Steven Weiner, computer specialist and Aesthetic Realism associate, writes:

“Good Power or Bad—the Criterion” is about something gigantic in everyone’s life. What kind of power are we after, and is there a fight in us about that? Can we learn from art about the power we truly want? And the battle about power now taking place in our nation—what is it really about? Here, a contemporary woman writes with depth and sincerity about what she learned from Aesthetic Realism about power—and how it changed her life magnificently. Read this exciting, important new issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known!

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

This issue of TRO is about the vast and intimate, historical and everyday, worldwide and personal matter of Power. We include a paper that art educator and sculptor Donita Ellison presented at an Aesthetic Realism public seminar titled “Power & Kindness: Do They Have to Fight?” And we begin with maxims about power, from Eli Siegel’s book Damned Welcome: Aesthetic Realism Maxims. They are playful, delightful, yet mightily serious. They have one feel there is sense to the world.

A struggle about power is taking place intensely in America now. It’s about: should this nation, including its wealth and opportunities, belong to all citizens or only to certain persons? As those in behalf of the second try to have the unjust power they want, they’re also trying to have power over truth itself. That is: they’re lying, ferociously, massively, and continually.

Mr. Siegel defined power as “the ability to change things.” The power Ms. Ellison discusses here is mainly the power people have gone after in social life and love. But whether in economics, love, sports, politics, academic pursuits, or conversations, there can be good power or bad power. And Aesthetic Realism is the philosophy which, after centuries, explains definitively the criterion for distinguishing between these. The distinction arises from the two large desires battling in everyone. These, Aesthetic Realism explains, are 1) the desire to respect the world, see meaning in it, and 2) the desire to have contempt for the world, feel superior to it. Good power arises from the first, and (in keeping with the subject of Ms. Ellison’s paper) good power is always kindness too. Bad power arises from, and is, contempt: “the addition to self through the lessening of something else….” Read more