When Everything Isn’t Enough
How Power Protects Itself
Third in the series The Wisdom Problem. Begin with Essay 1 here.
Let me restate the tension driving this series, because Essay 3 is where it gets sharpest.
I believe that human beings carry an inherent wisdom that is readily accessible — even in our most challenging moments. I believe this wisdom is not merely personal, but expresses the basic nature of the interdependent whole in which we all participate. For me, wisdom is a shorthand for many equanimous qualities that become available when we stop being run by fear.
But here’s the tension. Power in our world is concentrated in people and institutions operating almost entirely from fear. Fear dressed as strength. Wealth hoarded as security. Power confused with domination. These are people who “have everything” and somehow it is not enough.
How did we get here? And — more urgently — can a shift toward wisdom happen quickly enough to make a difference to the many crises humanity faces?
The seduction of high agency
Sophie Haigney has a great piece in the New York Times this week about high agency, a rising phrase in tech and business culture. When asked what skills matter most in the age of AI, Sam Altman listed it first. Google searches for the term have spiked. It’s showing up in job interviews, LinkedIn posts, Yale writing seminars.
The basic idea isn’t wrong. Agency — recognizing that you have some power to shape your circumstances, that you are not purely at the mercy of forces around you — is genuinely valuable. At its best it echoes Emerson’s self-reliance, the old-fashioned resourcefulness of someone who sews the button back on rather than waiting for someone else to do it.
But something has gone wrong with how the idea is being used. As Haigney describes: agency is about action, but it tells us nothing of direction. Donald Trump running for president with no government experience was high agency. So were the January 6 rioters who broke into the Capitol and, in lieu of other plans, took selfies upon arrival. Or the ICE protestors who, rather than using tactics so effective elsewhere, escalated into acts of aggression that mirrored the violence they were there to protest.
Other eras might have used “courage” in place of high agency, but courage suggests a moral weight that agency alone lacks.
Reflecting on Haigney’s essay, it occurred to me that “high agency” is the hollow twin of “wise action.” It has the motion without the interior. The decisiveness without the discernment. Capacity without the wisdom about what that capacity is for.
And here is what I notice: the people most loudly celebrated for high agency — founders, disruptors, those who move fast and break things — are disproportionately at the center of major problems.
Not because agency is bad. Because agency without the inner work is just another word for willfulness.
And willfulness, when concentrated, becomes something much darker.
Willful problems
No one loves you when they love your money. Including you.
I spent years working in philanthropy — where big money, great talent, and ambitious ideas commingle with great fanfare, but have remarkably little impact on the world’s most critical problems. I want to be careful here, because many philanthropic efforts are admirable. Being part of that work was an honor for a long portion of my career.
And yet something was always working against the best intentions. Anand Giridharadas named it precisely in Winners Take All. The people with the most resources and leverage to change unjust systems have almost always accumulated those resources within those systems.
The system’s continuation is in their interest — even when they sincerely believe otherwise. Philanthropy, impact investing, social entrepreneurship — too often, these are ways to be seen addressing problems without overly risking that the problems will be fixed.
This isn’t cynicism. It’s a structural observation Giridharadas makes as an insider. Don’t take my word for it: go read the book!
And now dear reader, I offer you an acute observation of the very obvious.
A prerequisite for accumulating wealth seems to be: avoid doing inner work.
Or at least, avoid inner work until you’ve accumulated so much you realize it will never make you healthy, funny, popular, or kind. Until it’s obvious it won’t fill your life with meaningful relationships or the unconditional experience of being at peace with your own self.
No one loves you when they love your money. Including you.
But to rise to the apex of most institutions — financial, political, corporate — you must be willing to subordinate relationships to outcome, compassion to strategy, long-term thinking to quarterly performance. You must, in other words, operate from your “small self” Protector Parts – in IFS language – rather than your wise Self.
The system doesn’t require you to be a bad person. It just rewards the parts of you that are most defended.
Adam Grant’s research on narcissistic leadership makes this uncomfortably concrete. The highest scorers of presidential narcissism— Johnson, Nixon, Jackson — saw their legacies defined by catastrophic overreach. Banks led by narcissistic executives took more risks, recovered more slowly from crises, and doubled down on failing strategies.
And yet: people who were fully aware of narcissists’ self-serving tendencies still preferred them as leaders during times of uncertainty. The greater the societal instability, the more people wanted someone who projected dominance and strength.
In other words, the conditions that most benefit from wisdom create a social demand for its opposite.
The Epstein labyrinth
What the Epstein horrors reveal are not just one man’s depravity. They also illuminate the social architecture of elite mutual protection. Extraordinarily accomplished, well-resourced people — across ideological lines, across institutions, and across decades – knew what was happening, or had reason to suspect it. And said nothing.
They apparently calculated that the cost of speaking was higher than the cost of silence. (The cost to themselves, anyway.)
These were people wrapped in the world’s thickest layers of financial and social security. If anyone could afford to act from principle rather than self-protection, it was them.
And yet the silence held. Because proximity to power generates its own gravity — its own set of Protector Parts – and those parts do not care how much money you have. They care about belonging. About not being cast out. About the particular, visceral fear of losing your place in the room where things happen.
This is not just a story about evil. It is a story about what happens when intelligent, accomplished people don’t do the inner work of distinguishing their Self from their fear. When the Protectors have been running so long, and been so richly rewarded, they no longer recognize themselves.
The rot is not incidental to the system. It is structural. Ezra Klein’s recent interview with Giridharadas on exactly this dynamic is worth your time.
Suffering in wealth
Philanthropy gave me a unique view into the interior landscape of wealth, especially for someone whose parents did blue collar work. I developed a genuine empathy for the existential loneliness of great wealth — the way it distorts relationships, forecloses certain kinds of belonging, and creates a particular, largely unacknowledged, type of suffering. The wounds of people in situations of wealth extend across families, into communities, and through society at large, due to their outsized power and influence.
My thinking was: if I could help a few people find equanimity in wealth, it would be a genuine service to them, and contribute to a broader positive impact.
This is a design advantage of systems where wealth is concentrated.
I still think the logic has some validity and use. A relatively small number of powerful people who shift from self-protecting instincts to more-wise action can contribute uniquely to positive change. And this would be faster than it takes to organize broad-based change in human behavior.
But I hold this more lightly than I used to. Social and economic systems that reward defended, willful, high-agency behavior don’t cease the moment someone starts doing inner work. The pull is constant and structural. And — more sobering — the Epstein revelation suggests that elite networks have their own immune systems, their own mechanisms for enforcing conformity and silence, that operate almost independently of individual intention.
Is this human nature?
Immanuel Kant said “the possession of power unavoidably spoils the free use of reason.”
If elite, narcissistic leadership and the Epstein silence are expressions of human nature — inevitable products of the way power works on people — then the only response is a kind of managed pessimism. You build better structures, stronger accountability mechanisms, harder guardrails. You assume the worst and engineer around it.
But we have a much more powerful tool.
In Essay 2, I described how the science of wisdom, cross-cultural contemplative evidence, and the Minneapolis moment all point toward something more hopeful: fear and dominance are not our basic nature. They surface under certain conditions, like chronic threat, isolation from genuine accountability, and systems that reward defended behavior and punish openness.
Which means the question isn’t only how to constrain bad actors, it’s how to change the conditions.
That is a design problem. And design problems can be solved.
Now, if only some sort of transformational power were available to jumpstart the process…
Oh look! On yon near horizon…!
Watch next week for Essay 4: The Wave — what AI has to do with all of this, and why the question of inner life has never been more urgent.
You called it out! An uncomfortable truth!