It is striking how much the need to control the smallest details of existence takes from a person the extraordinary opportunity to form cooperative bonds. The controller’s fear makes them see the world as a great threat. Like Don Quixote, mad and bewildered, they fight windmills and push people away.

For fear of seeming weak, the controller points out others’ weaknesses. For fear of seeming less competent, they have a sharp eye for others’ mistakes. For fear of seeming less intelligent, they spend enormous time on small things, for the small pleasure of seeming “more.” One of the resources they use to dominate people and make reality bend to their whims is lying.

Here I need a brief parenthesis. My central tendency is to understand, welcome the pain and, if the case calls for it, help the person find their way again. However, that does not mean I always understand, always welcome and always help. There are cases for which I declare my incompetence. In those, when possible, I seek to strengthen myself and the people I live with to resist power plays.

People, in different ways, seek to adapt reality to their frame of reference. Sometimes, unconsciously, they take on roles in sophisticated plots, which we transactional analysts study under the name of psychological games.

By playing, people confirm their perception of themselves, of others and of the world; extort affection when they do not have it in abundant flow; resolve their fears with intrasubjective and objective reality; deal with inner time and outer time, among other deep and ancient questions.

Human beings need to be loved in a way that lets them survive and then live fully. Neglect or violence pull them away from the clearest road to survival. Without learning the grammar of survival, they will play to keep going. One day I will write more about this. I almost lost my objective.

Power plays

As I wrote at the beginning, there are people who deliberately exercise power over others. They are the ones who play power plays. The reasons they arrive at this behavior are many; there are many whys to answer.

I perceive, predominantly, in the eyes of the controllers I know more closely, fear. But I have also seen coldness and indifference, up close. I identify coldness and indifference too in the eyes of the operators of the public power play.

In the 1980s, psychologist Claude Steiner, one of the pioneers of transactional analysis and radical psychiatry, explored this theme. More than 40 years have passed, and his text is current, powerful, frightening, and can be compared, item by item, with today’s events. What drove Steiner to deepen the study of power plays was the belief that there is another side of power, in which it is possible to live together with cooperation and humanity.

Power plays serve competition and control and affect relationships in every setting. The controller wants to gain advantages for themself and does not hesitate to create as many confusions as necessary to “win.” Power plays can be crude, violent, explicit. But they can also be subtle, as dangerous as the others but quieter, and, when they abduct the controlled person, the latter barely notices being imprisoned, claustrophobic in the other’s world.

Subtle power plays feed on obedience (often mistaken for collaboration). And the obedient will know how to justify effectively the reactions of those who control them. The obedient are not trained to perceive and contest the unpleasant, dishonest and violent actions of the powerful. They were raised in an environment of “I command, you obey” and keep obeying those who command, without even seeking factual proof of what they are forced to tolerate.

The obedient, when they look around and see conformity and acceptance in others, believe their objections have no reason to exist. In obeying a powerful controller, the shift of focus happens almost entirely. The obedient person’s feelings, needs and fears disappear under the force of the urgency to meet the powerful one’s designs. Those who protest are labeled dangerous enemies. If a trace of doubt appears, the obedient person starts doubting themselves.

The controller

Whoever maneuvers others through the power play does so by taking advantage of others’ weaknesses, which they despise and disregard. The weaknesses are detected with frightening efficiency.

The controller exercises power through intimidation, threats, manipulation and violence, using lying concurrently as a deliberate communication strategy of the game.

Lying receives definitions and conceptualizations from different areas of human knowledge, from distorting reality starting from a small fraction to creating a more comprehensive interpretation. It can arise from acts of personal or social preservation. It can be a survival strategy so rehearsed that it becomes part of the person’s “being.”

However, in the maneuvers of the power play, lying is intended to extend the dominion of one’s own will over other people, denying their rights, will or needs. Lying serves as a conduit of evil and injustice.

Besides exploiting obedience, the controller uses lying to exploit credulity and the fear people may have of confrontation. Whoever uses the power play as a form of control, and lying as grammar, feels superior to others and therefore thinks other people have no right to know the truth.

The liar undermines the obedient or credulous person’s ability to handle the demands of their own life. Isolated from reality and with their perceptions and emotions disqualified, these people will have disorganized thoughts and actions. The controller, through lies, destroys life outside submission and obedience. And makes people believe that success or living well will come only “if” their orders, subtle or declared, are followed. Therefore, if nothing works out, the fault lies with whoever was not submissive enough.

The controller’s conscious lie depends on trust and lack of information. Often masked as “honesty,” it is so widespread that the truly honest person is considered an anomaly.

Power plays corrode the foundations of ethical coexistence: manipulation instead of negotiation; individual objectives and goals instead of collective proposals and actions; indifference to needs and distance in place of contact, cooperation and dialogue.

Few control through power plays, but they form a powerful minority, and their effectiveness derives from cold blood and systematic planning. Nothing is left to chance.

The way out

The antithesis of power plays and competition is cooperation and emotional education. We are many, and we can do a lot. But that is a theme that deserves center stage. I need to leave room for Immanuel Kant.

For him, an individual must not lie under any circumstances, because a lie can induce the listener to perform a certain action that does not correspond to their will but to the will of whoever uttered the untrue statement. This deprives the listener of making use of their full freedom of action. That is, it violates the concept of right as a whole, by violating the listener’s right to know the truth.