"President of somewhere in nowhere, who tend to be autocratic, was nearing to end his tenure, being interviewed by a journalist about old age. The journalist asked, 'How do you know when you're getting old?' Swallowing his saliva, the autocrat said, 'You know you're getting older when you have retired, the telephone rings on a Saturday night and you hope it's not for you,'" said the Black Tulip to Wulandari when the light of the moon shone on her.
To introduce her podcast guest—let's just say this was Wulandari podcast—she started with, "Welcome back to my channel! Plants are curious organisms—clearly they are alive, but their apparent lack of any central organization (brain, heart, or nervous system) makes it harder for us to understand how they work. They are slow: usually they look today just like they did yesterday, and we have to wait, sometimes a long time, to see changes in them. Their metabolism, development, and sensory and response behaviors are orders of magnitude slower than those of most animals. Their bodies and development are not centralized but rather are diffuse; they grow in modular units, and often detached parts can reestablish as individuals (natural cloning) or be replaced. Plants don’t talk to us, so we are left to decipher what they are up to. This is the nature of inquiry, experimentation, and discovery.
All animals are dependent upon plants, since plants are the organisms at the base of the food chain, because of their capacity to photosynthesize—that is, to turn water and carbon dioxide into oxygen and sugars, in the presence of sunlight. As life on Earth gradually evolved from simple unicellular organisms to the variety of organisms we know today, the complexity of interactions between plants and animals increased, but plants remained the basis for life on Earth. Plants support all animal life. Humans are no exception to this rule, and we are just as dependent upon plants as any other animal. We depend on plants not only for their role in producing the oxygen we breathe, but also for food, shelter, medicines, clothing, and countless other uses.
Well, our guest today, the Black Tulip. Black, it’s an unusual color of a beloved flower! Black Tulips are as eye-catching as they are hard to plant. Their shades of deep chocolate, dark maroon, and midnight purples can very easily be interpreted by the eye as true black. But the richness of their colours and the variety of their flower shapes make tulips endlessly fascinating.
Bright, dazzling, impressive, imposing, and sumptuous, even dominating—these are all words that can be used to describe the flowers of tulips. With names like ‘Golden Parade’, ‘World’s Favourite’, ‘Big Smile’, and ‘Olympic Flame’, tulips are not expected to be shy and retiring. They burst upon the scene in early spring, reaching a crescendo by late spring before disappearing for the summer. They demand your attention and accommodating them in your garden will need some thought, otherwise what you imagined would be a joyous, flamboyant display might turn out to be overpowering, harsh, or even lurid.
It may not be love at first sight, but the allure of these plants will creep up on you and before you know it, you are seeking out new varieties, experimenting with different colour combinations, and finding new places to try tulips in your garden.
Now, let's listen what the Tulip would like to tell us!"
After fixing her bobbed hair, Tulip said, "Thanks for having me, Wulan! It's true that my kind, Tulip, comes in almost every colour, the exception being true blue, although some forms come very close. Plant tulips in a single colour block for a bold display or arrange them in geometric shapes of contrasting primary colours to jolt the senses.
Tulips are often associated with Turkey because it is from there that they were brought into Europe in the sixteenth century. Most tulip species are from further east, in the rocky valleys, hills, and mountains of Central Asia but, because of their intensely colourful flowers, they were grown and revered in Turkey, especially in Constantinople (present-day Istanbul), the capital of the Ottoman Empire. In the reign of Sultan Ahmed III (1703–30), known as the Tulip Age (Lâle Devri) because of the popularity of that flower in Constantinople in the early 18th century. Tulips with long narrow, pointed petals—often called needle tulips—were especially favoured.
Each of Tulips has a special look, and mainly the Black Tulip, signify power and strength. Now, despite all the stories about the Tulips, let me tell you about the Power.
The world you live in is a challenge and a game, and that a sense of power—your power—is at the core of it, says Michael Koda. All life is a game of power. Some people play the power game for money, some for security or fame, others for manhood game, most for some combination of these objectives. The master players seek power itself, knowing that power can be used to obtain money, sex, security or fame. None of these alone constitutes power; but power can produce them all. No matter who you are, the basic truth is that your interests are nobody else's concern, your gain is inevitably someone else's loss, your failure someone else's victory. Further, Koda says that to play the power game, it is first necessary to discover for yourself what power is. The trick is to develop a style of power based on one's character and desires. It is not enough to want power, or even to have it. It must be used creatively. And it must be enjoyed. The use of power as a weapon of aggression makes monsters of us. Power must be the servant, not the master.
According to Bertrand Russell, power, along with glory, remains the highest aspiration and the greatest reward of humankind. John Kenneth Galbraith says that not many get through a conversation without a reference to power. Max Weber, the German sociologist and political scientist, while deeply fascinated by the complexity of the power, contented himself with a definition close to everyday understanding: power is 'the possibility of imposing one's will upon the behavior of other persons.' This, almost certainly, is the common perception; someone or some group is imposing its will and purpose or purposes on others, including on those who are reluctant or adverse. The greater the capacity so to impose such will and achieve the related purpose, the greater the power. It is because power has such a commonsense meaning that it is used so often with so little seeming need for definition. Elsewhere Weber said of power that it is the ability of one or more persons to 'realize their own will in a communal act against the will of others who are participating in the same act.'
How the will is imposed, how the acquiescence of others is achieved? Is it the threat of physical punishment, the promise of pecuniary reward, the exercise of persuasion, or some other, deeper force that causes the person or persons subject to the exercise of power to abandon their own preferences and to accept those of others? Galbraith sugests that the instruments by which power is exercised and the sources of the right to such exercise are interrelated in complex fashion. Some use of power depends on its being concealed on their submission not being evident to those who render it. And in modem industrial society, both the instruments for subordinating some people to the will of others and the sources of this ability are subject to rapid change. Much of what is believed about the exercise of power, deriving as it does from what was true in the past, is obsolete or obsolescent in the present.
Power, in a secular way, yields strongly to the three instruments for wielding or enforcing it: condign, compensatory, and conditioned power. Condign power wins submission by the ability to impose an alternative to the preferences of the individual or group that is sufficiently unpleasant or painful so that these preferences are abandoned. It can be said, by using a condign punishment. Condign power wins submission by inflicting or threatening appropriately adverse consequences. Compensatory power, in contrast, wins submission by the offer of affirmative reward by the giving of something of value to the individual so submitting. In an earlier stage of economic development, as still in elementary rural economies, the compensation took varied forms including payments in kind and the right to work a plot of land or to share in the product of the landlord's fields. And as personal or public rebuke is a form of condign power, so praise is a form of compensatory power. However, in the modern economy, the most important expression of compensatory power is, of course, pecuniary reward the payment of money for services rendered, which is to say for submission to the economic or personal purposes of others. It is a common feature of both condign and compensatory power that the individual submitting is aware of his or her submission in the one case compelled and in the other for reward. Conditioned power, in contrast, is exercised by changing belief. Persuasion, education, or the social commitment to what seems natural, proper, or right causes the individual to submit to the will of another or of others. The submission reflects the preferred course; the fact of submission is not recognized. Conditioned power, more than condign or compensatory power, is central, to the functioning of the modem economy and polity, and in capitalist and socialist countries alike.
Compensatory enforcement is thought to be far more civilized, greatly more consistent with the liberty and dignity of the individual, than condign enforcement. In the poor society the difference between condign and compensatory enforcement is small; only in the rich society does a major difference emerge. When poverty was general, free workers toiled in fear of the starvation and other privation that were the alternative to compensation.
Behind these three instruments for the exercise of power lie the three sources of power the attributes or institutions that differentiate those who wield power from those who submit to it. These three sources are personality, property and organization.
Personality leadership in the common reference is the quality of physique, mind, speech, moral certainty, or other personal trait that gives access to one or more of the instruments of power. In primitive societies, this access was through physical strength to condign power; it is a source of power still retained in some households or youthful communities by the larger, more muscular male. However, personality in modern times has its primary association with conditioned power with the ability to persuade or create belief.
Property or wealth accords an aspect of authority, a certainty of purpose, and this can invite conditioned submission. But its principal association, quite obviously, is with compensatory power. Property income provides the wherewithal to purchase submission.
Organization, the most important source of power in modern societies, has its foremost relationship with conditioned power. It is taken for granted that when an exercise of power is sought or needed, organization is required. From the organization, then, come the requisite persuasion and the resulting submission to the purposes of the organization. But organization, as in the case of the state, also has access to condign power to diverse forms of punishment. And organized groups have greater or lesser access to compensatory power through the property of which they are possessed.
Because there is a primary but not exclusive association between each of the three instruments by which power is exercised and one of the sources, so there are also numerous combinations of the sources of power and the related instruments. Personality, property, and organization are combined in various strengths. From this comes a varying combination of instruments for the enforcement of power.
From the combination of personality, the property, and, above all, the unique organization came the conditioned belief, the benefices or compensation, and the threat of condign punishment. Such is the complex of factors incorporated in and, in great measure, concealed by that term. Political power, economic power, corporate power, military power, and other such references similarly and deeply conceal an equally diverse interrelationship. When they are mentioned, their inner nature is not pursued. Individuals and groups seek power to advance their own interests, including, notably, their own pecuniary interest. And to extend to others their personal or social values. And to win support for their economic or other social perception of the public good. The businessman buys the submission of his workers to serve his economic purposes to make money. The politician seeks the support, which is to say the submission, of voters so that he may remain in office.
Why you should want power? Why some have it and why not all people have it? Obtaining and holding on to power can be hard work. You need to be thoughtful and strategic, resilient, alert, willing to fight when necessary. We'll discuss it on the next session, bi 'idhnillah."
"And cut!" Wulandari then stopped for a moment the session to carried on the next session. Before continuing, she sang,
Bagai bintang di surga dan seluruh warna
[Like stars in heaven and all colors]
Dan kasih yang setia dan cahaya nyata
[And faithful love and true light]
Oh bintang di surga berikan cerita
[O stars in heaven give a story]
Dan kasih yang setia dan cahaya nyata *)
[And faithful love and real light]
