responsibility grows wherever our ability to affect others grows, then greater power should probably make us more careful rather than less. The word power, however, can immediately send our minds to a positions most of us will never occupy but they are easy targets of heavy criticism. Most of us are not presidents, billionaires, cabinet ministers, or chief executives of enormous corporations. This would make it relatively easy for us to eloquently spend the rest of this chapter elaborating and agreeing that powerful people should behave better. This would bring everyone to agreement and make us feel really good about having no power or agency and would prevent us from ever examining the places where the balance of power happens to favor us. That would be convenient, but power is far more ordinary than we often imagine. It exists whenever our choices can significantly affect someone who has less ability to shape the outcome in return. A parent has power over a small child, a teacher over a student whose grade matters, an employer over someone who depends upon a salary, a landlord over a family that may have few alternatives, and a doctor over a frightened patient who understands very little about the treatment being recommended. Even a customer can have considerable power over a tiny supplier who desperately needs the business and the person holding confidential information possesses a kind of temporary power over the person whose reputation could be damaged if that confidence is betrayed.

The interesting thing about power is that its dynamics shift based on time, place, and condition. I may be the more powerful person in one room and the most vulnerable person in the next. Someone can spend the morning making decisions affecting hundreds of employees and spend the afternoon sitting in a hospital room trying to understand a diagnosis explained by someone whose knowledge he cannot meaningfully evaluate. A wealthy person can walk into a courtroom where the judge holds authority over him, while that same judge might later depend entirely upon an engineer to determine whether the structure of her home is safe. The expert becomes the novice, the employer becomes the customer, the parent eventually becomes an elderly person who needs help from someone younger, and the person accustomed to giving instructions finds himself in situations where someone else knows more, controls more, or simply has choices he does not have. Perhaps this is one reason the subject of power should make us more reflective and a significantly less self-righteous. Nearly all of us have experienced both sides of this power imbalance. We know what it feels like to need someone else's fairness, patience, honesty, competence, or restraint, and we also know what it feels like when another person depends upon ours. We remember the teacher who could have embarrassed us but did not, the manager who could have made our lives difficult but chose to be reasonable, the doctor who took extra time to explain something we did not understand, or the person who knew we were in a weak position and still refused to take advantage of it. Those experiences stay with us precisely because someone else possessed more power and chose to not take advantage of it to our detriment.

This may be one of the most important things to understand about power: having more of it does not obligate us to use all of it. In fact, restraint can be one of the clearest signs that a person understands what power is for. A physically strong person does not prove strength by intimidating everyone weaker, a knowledgeable person does not prove intelligence by confusing someone who knows less, and a wealthy person does not demonstrate ownership by extracting every possible advantage from someone who has fewer choices. We sometimes associate power with the ability to make others yield, yet there is another kind of strength in knowing that you could press harder, demand more, take more, embarrass more, or simply walk away, and choosing not to because the other person's vulnerability matters.

The Prophet Muhammad expressed something remarkably similar when he redefined what it means to be strong. He taught that the truly strong person is not the one who can overpower another in wrestling, but the one who can control himself when angry. I love the reversal in that teaching because the person capable of throwing someone else to the ground certainly possesses strength, but the Prophet directs our attention toward a more difficult kind of strength: possessing power over ourselves. Physical strength can force another person to yield, while self-restraint determines whether that strength is used wisely in the first place. The principle extends naturally beyond anger. There are moments when we have enough authority to impose our preference, enough knowledge to take advantage of another person's ignorance, enough money to force a better bargain, or enough influence to make someone uncomfortable, yet choosing restraint may reveal far more strength than simply proving that we could have gotten our way.

This is where the idea of trust returns again. If power itself is something entrusted to us, then the question cannot merely be, “What am I allowed to do?” It also has to become, “What responsibility comes with the fact that I am able to do it?” Legal permission, ownership, superior knowledge, stronger bargaining power, physical strength, or institutional authority can all establish what we can do without necessarily settling what we should do. We explored this distinction when discussing ownership, but power makes it even more important because the person with greater influence is often the person with the greatest ability to define the terms, enforce them, explain them, interpret them, or simply refuse to negotiate at all. A parent sees this every day because the imbalance between parent and child is enormous. Parents control food, transportation, money, schedules, technology, permissions, discipline, and much of the environment in which a young child lives. The child cannot realistically resign from the family, negotiate a new contract, or move to another household because dinner was unfair. That gives parents enormous practical authority, but it is exactly that inequality that should make parents more thoughtful about how they use it. A father can win almost every argument with a six-year-old simply by being bigger, louder, older, richer, and in possession of the car keys, but winning the argument is not the same as leading the child well.

The same is true in workplaces, where the language of choice can sometimes hide how unequal the choices actually are. An employer may say that an employee is free to leave if she does not like a policy and technically that may be true. Yet freedom looks different when one person has six months of savings and the other has three children, a rent payment due next week, and no job offer waiting. This does not mean employers become responsible for every circumstance in an employee's life, nor does it mean employees should never be held accountable or difficult decisions avoided. It simply means that when one side of a relationship has dramatically more room to maneuver than the other, fairness requires more than pretending both parties are standing on identical ground.

Knowledge creates an especially interesting form of power because it can be almost invisible. A mechanic understands the car better than the customer, a lawyer understands the contract better than the client, a financial institution understands its product better than the borrower, a surgeon understands the procedure better than the patient, and a technology company understands its algorithm far better than the person scrolling through the application. None of those knowledge advantages are inherently bad. In fact, we need expertise because modern life would become impossible if every person had to understand medicine, law, engineering, finance, software, construction, and every other specialty before relying upon anyone else. The moral question appears when knowledge stops being used to serve and starts being used to exploit. One of the easiest ways to take advantage of another person is to allow them to misunderstand something when their misunderstanding benefits us. A customer signs an agreement without grasping an important consequence, a borrower misunderstands how a payment structure works, or a patient agrees to something without truly understanding the alternatives. The stronger party may technically have disclosed everything required, perhaps somewhere on page thirty-seven in a typeface designed primarily for people with excellent eyesight and unlimited patience, but disclosure and understanding are not always the same thing.

That distinction becomes particularly important in commerce because contracts can create the appearance of equality even when the parties are nowhere near equally informed. Two signatures sit beside one another at the bottom of the page, but one party may have written the agreement, paid the lawyers, understands the industry, knows the risks, possesses all of the relevant data, and negotiates agreements like this every day, while the other person may be signing the first document of this kind they have ever seen. The existence of consent matters greatly, but the stronger party should still ask whether the weaker person genuinely understood what they were agreeing to and whether the stronger party benefited from confusion that could easily have been corrected. This is not an argument against sophisticated contracts, complex products, or specialized expertise. Complexity is sometimes unavoidable because the world itself is complicated. What matters is whether complexity becomes a tool for clarity or a hiding place for advantage. A knowledgeable person can explain something complicated in a way that helps another person make a good decision or use that same complexity to make the other person tired enough to simply say yes. The information is identical, but the shepherding intention behind it is very different.

Wealth works in a similar way because money often creates options and options are one of the most practical forms of power. A person with savings can wait, negotiate, walk away, absorb a loss, hire professional advice, or choose between alternatives. Someone without those resources may have to accept what is available today because waiting another month is not realistic. Again, there is nothing shameful about having choices. Wealth can be the product of discipline, enterprise, inheritance, sacrifice, timing, intelligence, or a mixture of many things, and as we discussed earlier, prosperity can enable enormous amounts of good. The question is what we do when someone else's lack of options becomes visible to us. If I know a person is desperate, do I see an opportunity to help or simply an opportunity to negotiate harder? If I am buying something from a person who urgently needs cash, does their desperation become my justification for forcing the price as low as possible? If I am lending to someone with no alternatives, does the fact that they will accept almost any condition make every condition morally acceptable? Markets require negotiation, prices matter, risk matters, and people should not be expected to ignore their own interests, but there is an uncomfortable difference between benefiting from a good opportunity and constructing our advantage out of another person's inability to say no.

The same principle can even work in reverse in ways we do not always notice. Customers can be powerful too. A large company negotiating with a small supplier may know that losing the contract could threaten the supplier's survival, which can make seemingly ordinary demands extraordinarily difficult to refuse. A wealthy customer may treat a waiter, driver, tradesperson, cleaner, or shop employee in a way they would never treat someone they considered socially equal because they know the other person is expected to remain polite. A person leaving an online review may hold surprising power over a small family business whose reputation can be damaged by a few careless words. We often notice power most easily when we lack it and much less easily when it sits quietly in our own hands.

Social power may be even more subtle. The popular student has power over the child desperate to be accepted, the respected person in a community can damage someone's reputation with a sentence, and the person with a large audience can turn a private disagreement into a public spectacle. Someone with social confidence can dominate a room without ever raising a voice, while another person may remain silent because disagreeing carries consequences that are invisible to everyone else. Power does not need an office, a bank account, or a government title. Sometimes it is simply the ability to make another person feel that belonging, opportunity, dignity, or peace depends upon keeping us happy. This is why I like the idea that we are all powerful somewhere. It prevents the subject from becoming a moral investigation of people we already dislike and may be easy targets of our disgust. There will always be someone richer than us, more influential than us, more politically connected than us, or more obviously powerful than us, and focusing exclusively on that person can become a convenient way of escaping our own spheres of influence. I may have no control over international politics but I may have complete control over how I speak to someone who works for me. I may not influence a multinational bank but I can decide whether to give someone who owes me money reasonable space when genuine hardship appears. I may not control a global technology company but I can decide whether I use information about another person responsibly.

Power becomes morally interesting precisely when we stop measuring it only by its largest examples. A father standing over a frightened child may have more practical power in that moment than a government minister has over his own teenage son. A teacher controlling whether a struggling student receives encouragement or humiliation may shape that student's life more deeply than any famous leader the student will ever meet. A manager deciding whether to protect a junior employee from unfair blame may hold more meaningful power over that person's life that week than almost anyone appearing on television. The sphere may be small, but the experience of the person inside it is not. Remembering our own vulnerability can help us use such power better. Almost everyone has been in a situation where someone else knew that we needed them and there is something uniquely uncomfortable about being dependent upon another person's character. Perhaps we needed an extension on a payment, help from a doctor, approval from a manager, patience from a teacher, understanding from a spouse, flexibility from a landlord, or simply mercy from someone who had enough information to embarrass us. In those moments, we rarely think abstractly about power structures, we simply hope the person on the other side will have the requisite empathy to be understanding and fair.

This perspective is morally useful because it transforms the Golden Rule from a pleasant saying into a practical discipline. How did I want to be treated when I had fewer choices because there was certainly a time when I did and there will be a time in the future when I will? Did I want the expert to confuse me or explain things carefully, the lender to maximize my weakness or recognize my difficulty, the manager to use fear or patience, the teacher to humiliate me or help me improve? If I remember what vulnerability felt like, then perhaps I should carry that memory with me when the balance eventually shifts and someone else is sitting across the table hoping that I will be reasonable. This does not mean always giving the weaker person whatever they want. That would return us to the mistake of confusing care with indulgence. A lender may still need repayment, an employer may still have to dismiss someone who repeatedly fails to perform, a parent may need to enforce a difficult boundary, and a judge may have to impose a consequence that causes genuine hardship. Justice is not simply choosing the softer option. What changes is the spirit in which power is exercised and whether the stronger party remembers that the other person remains a human being whose dignity does not disappear because a consequence is necessary.

This is where restraint becomes such an important expression of strength. Someone who can impose a consequence without humiliation, correct without cruelty, negotiate without predation, lead without domination, and hold another person accountable without enjoying their vulnerability demonstrates a kind of power that is deeper than simply getting one's way. There is a major difference between being firm because something is right and being harsh because we enjoy the feeling of superiority. The outward decision may occasionally look similar but sincerity and stewardship require us to examine the spirit behind it. The Prophet Muhammad's model of leadership repeatedly challenges the idea that strength is proven by domination. His teachings around mercy, justice, trust, restraint, debt, property, family, rulers, and commercial dealings consistently force the person holding greater power to remember that authority does not erase accountability before God. The weaker person may not be able to stop me, the law may not punish me, the contract may favor me, and society may even congratulate me, but none of those things answer the deeper question of whether I used what God placed in my hands in a way He would consider just.

This is an important shift because power has a way of insulating people from feedback. The more authority a person gains, the more likely people are to laugh at his jokes, agree with his ideas, soften bad news, and hesitate before telling him he is wrong. Wealth can create similar insulation because many inconveniences disappear when a person can simply pay to solve them. Social status can do the same thing when people begin treating someone's preferences as though they were principles. One of the hidden dangers of increasing power is not only that we can do more harm, but that fewer people may feel comfortable telling us when we are doing it. Good shepherding requires us to actively compensate for that. The more power we possess, the more intentionally we may need to seek disagreement, listen to people who cannot benefit from flattering us, and pay attention to consequences experienced by those farthest from the decision-making table. A manager should want to know how policies feel to the junior employee implementing them, a business should understand what its product does to customers after the sale, and a government should care about the person whose ordinary life is affected by a policy that looked elegant in a presentation. Power can create distance from consequences, so responsible power has to work deliberately to close that distance.

Technology magnifies this problem enormously because it allows a relatively small number of people to affect millions of others without ever meeting them. A product designer can influence how long people stay awake, an algorithm can determine what information receives attention, a financial model can influence who gains access to credit, and an automated system can make decisions at a scale no individual human being could possibly manage manually. None of this makes technology evil. In many ways technology is one of humanity's greatest demonstrations of the knowledge and capability we discussed at the beginning of this book and it has improved lives in ways previous generations could scarcely have imagined. But power multiplied by technology is still power, only faster. If an unfair decision once harmed ten people, automation may allow the same decision to affect ten million before anyone notices. If a manipulative sales technique once required a salesperson to speak individually with every customer, software can now perform the same persuasion continuously and at enormous scale. The radius of consequence expands, which means the shepherd's responsibility expands with it. Greater capability is exciting precisely because it allows us to create more benefit, but the same amplification means carelessness travels farther too.

Institutions work in much the same way. A family affects a handful of people directly, while a company may affect employees, customers, suppliers, investors, communities, and entire industries. A bank can influence whether families buy homes and businesses survive. A government can shape education, healthcare, infrastructure, commerce, public safety, and the conditions in which millions of ordinary decisions are made. It would be absurd to pretend that all power is equal or that my influence in my home is morally equivalent to the power of a government or massive corporation. The greater the scale, the greater the potential consequences, and powerful institutions deserve scrutiny precisely because so many people may be unable to protect themselves from their mistakes. Recognizing that we all possess power somewhere should therefore never become an excuse for letting enormous concentrations of power escape accountability. Quite the opposite. If responsibility increases with the radius of influence, then those whose decisions affect millions should expect far greater scrutiny than those whose decisions affect a few. A leader controlling public resources, a corporation handling people's private data, a financial institution serving millions of customers, or a government capable of coercion carries responsibilities proportionate to that reach. The point is not that everyone is equally powerful. The point is that the same moral principle operates at every level, and the scale of accountability grows with the scale of consequence.

Similarly, criticizing distant power can never substitute for examining our own power imbalances. I can oppose corporate exploitation while exploiting the person working for me. I can demand transparency from government while hiding information from someone who depends upon my honesty. I can criticize wealthy people for failing to help the vulnerable while refusing a small act of mercy when I am the one in a position to give it. Both questions matter and require scrutiny. We should care about unjust systems and powerful institutions but the ethical uprightness of society is also constructed through millions of smaller relationships in which ordinary people decide what to do when the balance happens to favor them. Perhaps this is where power becomes less frightening and more hopeful. If power were only something possessed by presidents and billionaires, most of us could do little more than vote, protest, advise, or complain. However, if power also exists in our families, businesses, classrooms, friendships, purchasing decisions, expertise, money, knowledge, and everyday relationships, then each of us already has opportunities to use it well. Every time we choose patience over humiliation, clarity over confusion, fairness over advantage, development over dependency, or mercy over unnecessary harshness, we are practicing stewardship in a place where the outcome genuinely lies within our reach.

This does not require us to become timid. I do not think Islam asks people with capability to become afraid of using it. Knowledge should be developed, wealth can be grown, organizations can expand, leaders can lead decisively, parents can exercise authority, entrepreneurs can take risks, and societies can build extraordinary things. Power is often what allows good intentions to become real outcomes. A person with resources can build a hospital that compassion alone cannot construct, an effective government can protect people at a scale individual charity cannot, and a talented leader can create opportunities for thousands of people. The problem is not capability; the problem is forgetting what capability is for. The more power we have, the more possibility we hold in our hands. We can protect more, teach more, build more, employ more, solve more, influence more, and leave behind things that continue benefiting people long after we are gone. Unfortunately, we can also exploit more, confuse more, intimidate more, waste more, and extend the consequences of our mistakes much farther than before. Power widens the road in both directions, which is why greater capability should produce greater consciousness rather than greater entitlement.

This is where the ideas we have explored converge. Vicegerency tells us that human beings have been given extraordinary capacity to shape the world. Trust reminds us that the things within our reach do not belong to us absolutely. Sincerity asks who or what we are really serving when we act. The shepherd reminds us that whatever comes within our care creates responsibility. Power then tells us something about the size of that responsibility: the greater our ability to affect another person, the more carefully we should consider what our actions may do to them. Perhaps the easiest way to remember all of this is to return to an experience almost everyone understands. Think of a time when you needed something from someone who did not need anything from you. Remember the slight discomfort of knowing that the outcome depended largely upon their character, their patience, or their willingness to be fair. Remember how much difference a little kindness made if they gave it, and how exposed you felt if they did not. Then remember that somewhere in your life, perhaps today, someone else may be standing in exactly that position with you.

We are all powerful somewhere, even if our influence is limited, but every circle of power contains opportunities to decide what kind of power we want to exercise. We can use advantage simply because it is available, or we can ask whether the person affected is being treated with the same consideration we would hope to receive if our places were reversed. This question does not weaken power; I think it helps power remember its purpose. The clearest test comes when we stop thinking of the weaker person as a customer number, employee ID, borrower, tenant, subordinate, stranger, or statistical category and imagine that person living beside us. We tend to behave differently when abstraction acquires a face, when a problem belongs to someone whose children play with ours, and when consequences cross the fence into a life we recognize. Perhaps, the next question is not only how much power we have but how differently we would use it if the person affected were our neighbor.