Aoife Henry

I don’t think that the above adage, attributed to The Amazing Spiderman, is a useful one. Telling people of power that they are obligated to be proactive with that power is unlikely to win them over. Nobody likes to be told what to do or what they should be doing. People with power, be it in the form of wealth, influence, charisma, opportunity, proximity to whiteness/maleness/heterosexuality, fluency in English, education, connections, etc, rarely appreciate being told that their power was not hard-earned but rather is a. product of a series of self-perpetuating lucky coincidences. I prefer the following formulation:

With any power, comes some capacity to instigate some change for the greater good.

If you have the power of stature, as a supervisor of any number of people at work, you have the capacity to make 40+ hours of each week of their lives better or worse. If you have the power of good looks and verbal or.written elocution, you have the capacity to convince other power-bearers of radical ideas and calls to action. If you have the power of money, you have the capacity to wield resources for the common good.

This is both a liberating and terrifying proposition. Liberating, because it means that our chosen career paths may not limit our altruistic aspirations, even if they do not wind through the realm of philanthropy. Terrifying, because it means that our chosen career paths do not excuse us from pursuing those altruistic aspirations. If you have any power, you can choose to use it to instigate positive change. It would be unhelpful to say that you are obligated to, but you do have the option.

The means by which you could make change depend on the form your powers take. I, for example, am white, a native English speaker, middle-class, highly educated, radiating with confidence in my own abilities, and have been trained in technical skills that are prized in our economy. I have youth and pretty privilege on my side. I have a knack for wordsmithery (if you’re still with me, I hope that means that you agree), I’ve read enough psychology bibles to know how to manipulate people for better or for worse, and I can play the entertainer in.a group of people. As a woman, I may lack the advantage bestowed upon cisgender males by the patriarchy, but I recover some of that lost ground because I am unlikely to be perceived as a threat. I am a PhD student in engineering with some leverage at various institutions that have benefited, and have more to benefit, from my work.

What capacity to instigate positive change do these superpowers grant me? I have options that span a range of scopes and effectiveness, for example:

• Effective altruism – earn a lot of money and give some percentage of it to reputable non-profit organizations and/or individuals
• People management – gain a supervisory role and treat the people under my management like humans rather than machines
• Advocacy – volunteer for this and that committee as a voice for diversity, equity and inclusion, environmental sustainability practises, and alignment of the organizations with the ethics etched into their mission statements
• Unionizing – rallying and organizing employees to make requests for less exploitation of their labor
• Outreach – feeding individuals and organizations gifted with lesser power and/or confidence with the resources that I/my organization has been gifted
• Application of skills – using my engineering skills to design and build products that do good and withholding those skills from applications that do harm

This is one of those posts that I write in my efforts to untangle my own thoughts and biases, to find that pearl of wisdom buried somewhere in me that encloses the answer to my question – how can I best do good in my line of work?