Hard Power vs Soft Power

A couple of weeks ago I caught up with Marcos, my former empregado from Mozambique. He was a student at the high school where I taught in Alto Molocue, Mozambique during my time in the US Peace Corps from 2012-2014. I hired him to do various house chores, such as laundry and bringing water to the house from the nearby well. Over the course of two years, he became a good friend and we have kept up ever since.

Marcos in 2012

It had been a few years since we last caught up and his updates brought me to my knees.

He’d lost two children in the last three years. One at four months old, the other at seven months.

Just heartbreaking.

And now, the USAID funding for the project that employs him is about to run out because of the federal cuts.

He’s about to lose his job. A job that was probably paying him maybe $500 a month, if that, probably less.

Why?

I sit here as my wife and I are expecting our first child in May. Holding our potential joy and his existential grief at the same time.

I haven’t written at all about the USAID cuts, about the decisions to throw caution to the wind and soft power out the window.

The decisions that have been made in the past year in DC, that are made everyday, reverberate around the planet.

Touching base with Marcos made me realize the extreme disconnect between where these decisions are being made and the impact on people on the ground.

Real people.

Real lives.

In Mozambique, in America and in every country in the world touched by American influence. So every country.

It gets me asking the question: what is the point of this whole thing?

Like the big thing.

Life.

What are we doing?

Is the point to just gain power and have power over people? Or is the point to support and help other people?

The answer to this question I believe rests on whether we let fear or hope take the drivers seat in our lives, and in our society.

Is hard power or soft power the best path?

At its core, I believe this is a question of the balance between fear and hope in our individual lives all the way up to that balance within our culture(s) and broader society.

I think we default to “hard power” when we let fear dominate our decision-making matrix. And soft power is when we let hope take the wheel.

Soft power is essentially saying: I believe that I can build enough of a relationship with this person, with this country, that I can trust that what they say is what will happen — that we have enough shared respect, appreciation, and mutual desire for us both to succeed — so that I don’t need to have hard power over them.

A world only controlled, governed, and influenced by hard power is a terrible world. You’re always living in fear. Always living in a scarcity mindset, a fear mindset. That’s not a world I want to live in. I don’t think it’s a world many people want to live in.

I feel like we’re living in a moment where on the net, we are really leaning into expecting the worst of each other and humanity. We assume worst intent. We’re largely making decisions driven by fear, from individual life decisions up to decisions at the highest levels of government.

And I think that is a self-reinforcing feedback loop. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that’s going to lead us more and more into that darker world. We’re manifesting a world of fear, where hard power is the only thing that works.

But hard power creates more fear, more darkness, and increasingly likely, more death.

But we have a choice. And maybe we need to take a step towards soft power, a step towards hope. A step towards a neighborhood where we can actually trust our neighbor. A country where we can trust our government. We can start to rebuild trust the country next door or half way around the world. We create space for that trust emerge and take root.

And to me, this is the ceiling for humanity. This is the ceiling that we can and should aspire to. Proving to the universe that we are the most evolved species. Cause right now, we ain’t acting like it.

But trust is not something that is built in a day, and it can be easily broken. There is a purpose to fear. When I suggest that we should lean more into soft power, that doesn’t mean a full shift to blindly trusting everyone that you interact with in life, that we should assume best intent all the time by every actor in the world.

I believe that a wisest path is the middle path. A balance between fear and hope. A balance between soft power and hard power.

My issue is that right now I think we are heavily over-indexing towards fear and hard power. And that is a self-fulfilling negative feedback loop that will lead to a more unsafe and more unstable world, for everyone and every being that calls it home.

In my lived experience, hard power has never been sustainable.

When in my life has power over someone else, physical power over somebody, actually gotten me what I wanted over a sustained period of time? More than ten minutes? Rarely, if ever.

I can’t think of a single example.

The only sustaining power in my life comes from relationships I’ve built. People I know, that I can trust, that I can go to when I need help, and I know they will be there.

Yes, I know we have weapons of mass destruction. Maybe there’s some truth to mutually assured destruction as a kind of necessary evil, because these evils exist to begin with. But if we only lean into that, if we only lean into hard power, especially looking at a world where resources are likely to become scarce, we are going to go down a darker and darker path.

I don’t want to go down that path. I don’t want to live a life in fear. Because I believe in humanity, and I believe we are capable of so much more.

But that starts with an understanding, a recognition, and a respect that soft power is actually stronger and more durable power than hard power. And we have to recognize and adopt that across all levels of society, from our individual lives all the way up to the highest levels of government.

Every day we get to wake up and choose fear, or choose hope. We get to assess whether we are in balance, or whether we are out of wack. And in a world where most of the systems are optimized to push fear, it will take each of us as individuals over-indexing towards hope, at least for a period, to come back into balance.

Every day, we each get to choose whether to see the humanity in others or see their evils. We get to choose whether we give grace and give an opportunity for trust, for something better, or whether we see others as an enemy, a threat to be mitigated, or worst, neutralized.

When I look across the arc of history at the people we really celebrate, idolize, the ones that all of society truly reveres, they are the people who said, I’m going to forgive you.

They’re the ones who said, I’m not seeking retribution. I’m not seeking an eye for an eye. I’m going to see the humanity in you, and even though you might have harmed me, I’m going to forgive you. They gave grace and allowed the better part of humanity and society to emerge.

Jesus is probably the best example. There’s Nelson Mandela. There’s Mahatma Gandhi. Martin Luther King Jr. There are so many of these people that we revere, figures who were tapped into a deeper spirit and a deeper purpose of being. And those are the ones we celebrate. We celebrate those who are masters of soft power, who fully believe in it and lean into it.

We don’t celebrate the people whose only legacy was hard power.

And I don’t think we will in 100 years.

So to me, the question — and the big opportunity — is this: Can we see the value of life? Can we see the humanity in other people? Can we see the value in relationship building and trust and soft power?

Can we open our eyes to the reality of others’ lived experience> Like Marcos, who’s about to lose his job, and who, because of the lack of medical services in Mozambique, has lost two of his children in the last three years? And here we are, cutting the support that is his job, that provides the medical care, that builds the relationship with Mozambique, that builds the trust, that builds reciprocity.

We have an opportunity to do this so differently than we’re doing it right now.

This is where I think looking at your personal life is so important, because the macro reflects the micro, and the micro reflects the macro. You might think that on a macro scale, the US should be fully leaning into hard power and hard power only. But if you did that in your personal life, if you only leaned into your physical power over the people around you to accomplish things, how far would that get you?

To me, this is the critical question. Because in general, what we see and experience and live in our personal lives is what we see reflected in the bigger macro engagements in the world.

Personally, I choose hope. I choose trust. I might get burned. But I know that if we continue on the current path, we all will burn.

I want to lean into believing that a life focused on building relationships and trust will get me much further than a life of power-over and fear and anger. And I believe in the macro, that’s the way to go for the US as well, or any other country.

And honestly, when I listen, when I listen to whatever deeper wisdom you want to call it, God or whatever, the voice tells me that I, we, need to be vassals of hope. We are harbingers of trust. We are builders relationships. We are vehicles of reciprocity.

That is what I believe we as individuals, especially us Americans, in this moment in time, are being called to do. That is how are being called called to show up.

And we can all do better. I know I can do better. I am one of the believers in soft power, and yet I know that every day I can do a better job of choosing hope over fear. And in doing so, I think this creates some light. That light will attract others. And little by little, we start to shift neighborhoods, communities, cities, states, countries and ultimately the world to bring hope back into balance with fear. Soft power back into balance with hard power. And maybe just a nudge beyond :).

That’s the promise of humanity, that is our highest calling. Give grace, create space for second chances, forgive.

At least for today.

Choose hope.

Choose soft power.

Let’s come back into balance.

- Eric