The triangle of power

 

©Antti Talvitie, 2025

I recently read Finnish President Stubb’s excellent and courageous book Vallan kolmio.  I will write about what I read in between the lines. I stress that I do not in any way question President Stubb’s ideas or message – on the contrary, I agree with him. But I would like to add something of great importance.

As a teenager during the Korean War, I heard two priests warn of nuclear conflict and the Bible’s three Apocalyptic woes. Barely six years had passed since Finland’s war with the Soviet Union had ended and the atomic bombs had fallen on Japan. Everyone present had vivid memories. Would there be a world war? A layman answered bluntly: the Third World War has already begun. It is about money and power.

These two are not spelled out in the president’s book, though he explores their many dimensions with great depth. Would it have been too disruptive to say them openly? Multinational corporations and great wealth – money – exert an immense influence in the world. They shape geopolitics, the balance between democracy and autocracy, the divides in income and welfare, trade, technological progress, investment, and even our thoughts and opinions through the mass media. Power is often tied to money, but it exerts an independent force, as we can clearly see in the political, civic, and corporate life in the United States.

The dominance of money and power reflects human instincts of aggression and self-destruction. They are not the only instinctual expressions, but in the context of Vallan kolmio, perhaps the most important ones (with sexuality lurking behind). Freud propounded his ideas in correspondence with Einstein, Why War?

Many of the ideas Einstein and Freud discussed in their letters in the early 1930s have since become reality: international institutions, rules that all nations accept and obey [if only with great difficulty and never consistently], endowed with authority and force, when necessary, to oversee compliance with the agreed rules. President Stubb incisively analyzes the very reservations and dangers that all three foresaw, while exploring how humanity might act when faced with such challenges.

Freud emphasized that our instinct for aggression and self-destruction is as important as that of the life instinct. They are intertwined, at work within each of us, and active in groups, societies, and political units across the three regions West, East, and South. Divergent perspectives, interests, and conflicts are inevitable. Justice and violence are not opposites, even though violence has often been the way conflicts are resolved. But are there other ways? Is war and killing, large-scale violence and mass murder, unavoidable? Can nations of unequal strength form a union – the United Nations – with the ability to cooperate dynamically, to determine what is just, and, through superior power, to uphold a rule of law?

Can nations cooperate on global questions – security, peace, the environment, climate, international trade, poverty, economic development, intellectual and immaterial rights – despite profound differences in values? The answer is yes, if emotional bonds exist between societies, as among the Nordic countries and, more broadly, in the Western world. Yet these issues remain difficult and contentious even within, and between, nations that share similar values. President Stubb underlines in Vallan kolmio that cooperation among the world’s three regions is made even more challenging by divergent political and economic systems, poverty, geopolitical rivalry, contrasting historical experiences, and different starting points.

In the absence of emotional bonds, Freud saw the pursuit of truth as the answer – a scientific approach to questions and problems, regardless of background or perspective. But today popular knowledge from science is nearly exhausted, without having brought about unity.

Freud captured the gravity of the human condition in these words: “The fateful question for the human species seems to be whether and to what extent [it] will succeed in mastering the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction … But who can foresee with what success and with what result.” And before that is his uncompromising phrase: “Where id was, there ego shall be.”

Therapy is of no help -- only analysis is, as President Stubb did in his book. Yet does he avoid hinting at analysis of motives of the (most) powerful decision-makers? Would it have been counterproductive to say so?  Instead of King Claudius’, Hamlet is saying: "Madness in great ones must not unwatched go."  

Julkaistu: Uusi Suomi Puheenvuoro 6.10.2025 (in swedish)