Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan has held power for 10 years, during which period his country has experienced unprecedented economic growth and international prestige.
Power and success are two of the biggest brain-changing drugs known to mankind, however, and no human being’s brain can survive unchanged such large infusions of these two drugs. Edrogan’s response to this week’s demonstrations in Turkey show that he may not be an exception.
Power’s effects on the brain have many similarities to those of drugs like cocaine: both significantly change brain function by increasing the chemical messenger dopamine’s activity in the brain’s reward network. These changes also affect the cortex and alter thinking, making people more confident, bolder – and even smarter.
But these same changes also make people egocentric, less self-critical, less anxious and less able to detect errors and dangers. All of these conspire to make leaders impatient with the “messiness” of opposition and contradictory opinions, which we can see clearly in Prime Minister Erdoğan’s intransigent and aggressive response to the demonstrators, including his infamous claim that “there is an evil called twitter” and that “social media is the evil called upon societies”.
The neurological effects of unconstrained power on the brain also inhibit the very parts of the brain which are crucial for self-awareness and what Erdoğan has to realize for the sake of Turkey’s future is actually the hardest thing for any human being to appreciate – that his own judgment is being distorted by 10 long years in power.
It is my judgment that no leader can survive more than 10 years in power without encountering massive distortion of judgment of the sort we are witnessing in Erdoğan’s response to the current unrest. No-one – but no-one – is immune to these neurological effects of power and I do not think it is a coincidence that 10 years is the maximum term in office for leaders of many countries, including USA and even the Republic of China.
It is the neurologically-created conceit of many powerful leaders that – in the words of Louis XV of France - “après moi le déluge” (after me, the flood). Power fosters the delusion of indispensability and many political leaders have created havoc in fighting to stay in post because they genuinely believe their abilities are crucial for the survival of their country and that no-one else can do it.
Former British Foreign Secretary Lord David Owen has proposed the existence of a “Hubris Syndrome” – an acquired personality disorder which arises in some leaders because of the effects of power on their brains. Among others, he diagnosed UK Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher as having succumbed to this disorder, both of whom ingested the power drug for that crucial 10 years.
The symptoms of Owen’s ‘Hubris Syndrome’ include the following:
- A narcissistic preoccupation with one’s image (eg, about not being seen to back down and lose ‘strong man’ image).
- A tendency for the leader to see the nation’s interests and his own as identical, including a tendency to talk in the third person about himself.
- An excessive confidence in the leader’s own judgment and contempt for the advice or criticism of others, along with a sense of omnipotence.
- A tendency to feel accountable to History or God rather than to more mundane political or legal courts.
- A tendency towards a loss of contact with reality and progressive isolation.
- “Hubristic incompetence”, where things go wrong because of over-confidence and impaired judgment
Turkey is a vibrant nation, incredibly important to Europe, the USA and the Middle East and it is of paramount importance that its stability is not threatened by a brain distorted by power: there are enough countries surrounding Turkey which have been brought to their knees by precisely this neuropsychological affliction in their leaders and the world does not need any more.
@ihrobertson
Love and Attention
Two fundamental things - love and attention – shape our lives more than anything else. Without the consistent love of at least one person, children’s brains do not develop properly and their lives are often blighted. Being attended to - that is, feeling held in another’s mind – is part of being loved and is also crucial for the brain’s development.
Attention is the gatekeeper for how experiences sculpt the child’s brain. Without attention, experiences don’t trigger physical changes in the brain tissue of the sort that attended-to input does. [i] This means that potentially rich stimulation drains away like water into sand because it is not ‘activated’ by attention.
Our brains have a number of specific general purpose attention networks which help us to select what to attend to (one voice rather than the background conversation), allow us to switch from one thing to another (from the song on the radio to the red traffic light ahead) and to sustain it over time (read this blog to the end without mind wandering).
Loving adults sculpt these attention networks in their young children through joint attention; babies learn to attend a little like they learn to walk, by being held for the first few steps before gradually venturing on their own with just a hand, and finally staggering off with anxious hands braced to catch. Attention is a bit like that – the attentional circuits are like muscles which need to be developed.
Children learn to sustain their attention in this sort of faltering, supported way: the brain finds it hard to keep attention on an unchanging stimulus for more than a few seconds at a time, but that’s exactly what the children have to learn to do they are going to learn to read, think and regulate their emotions.
Love is a specific kind of attention imbued with feeling, and the same is true for hate. When a child struggles through a difficult reading passage in school, it’s not just her brain’s attention network which is keeping her focused – it is also the fact of feeling held in her parent’s attention which helps keeps her on task.
This is why children who are having emotional problems, say during family breakup, can really start to perform badly in school, but this is not just true for young children.
Attention depends a lot on the brain’s prefrontal cortex and this region is not fully ‘wired-up’ to the rest of the brain until the early to mid twenties, particularly in men [ii]. This is why car insurance premiums are so high for people in this age group – even young adults’ ability to focus their attention, consider future risk and inhibit their emotions are underdeveloped.
Attention is not just about thinking and focus – it is hugely important in our emotional life as well. When someone snaps at us, it is our ability to refocus our attention which allows us to remember that he is very stressed, and so with luck we inhibit our natural response to retaliate and provoke more trouble.
Our ability to control our attention seems to be very important for our own emotional balance as well. Left to wander on its own, the mind will quickly revert to unhappy memories or anxious thoughts if these exist - as they do for many people. This is why, in the words of one pair of researchers - ‘a wandering mind is an unhappy mind’: this study showed that people are unhappier when their minds are wandering, even when compared how they feel when focused on routine or tiresome chores.[iii]
The centrality of love and attention to our health mental functioning is starting to become clearer in recent research on the biological and psychological effects of two different types of meditation, each emphasizing one element of the love-attention partnership. I will discuss these in my next blog.
[i] Recanzone, G. H., Schreiner, C. E., & Merzenich, M. M. (1993).Plasticity in the frequency representation of primary auditory cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, 13 , 87–103
[ii] Sowell ER et al (1999 In vivo evidence for post-adolescent brain maturation in frontal and striatal regions. Nature Neuroscience 2, 859 – 861.
[iii] Killingsworth, M. A. and D. T. Gilbert (2010). “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind.” Science 330(6006): 932.
Molecular geneticists are engaged in social work, if we are to believe the Nobel Laureate, James Watson, who is reported to have said: “There is only one science, physics: everything else is social work”.[i]
Of course the sophistication and beauty of molecular genetics research reveals the absurdity of extreme reductionism. The molecular level of analysis of human life is every bit as ‘real’ as a quantum atomic level of analysis. But so are the cellular, psychological and social levels of analysis.
Each of these is just a different ‘take’ on the phenomenon of human life and the scientific virtue of all research is determined not by how ‘low’ a level of analysis a researcher focuses on, but rather the rigour of the methodology, the predictive value of the theory and the replicability of the findings.
By these criteria, social and psychological analyses of disorders of the human mind/brain are every bit as scientifically ‘real’ as a cellular or molecular approach. In fact, when it comes to translational efficacy in developing new models and treatments for disorders of the mind/brain, molecular-cellular approaches have largely failed. Here is what Tom Insel, the director of the US National Institute of Mental Health said in December 2011.
“..there are few validated new molecular targets (like the dopamine receptor) for mental disorders. Moreover, new compounds have been more likely to fail in psychiatry compared to other areas of medicine. Studying the brain and the mind has proven to be much more difficult than the liver and the heart. Most experts feel the science of mental disorders lags behind other areas of medicine. The absence of biomarkers, the lack of valid diagnostic categories, and our limited understanding of the biology of these illnesses make targeted medication development especially difficult for mental disorders.”[ii]
In contrast to this pessimistic finding, very strong social and psychological ‘targets’ – and in some cases associated effective treatments – have emerged across a whole raft of mind/brain disorder.
Here are just a very small number of examples from a pool of hundreds:
- Low socio-economic an immigrant status increases the risk of schizophrenia four fold and this cannot be explained away by ‘drift’ of genetically vulnerable people two lower socio-economic strata. [iii]
- The greatest obstacle to daily life functioning in chronic schizophrenia is impaired cognitive function; the only known effective treatment for this is purely behavioural cognitive remediation training.[iv]
- Low levels of education increase your risk of Alzheimer’s Disease by between 200 and 300% [v]. This cannot be attributed to genetic factors causing both the disease and the educational attainment.[vi]
- Rich social networks eliminate the relationship between Alzheimer’s Disease-related brain pathology on the one hand, and symptoms of the disease on the other.[vii]
- Even in a single-gene disorder such as Huntingdon’s Disease, research on infant mice destined to develop the disease shows enormous effect of environmental enrichment on delaying the emergence of the symptoms, presumably through influencing gene expression.[viii]
Am I saying that we should dispense with all this enormously expensive molecular and cellular research and focus on the social and psychological level of analysis in understanding and treating mind/brain disorders?
No, I am not, though the expenditure is so grossly imbalanced worldwide that we certainly need a significant rebalancing. Furthermore, these are all multi-level disorders and if we are going to find cures, we need multi-level solutions. We will never be able to find an effective treatment for Alzheimer’s Disease, for instance, unless molecular, cellular, brain systems, psychological and social scientists collaborate together on this problem with the mutual respect that can often be absent in many centres.
But there is a solution to this problem: This is for researchers at each level of analysis to try to build links with other levels – psychological with molecular, cellular with systems, social with cellular and so on. We need high scientific rigour at all levels and a mutual respect between every level. Above all, we need to get rid of reductionist delusions that make us believe that ultimately we will explain human behavior in purely molecular or quantum terms. That is a recipe for yet more failure in developing new targets and new treatments for terribly disabling and hitherto uncurable disorders.
[i] Quoted by Steven Rose in his book Lifelines: Biology Beyond Determinism
[ii] NIMH Director’s Blog Dec 14th 2011; http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2011/treatment-development-the-past-50-years.shtml
[iii] Cooper B (2005) Immigration and schizophrenia: the social causation hypothesis revisited. British Journal of Psychiatry 186: 361-363
[iv] Wykes, T., Huddy V, C. Cellard, S. McGurk and P. Czobor (2011). “A Meta-Analysis of Cognitive Remediation for Schizophrenia: Methodology and Effect Sizes.” American Journal of Psychiatry 168: 472-485
[v] Stern Y, Gurland B, Tatemichi TK, Tang M, Wilder D and M. R. (1994). “Influence of Education and Occupation on the Incidence of Alzheimer’s Disease. .” Journal of the American Medical Association 27: 1004-1010.
[vi] Gatz, M., J. A. Mortimer, L. Fratiglioni, B. Johansson, S. Berg, R. Andel, M. Crowe, A. Fiske, C. A. Reynolds and N. L. Pedersen (2007). “Accounting for the relationship between low education and dementia: A twin study.” Physiology & Behavior 92(1-2): 232-237.
[vii] Bennett, D. A., J. A. Schneider, Y. Tang, S. E. Arnold and R. S. Wilson (2006). “The effect of social networks on the relation between Alzheimer’s disease pathology and level of cognitive function in old people: a longitudinal cohort study.” The Lancet Neurology 5(5): 406-412.
[viii] vanDellen, A., C. Blakemore, R. Deacon and e. al. (2000). “Delaying the onset of Huntington’s in mice.” Nature 404: 721-722.
What is the secret of Manchester United’s manager Alex Ferguson’s success? No, it was not primarily the quality of his players nor the money he had to spend on attracting international stars. We know this because before he moved to Manchester more than a quarter of a century ago, he took the Scottish team Aberdeen, with its squad of mediocre players, to unprecedented heights of the Scottish league.
Alex Ferguson’s gift is to be a dominant, alpha-male primate, who maintains the perfect balance between ensuring that his young male players pay proper obeisance to his dominant status on the one hand, while nurturing them like a protecting father on the other.
Anyone who threatened his absolute dominance of the primate troop which is the basis of all human groups, was expelled unceremoniously irrespective of their supposed skill and indispensability to the team: Jaap Stam, David Beckham, Ruud van Nistelrooy and Roy Keane were all swatted away like the junior male challengers to the primate throne which they were. (Although as a fellow Glaswegian, I have to say that my strong hunch is that wearing a hairband on the pitch was really what did for Beckham in Ferguson’s mind).
Being a leader is stressful, and one of the best antidotes to stress is the power that goes with leadership. Power means having control over things which other people want, need or fear, and Ferguson had this in spades. Power makes you smarter, bolder, goal focussed, strategic in your thinking – as well as more confident, less depressed and less anxious. It does this by changing brain chemistry via the hormone testosterone.
The power and prestige which Ferguson accumulated over his years at Manchester United built all these capacities in him, leading to his team’s huge success. But the more successful he became, the bigger the egos he had to deal with among his millionaire players. Success, like power, is a strong drug which inflates egos and can distort judgment and personality.
And this is why, no matter how good a player was, if they showed the slightest hint of failing to show total respect for Ferguson’s authority, they were out. It doesn’t matter how good a goal scorer Wayne Rooney was – if he hadn’t showed absolute submission to the alpha male, he would have been out on his ear.
For a group to function well and survive in the wild – and premier league soccer is indeed the wild – there has to be a clear and indisputable hierarchy for the manager to get the best out of his team of testosterone-fuelled players. Ferguson could tolerate the most remarkably damaging behaviour of some players – Rio Ferdinand for instance missed a drug test in 2003 and may have lost his team a major opportunity in the European championship.
So, why did Ferguson keep Ferdinand, but not Beckham, Stam, van Nistelrooy or Keane? – Rio Ferdinand did not threaten Ferguson’s alpha-male authority. He broke the rules and damaged the team, but he always deferred to the boss. He was the prodigal son whom the all-powerful but ultimately protective father brought back into the fold.
Teams with a strong hierarchy have a clear alpha male leader who has a mix of more or less dominant members below him – just like an army platoon. Adam Galinsky and his colleagues at Columbia University have shown that the best teams include a mix of testosterone levels and that teams with too many dominant players perform worse. Players like Beckham and Keane who got too big for their boots threatened not just Ferguson’s ego, but more importantly from his point of view, threatened the efficient functioning of the team.
But Ferguson’s management greatness was not just down to raw primate dominance. He managed his huge success and considerable power well, not allowing it to inflate his ego too much and avoiding the trap which befalls so many successful people – hubris. My hunch is that he was protected from the narcissism and ego-inflation that great power and success often bring, by his devotion to the greater cause which was Manchester United.
Leaders need to have an appetite for power, otherwise they find leadership too stressful. But power is a strong drug and can tip people into strange and self-defeating behaviours. The great social psychologist David McLelland showed that where the appetite for power was leavened with what he called ‘s-power’ – an appetite for power for the greater good of a group or community – led to less susceptibility to power’s addictive and corrupting properties. My hunch is that Ferguson’s greatness and his having coped with so much power and success, is down to a health dose of ‘s-power’.
But Alex will still be hooked on this powerful drug and he will find it very, very difficult to come off it, as we saw in his tears yesterday as he announced his departure. But ultimately, his devotion to the strange and wonderful cause which is Manchester United, will see him recover into the satisfying afterglow of leadership greatness.
Margaret Thatcher was a deeply polarizing leader whose policies I lived under and disagreed with. But I look on aghast at the morbid celebrations of her death in the UK and at the ghoulish joy expressed by many who were not even alive while she was prime minister. This outburst of malign schadenfreude is evidence of a very sick society.
In Saturday’s Independent newspaper, philosopher Anthony Grayling describes respect for the dead as an ‘outdated and foolish principle’. I suspect that the bleak scientism of leading UK public commentators like Grayling and Richard Dawkins has contributed to an intellectual zeitgeist in the UK of total moral relativism. This in turn lies at the root of a debased social climate where the death of an old, demented woman can be celebrated with such gusto.
Every human brain is totally and utterly unique, physically and mentally. There are more possible patterns of connections within the human brain than there are atoms in the universe. Combine that with the physical shaping of a brain by trillions of bits of information in the course of an individual lifetime, then you have, at the end of a life, an astonishing thing: a single life etched into a near-infinite membrane which is unique in the known universe.
The death of a single individual is like the extinction of a species and the loss of a human consciousness is a tragedy. In his recent book Mind and Cosmos, philosopher Thomas Nagel reveals the intellectual flaws in the materialist reductionism that underpins the Dawkins-Grayling dogma of scientism. The phenomenon of human consciousness and its ‘qualia’ are a huge problem and enigma and physicists searching for the unified theory of the cosmos are stumped by it. Only naïve biologists like Dawkins think they can explain it with an airy wave of the hand.
Let me be clear: no more than Nagel, I am not a Cartesian dualist who believes that consciousness or ‘soul’ can exist separately from the beautiful biology of the brain. But as a scientist I find myself dismayed by those scientists – usually biologists and philo-biologists – who pretend a comprehensive understanding of reality by science that simply does not exist.
Neanderthal man’s advanced humanity was identified and our image of him improved when evidence for ceremony and reverence for their dead was found in burial sites. We revere the extinction of a human consciousness because we are part of an utterly amazing common human consciousness which requires reverence and mutual respect – above all when one is extinguished.
The loss of this token of common humanity in UK today is a sign of the country’s sickness.
Women, Power and Margaret Thatcher
At the height of her political power, demented hospital patients remembered that Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister more readily than that Queen Elizabeth was queen. Her own declining years unfortunately were plagued by dementia and she will be given a state funeral of entirely royal proportions.
Few women in history have achieved the political, social and economic influence that Margaret Thatcher did, and whether you disagree with what she did or not, by any measure she was a historical ‘great’. Above all, she showed that biology had not handicapped women from achieving dominance in the human tribe and that the barriers to women becoming leaders were primarily social and psychological, not Darwinian and biological.
She was a dominant politician, but whereas in a man this would have often have been seen as a virtue, her gender meant that this tough leadership style was often negatively framed as a particularly female type of hectoring.
In accordance with this view, she supposedly interrupted interviewers much more than other politicians, but in fact when psychologists counted her interruptions, she did not. What she did do, was to complain more when she was interrupted, thus giving the impression to sympathetic viewers that she was being badly treated by biased interviewers. She reinforced this successful strategy by tending to personalize issues and to take some critical questions as accusations.
She tended to black and white thinking: she used words like “trend,” “possibly,” “perhaps,” and “sometimes” much less than did other world leaders when talking about foreign policy, and the words “always,” “never,” and “absolutely”, much more.
This led her to be assessed as having a cognitively simple, black and white view of the world, yet within a year of the Irish Republican Army almost killing her with a bomb in her hotel in Brighton, she had signed the Anglo-Irish agreement, a key element in the start of the ultimately successful peace process.
Of course, she also fuelled the IRA campaign by her rigid black and white stance in refusing to give their hunger strikers special status in the prisons, yet at the same time her government was holding secret talks with the IRA.
Her apparent cognitive simplicity, in other words, may have been more a stylistic feature of a populist leader who was extremely focused on action.
The best leaders enjoy power because if they don’t, they too-easily succumb to stress and self-doubt. Power has strong anti-anxiety and anti-depressant properties and equips leaders to take unpopular decisions and to follow a course of action through the complex forest without being distracted by individual trees. Power can make you smarter and the Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny’s hugely increased performance since becoming Taoiseach is an example of this.
But no leader can survive too much power for too long and the eleven years of dominance in her country took its toll on Margaret Thatcher’s judgment and abilities.
While some power can embolden and smarten, it very easily tips over an inverted-U curve where its chemical effects on the brain disrupt its fine tuning. Among the symptoms are narcissism, loss of empathy, risk-blindness and a mental tunnel vision that comes from over-focus on one’s own personal goals.
Margaret Thatcher apparently was a great admirer of Tony Blair, and vice versa, which is not surprising since both these talented people suffered serious distortions of their cognitive and emotional functions as a result of the power they managed to garner over long periods in office.
Both were dragged from their hunting horses not by the dogs of the electorate, but by the hounds of their colleagues.
Power’s action on the brain has many similarities to drugs like cocaine, and can cause similar changes to the brain, including, in extreme cases, a sort of addiction to power. Margaret Thatcher found it exceedingly difficult to live without this drug and harbored a bitter and unforgiving resentment against the colleagues who brought her down until dementia came over her.
Margaret Thatcher taught us that women leaders are not immune to the distorting – and sometimes corrupting – effects of power that we have seen throughout the ages in men. My own research of the scientific literature suggests that women may be somewhat less at risk for this, and that we need many more women in positions of power, not just in politics but also in business and other domains of life.
But power is a strong and dangerous drug and we need all the mechanisms of democracy and good governance to tame and constrain our leaders, whether they be men or women.
@ihrobertson
The Korean Dictator is Behaving Rationally
North Korean Dictator Kim Jong-Un is behaving rationally.
The 30 year old is new leader of a gang which has taken over – nay, created – an entire country, and like any boss he wants to keep his gang in power and build its wealth and status.
He is no different from the Congolese warlords who rule country-size regions of central Africa or Mexican drug cartel bosses running parts of Mexico with private armies better-armed than the state’s own forces.
Nor is his gang different from the House of Saud, a family which also contrived a country to boost its family fortunes.
Napoleon, self-crowned Emperor of France, plunged Europe into war and successive kings of England plundered Ireland, Scotland and Continental Europe during adventure-wars of the type that Mr Kim Jong-Un is now threatening against the USA, South Korea and Japan.
Kim Jong-Un is as sane. He is not a psychopath – he made good friends while in school in Switzerland – and is quite intelligent, being good at mathematics although lazy in his studying, according to his closest friend at school, Portugese diplomat’s son Joao Micaelo.
He was the ‘fiercely competitive’ star of his school basketball team and ‘hated to lose’. He also, according to Micaelo, listened to the North Korean national anthem ‘thousands’ of times and was proud of his country. He seems to have had a close relationship with his father.
In spite of the sneering rhetoric in the press – prominent BBC broadcaster Jeremy Paxman for instance last night described him as looking like a haggis – Kim Jong-Un is a world leader with enormous, albeit malign, influence. But he is little different from many other world leaders over the centuries, except in a couple of respects.
The first is the extraordinary personality cult which his family and its supporters have created through complete control over the media, education and civic life. Kim Jong-Un is essentially a god – or at least a demi-god on the way to full godship. Julius Caesar allowed statues of himself as a demi-god to be erected and the pre-democracy English monarchy perpetuated their family gang through the propaganda of ‘the divine right of kings’.
Absolute power changes peoples’ brains and makes them feel like gods, or at least in communication with gods. In June 2003, George W Bush told Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen that God had told him to invade Iraq. Osama bin Laden also believed his actions to be divinely inspired.
Kim Jong-Un almost certainly feels god-like because of the drug-like effects – the chemical messenger dopamine is a key player - that power has on his brain. Power is an aphrodisiac which casts a spell of charisma around the holder and bewitches those he has power over, and if that be millions of people, so be it.
A former North Korean soldier interviewed on BBC’s Newsnight last night said that he and everyone else he knew completely believed the world view of the country’s leadership. This held that North Korea was poor because of the unfair persecution by South Korea, USA and Japan, and that it was in constant threat of being destroyed by these enemies, which is why it had to have its nuclear weapons.
And that is the second difference between Kim Jong-Un and other world gang leaders – his power is supercharged by nuclear weaponry. This not only affects his brain but also empowers millions of his soldiers and citizens whose otherwise drab and miserable lives are given this drug-like fix which is re-ignited every time they hear the national anthem played on television to images of ballistic missiles blasting off to destroy their enemies.
Animals low in a pecking order – powerless, in other words – are more likely to take and become addicted to cocaine if offered it than are those at the top of the dominance hierarchy. Cocaine acts on the brain in the same way as power does and to the powerless, impoverished North Koreans, these repeated images of mushroom clouds and military aggression are – almost literally – equivalent to repeated intoxicatingly-rewarding cocaine fixes which bind them emotionally to their leader and make everything else seem unimportant in comparison.
So, while Kim Jong-Un was a sane adolescent, power is such a strong drug that it will have changed him fundamentally. Excessive, unconstrained power makes people feel over-confident, blind to risk, inclined to treat other people as objects, tunnel-visioned, narcissistic and protected from anxiety. These are all real effects, as biologically driven as those caused by any powerful drug.
All gang leaders experience these effects. But there are two other symptoms of power which should give us special pause. The first is that excessive power so increases dopamine activity in the front part of the brain that it distorts rational judgment of cost and benefit: for instance Hitler’s military decisions on the Russian front were an example of this.
The North Korean leadership’s aggression and threats are a rational strategy within the twisted confines of gang-logic: they help keep a powerless populace in thrall to their nuclear-cocaine fixes, for whose continued efficacy a sense of constant threat is essential, and they also squeeze concessions out of the international community. They also provide international attention which feeds the power-kindled narcissism of its leaders.
But the most worrying symptom of power in the current crisis is its god effects. Gods are invulnerable. Gods are not constrained by the laws of nature. Gods are immortal.
We should be worried.
@ihrobertson
