The Nature of Power as a Psychic Trap (Part IV)

Power’s most devastating trick is convincing us that it’s something you can fight, overthrow, or escape. While power seems to reside in institutions, police batons, or government decrees, it’s more helpful to understand power as a way of relating to the world. In other words, rather than something external to us, power is woven into our very sense of self. The external expression of power is a reflection of our internal makeup. Power shapes who we are, how we think, and what we desire.

This is the trap: even when we resist power, we often do so using the same patterns, assumptions, and structures that power imposes on us. We think we’re breaking free, but in reality, we’re still operating within the logic that power has ingrained in us. Thus, we find ourselves fighting on its terms, using its language, and reinforcing its grip on our thinking and behavior.

Internalization and the Performance of Power

The most devastating thing about power is that when you think you’re flipping the script, you’re often just turning to another page in the same book. What I mean to say, is that even rebellion can become a reflection of power. Resistance efforts often mirror the structure and logic of power in a slightly distorted form, making it feel like change while keeping us trapped within the same story.

Think of the militant revolutionary so many on the left idolize, clutching a weapon as if it were a key to liberation. That gun is the distilled essence of state power, a miniature version of the authority they claim to defy. It is a relic of the very system protestors and militants claim to hate.

Take a closer look at the performance. The squared shoulders, the clenched jaw, the calculated threat in the militant’s voice. This is the same posture worn by soldiers, cops, and political strongmen. It’s the body language of authority. We have been taught, directly or indirectly, that to command respect and assert control, you must embody fear itself. Power has written the script, and in trying to flip it, resistance fighters only learned their lines better.

This is mimicry, dressed in power’s defiant clothes. Their rage feels like a personal fire, but it burns with fuel provided by the very structures they oppose. They mistake the inversion of power for subversion. But flipping the chessboard doesn’t mean you’re no longer playing the game.

A revolutionary strategy built on violence simplifies people into fixed roles of oppressor and oppressed, good and evil. This framing ignores how identity is shaped by context and how behavior reflects larger social, cultural, and psychological conditions. A police officer may act violently or unjustly, but that does not define his entire being. He is still a person shaped by his training, his upbringing, the norms of his workplace, and the broader political and economic structures he lives within. No one is purely evil.

When a rebel kills a police officer, it is often framed as an act of resistance. But the officer is also part of a web of human relationships. He may be a sibling, a neighbor, or a parent. People in his life see him as more than his uniform. His death causes pain that is not abstract. It creates grief, anger, and a sense of injustice for those who knew him personally.

This kind of action also affects the movement internally. Some participants begin to question the use of violence but stay silent out of fear of being labeled disloyal or weak. Their continued involvement is no longer based on shared belief but on pressure and anxiety. Outside the movement, people who see someone they care about killed by a revolutionary are unlikely to feel sympathy for the cause. Instead, the violence hardens their views, closes the door to dialogue, and creates new divisions. Rather than building support, it creates isolation.

This mirrors precisely the logic employed by the police against poor, Black neighborhoods devastated by constant surveillance, brutality, and arbitrary violence. Police cruisers patrol the streets endlessly, like vultures circling wounded prey, their blue lights casting haunting reflections in shattered windows. Doors kicked in without warning, bodies pressed violently to pavement under the glaring heat of searchlights, children's sleep disrupted by shouting and the metallic clink of cuffs becoming routine background noise.

The militant revolutionary mimics this exact brutality when choosing violence: targeting individuals as symbols, executing punishment without context or nuance, and imposing fear rather than fostering understanding. Though fighting back against such relentless trauma may feel justified, even necessary, the consequences are severe and profound.

Rather than breaking the cycle of oppression, violence deepens it, eroding the movement’s original commitment to communal flourishing, support, and radical empathy. The very logic of mutual aid and egalitarian freedom that inspired rebellion is betrayed, replaced instead by coercive power dynamics indistinguishable from those wielded by the oppressor. There is no endpoint to such violence.

This is the psychic trap of power: it prepares rebellion, shapes it, and often uses it to reaffirm its own necessity, as we discussed in Part I. In the end, the rebel clutching the weapon and the officer wielding the baton are mirror images locked in a dance choreographed long before either of them took the stage.

Violence as Recognition and Reproduction

It may appear, at first glance, that the police represent the most significant obstacle to meaningful revolutionary change. After all, they are the ones storming peaceful demonstrations, violently evicting those living in reclaimed abandoned housing, and systematically crushing efforts at mutual aid and communal autonomy. All of this is undeniably true. The crucial question then becomes: how do we respond effectively?

Our initial impulse, shaped deeply by the structures of domination embedded in our psyches, often pulls us toward fighting fire with fire. Yet, as discussed, this path is inherently self-defeating. Violence, once embraced, rapidly spirals into its own self-sustaining logic, obscuring the original aims of the movement and transforming it into something hostile, coercive, and ultimately unfree. The only way out is to first recognize the fundamental uncertainty of life itself, including the fluidity of our identities and those around us. As James Baldwin wrote in his essay The Creative Process, “A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.” A movement that fails to account for this instability ends up repeating the same patterns it set out to break.

Historically, successful revolutions have witnessed key moments when the police, soldiers, and other state agents—initially perceived as unwavering opponents—defected to join the revolutionary cause, as seen vividly in the Paris Commune and the Russian Revolution. No person's identity or allegiance is fixed permanently. Even those who seem inseparably bound to oppressive roles hold within them the potential for transformation. If a movement genuinely centers on principles such as mutual aid and free agreement, it must remain steadfast in refusing to harm or coerce those who have not yet freely chosen to join its cause. For what is free agreement if not a commitment to non-violence? True revolutionary strength lies precisely in the courage to extend compassion, patience, and openness, even to those who presently stand against you.

Violence is raw, immediate, undeniable. It often feels like the purest form of resistance. It’s the body screaming I exist in a world determined to erase you, to render you invisible.Yet, that surge of defiance, violence—especially when detached from any clear political purpose—doesn’t break chains. It polishes them. It reenacts power’s logic. The same brutal logic that dehumanizes the oppressed gets mirrored in their attempt to assert control.

People crushed by violence learn to speak its language fluently. It becomes their grammar for existence, shaping how they express pain, rage, and even love. They lash out not just at those who hold power over them, but also at their peers, their partners, their own communities.

The same structures that taught them submission also taught them aggression. When the anger turns inward, it festers into self-destruction. The consequence is addiction, self-harm, and reckless behavior that chews away at their own dignity because somewhere deep down, the system planted the lie: This is what you deserve.

Power doesn’t need to stand over them with a baton anymore. It’s already carved its mark inside their minds, shaped their reflexes, defined what resistance even looks like. Rebellion becomes a ritual that feels fierce and righteous but never spills outside the boundaries drawn by the very forces they oppose. Every punch thrown, every act of violence aimed without clarity or purpose, tightens the noose instead of cutting it.

That’s the cruelty of it: the system doesn’t just survive resistance; it feeds on it, thrives on the spectacle of people reenacting their own oppression, mistaking the echo for a roar.

Power as Performance

In a world gutted by alienation, where genuine community has been stripped down to transactions and collective struggle reduced to hashtags, resistance tends to take the form of spectacle. The militant revolutionary has largely been superseded by the Instagram warrior who is less interested in dismantling systems of oppression than in being seen resisting them.

Defiance gets packaged as an aesthetic, rebellion flattened into a pose, outrage turned into content. The anger is real but it’s funneled into gestures designed less to challenge power and more to be consumed by an audience, by algorithms, and by the very system it claims to oppose.

What’s tragic isn’t just that these performances are hollow. It’s that to the person performing them, they feel profound.

There’s a spike of adrenaline and a fleeting sense of purpose that comes with standing up, flipping off authority, and shouting into the void. But that high fades fast because it’s untethered from anything that could actually change the conditions that sparked the rage in the first place.

Without a collective framework, without a movement that stretches beyond the self, resistance collapses into a closed circuit. It feeds on itself, looping through cycles of outrage, performance, and burnout. The energy that could fuel real transformation gets drained by the need to appear radical, to curate an identity of defiance that’s easy to share, easy to brand, easy to dismiss. The system doesn’t have to crush rebellion when it can just turn it into a vibe.

The desire to break free becomes part of the machinery, repackaged and sold back to us as proof of our own agency. We’re left exhausted, convinced we’ve fought, when all we’ve done is perform.

This is precisely why identity must be understood as fluid and never static. A resistance that locks people into fixed roles—good versus evil, radical versus reactionary, ally versus enemy—ultimately becomes a closed circle, drawing in only those who already conform to its rigid expectations. Such a movement thrives on affirmation from those already converted, preaching rebellion to the already rebellious while remaining oblivious to the revolutionary potential latent in the apolitical supermarket workers stocking shelves at dawn, pharmacists managing prescriptions with quiet patience, nurses silently navigating exhaustion at the hospital, and sanitation and construction workers whose labor invisibly supports daily life.

These are the individuals whose buy-in genuinely matters, whose participation transforms rebellion from spectacle into a living, breathing movement. Yet if they sense that joining means stepping into a pre-assigned category, a strict moral hierarchy, or worse, a hostile environment defined by coercion and fear, they’ll remain on the sidelines. Rebellion, then, closes in on itself, gathering only those who already agree, never reaching those whose allegiance is fluid, undecided, and still forming. For true liberation, the movement must embrace uncertainty, meeting people where they are, in all their complexity, rather than forcing them into pre-set roles or ideological purity tests. Only then can resistance break out of the closed circle of performative defiance and into the expansive terrain of meaningful, collective transformation.

Power as Distorted Relation

Power divides people and creates identities based on those divisions. This makes people understand who they are through the same systems that oppress them. Even resistance becomes connected to these systems, because resisting still means accepting the rules set by those in power. To be against power is still to be within its grasp, still playing by its logic, still measuring existence in relation to the thing being fought.

How many people have said they expect to battle the system for life, never questioning whether that, too, is a role the system has assigned them?

Since capitalism can absorb and repurpose opposition, the real task isn’t to defeat its enforcers—police, CEOs, landlords, bosses, politicians—because they are not the root of its power. They are interchangeable parts in a machine that keeps running regardless of who fills those roles.

The system sustains itself by channeling opposition into competition that pits people against each other, hierarchies that recreate domination, and conflict staged as a spectacle that reinforces its own logic rather than dismantling it. Fighting capitalism on its own terms means playing a rigged game where even rebellion feeds the system.

Power is simply a distortion of the same energy that fuels all action, thought, and connection. This energy is what allows people to create, collaborate, and shape the world around them. But instead of flowing freely through mutual exchange, power manifests when that energy is seized and redirected, turning open-ended potential into rigid hierarchies. It transforms movement into control, creativity into ownership, and relationships into domination.

This redirection of energy into power doesn’t happen because control is some natural law. It happens because of a deep, underlying existential anxiety: nothing is truly independent or self-sufficient. No person, institution, or idea exists in isolation or in a static form. Everything depends on relationships, on fragile, shifting connections that can’t be fixed or fully controlled. Power emerges in the denial of this reality, seeking to impose order on what is fluid, to create the illusion of stability through domination.

Power survives by fabricating the illusion of fixed boundaries where there are none. It constructs the lie that there are clear-cut subjects—the “doers,” the ones who wield authority—and objects—the “done-to,” those who are acted upon.

You can see this existential performance in the smallest moments. The boss who hovers over every task, red-penning emails and nitpicking reports, is clinging to the illusion that control can anchor them against the fear of being insignificant, that without their grip tightening, they might vanish into the background noise of the world.

The friend who always needs to win the argument, who turns every conversation into a silent contest, is desperate to outrun the quiet terror that being wrong might mean being unseen, unworthy, or disposable.

The person obsessed with dominance in relationships is afraid that if they let go, if they stand unguarded, they’ll be exposed not as powerful but as fragile, vulnerable to the chaos that real connection demands.

Power fills the void left by an inability to sit with uncertainty, to accept that nothing—not status, not success, not even the self—is permanent. It’s a shield against the vertigo of meaninglessness, a tool to carve out artificial markers of significance in a world that refuses to give any guarantees.

To maintain the illusion of autonomy, people have to lie to others and to themselves. They have to suppress the parts of them that feel too porous, too dependent, too fragile. They build identities like fortresses, hiding the soft, shifting core of what it means to be alive. The more they cling to control, the more disconnected they become from others, from reality, and from themselves.

Yet, the fact that nothing is fixed and that everything exists in relationship should not be seen as an existential threat. It’s better understood as freedom. A self that isn’t permanent is a self that can change, adapt, and connect without being confined to a rigid identity. A world without absolute control is a world where people shape their lives through cooperation rather than coercion.

Yet, spellbound by the delusions of power, we refuse to accept this. Power thrives on our acceptance of the illusion that things must be solid, predictable, and owned. It builds borders to define land, laws to define behavior, titles to define worth. It grips institutions, hierarchies, and identities as if they are eternal truths rather than temporary arrangements.

Fortunately, the more power tries to hold onto control, the more fragile it becomes. Dismantling power, therefore, must not be about seizing it, redistributing it, or even resisting it in the traditional sense. It is about releasing the need for it altogether.

This release is an active unbinding, an engaged withdrawal, a deliberate refusal to participate in the rituals that keep hierarchies alive. It requires stepping out of the frameworks that turn life into a competition, where worth is measured by control, dominance, and status. It means consciously rejecting the belief that relationships need to be managed, people need to be fixed, and life needs to be organized around authority.

In practice, this looks like building communities where survival isn’t conditional on your ability to compete, earn, or prove your value. Rather, care is embedded in the structure itself through mutual aid systems where people provide food, shelter, medical support, and emotional care for each other without expecting anything in return. Not because it’s charity, but because interdependence is seen as the basic fact of being human. When you know your housing doesn’t depend on pleasing a landlord, your food doesn’t depend on wages from a boss, and your healthcare isn’t locked behind insurance paperwork, the whole premise of control starts to unravel.

Relationships shift when scarcity disappears because without the ability to withhold resources, there’s no leverage to exploit. No one has to stay in a miserable friendship for security, endure a controlling partner for shelter, or tolerate a domineering figure just to keep access to food, space, or community. You can move freely, sleep in different homes, share meals with new people, and cook alongside others without fear of being cast out or cut off. Affection, respect, and support flow naturally, because survival doesn’t depend on pleasing the right person.

Power-hungry friends lose their grip because there’s nothing to grip. Connection is everywhere, fluid and abundant. Relationships aren’t shaped by status or obligation but by shared work, spontaneous laughter, and a genuine curiosity about each other’s lives. You’re not calculating what someone can offer you, what debts are owed, or how to maintain favor. You exist in connection.

For this to happen, the environment itself has to strip away the conditions that breed control. Decision-making happens through consensus, not orders from above. No one is locked into a permanent leadership role. Rather, facilitators emerge, adapt, and step back when needed. Conflict isn’t a threat to stability that must be crushed or ignored. Rather, it’s a part of life, worked through collectively because the community doesn’t hold itself together with fear. There are no fragile hierarchies to protect, no punishments for disagreement, no authority figures who need obedience to maintain their position. Without power as the glue, relationships simply unfold, freely and without fear.

These spaces dismantle the feedback loops that condition people to accept capitalist norms. The constant anxiety of proving yourself fades because there’s nothing to prove when your value isn’t tied to productivity or performance. Through the steady, everyday rhythms of working, eating, resting, and creating together, relationships become horizontal instead of vertical, rooted in mutual aid, free association, and shared responsibility.

In such spaces, the very act of doing anything becomes transformative. Cooking together, growing food, caring for one another, creating art, and making decisions collectively are radical acts because they reorient the basis of social relations. Over time, these practices reshape external behaviors by breaking the psychological and emotional dependencies that capitalism has instilled.

Power doesn’t collapse in these spaces because it’s been overthrown. It dissolves because it has nothing to grip onto.

This would be life unmediated by the constant performance of control, where people exist in relation, not in opposition, to one another. But the truth is, people already exist in relation.

The idea that we are isolated individuals locked in competition is the illusion. Even in systems designed to pit us against each other, our lives are stitched together through threads we don’t always see. The coffee you sip in the morning was grown by someone thousands of miles away, picked, packed, and transported by hands you’ll never shake. The language you use, the ideas you think with, were shaped by generations long gone, people whose names you’ll never know. These are the quiet ways we hold each other up without even thinking about it.

Interconnection doesn’t need to be built from scratch. It’s already here, but it’s buried under layers of distraction, fear, and manufactured scarcity. The task isn’t to invent relation, it’s to notice it. To realize it’s been the ground beneath our feet the whole time.

And once we see it, the work becomes clear: we don’t need to chase some grand blueprint for a perfect system. We need to practice relation, deliberately and consistently. This isn’t about overthrowing one authority to install another or replacing one rigid structure with a shinier version. None of that matters if our relationships remain hollow, transactional, or rooted in the logic of power. To practice relation means creating conditions where connection can flourish, designing spaces where cooperation is easier than competition, where care isn’t heroic but ordinary, where conflict is part of growth, not a threat to stability. It’s about structuring the world so that power can’t sink its hooks into us because there’s no space left for it to take hold. The more we invest in the practice of being with one another through mutual aid, shared responsibility, and genuine presence, the more irrelevant power becomes.

Peter S. Baron (http://www.petersbaron.com)  is the author of If Only We Knew: How Ignorance Creates and Amplifies the Greatest Risks Facing Society.