The Nature of Power (Part I)
What is power?
To answer this, we should think about how power shows up in the world, how it operates, and why it works the way it does. Power isn’t something you can hold or own. It is not a thing. Rather, power is a relation. It manifests as a dynamic process woven into the structures of our social, political, and economic systems.
Power is a force that moves through relationships, shaping who gets heard, who makes decisions, and who controls resources. It shapes the rules of the game, determining what’s possible, what’s considered legitimate, and what can be enforced in any given situation. It shifts, expands, and contracts as people push back, comply, or reinforce the systems around them.
Crucially, power does not exist outside of these relationships. It doesn’t hover outside of society. Rather, it is the architecture of social life itself. Let’s be more precise. Power takes form through laws, social norms, institutions, and the routines of our daily lives. Its role extends beyond controlling people or dominating others. Power is fundamentally creative. It works to create, organize, and sustain specific arrangements of people, resources, and behaviors.
With more detail, the nature of power will reveal itself. Let’s dive in.
Power as the Production of Subjects
Power shapes people into specific roles. It tells us what to do by telling us who we are. I’m not referring to those rare moments of crisis or authority figures barking orders. Power works best when it’s invisible, embedded in everyday routines, relationships, and institutions.
Consider schools. They teach math and history, yes. But they also teach obedience, punctuality, and respect for hierarchy. Students learn to raise their hands to speak, sit still for hours, and accept that the person at the front of the room controls their time. While punishment enforces the rules when necessary, the real power lies in the structure itself.
When power is embedded structurally like this, it becomes invisible. Behavior is shaped through the illusion that this is simply the way things are.
The use of occasional but swift force serves to snap people back in line. A reprimand, a bad grade, or a trip to the principal’s office each sends a message about what kind of person you are becoming. Over time, you learn that being quiet, obedient, and efficient earns approval, praise, and the promise of a good future, while questioning, resisting, or moving at your own pace leads to trouble (or to a rebel identity). This doesn’t feel like someone’s opinion, it simply feels like the way the world is. You start to see yourself as a good student, a problem child, or maybe just average. Rarely do you stop to ask “who decided these were the measures of success in the first place?” The system’s values become your own, shaping what you strive for, what you avoid, and what feels possible for you long after school is over.
The same goes for workplaces. Job titles, dress codes, and performance reviews shape behavior without anyone needing to yell. You show up on time, meet deadlines, and act “professional” because that’s what’s expected. Deviate too far and you face consequences. Maybe you don’t get terminated, but your so-called “deviance” may mean missing out on promotions, being sidelined, or socially isolated. That quiet voice rears its head again, reminding you to stay in line, to not push too hard, and to shrink yourself just enough to fit the mold.
Legal systems go even deeper. Being labeled a “felon,” a “refugee,” or an “illegal immigrant” is a status that carries specific legal and social consequences. These labels dictate who can vote, who can work, who deserves protection, and who can be thrown in a cage. They create categories that shape how people are treated by the state and by each other. You don’t have to be arrested to feel the weight of power. If you’re constantly aware that certain behavior might get you profiled, surveilled, or harassed, you start adjusting without anyone having to say a word.
Normalization is the process of making certain behaviors, identities, and roles seem so natural that questioning them feels strange. Why do people work 40 hours a week? Why do they take out massive loans for education or housing? Is this because this is the right way to live, or because power has imposed a standardized model of success while making alternative paths economically punishing or nearly impossible to sustain? Other choices exist, but they seemingly come with even greater risk, instability, or social exclusion.
People don’t need to be forced into compliance when deviating from the system extracts an such a heavy toll. The debt, the job, and the obligations tighten around those who try to carve their own path, making exit from social normativity feel like a gamble, if not unthinkable. People conform because they believe (often rightly!) it’s the only way to survive, succeed, or even be accepted.
Step outside the lines, and the consequences show up as an eviction notice taped to your door, an empty fridge at the end of the month, or medical bills. The punishment is the aching exhaustion from juggling two jobs with no time for your kids, the gnawing anxiety of living one missed paycheck away from disaster.
Power takes shape in how we relate to our world, where the system presents itself as the natural order and enforces obedience through swift and unforgiving consequences, carried out as the slow violence of deprivation, isolation, and insecurity for those who refuse to comply.
Power as Self-Reinforcing Through Resistance
Power often relies on conflict to justify its continuation. Systems of control are built to absorb resistance, twist it, and feed off it.
Resistance can be the very thing that justifies the system’s existence.
When authority is challenged, it seizes the opportunity to tighten its grip, rolling out new surveillance programs, passing harsher laws, or flooding the public sphere with narratives that paint dissent as a threat to safety, order, or 'the common good.'
Take protests, for example. A mass of people in the streets demanding change might look like a crack in the system, but at this point in history, the system has had centuries of practice in responding to protests. It knows how to respond: deploy riot cops, control the media narrative, and when the dust settles, introduce reforms that may appear progressive, but, after rounds of deliberation, result in policies that leave the foundations untouched. Maybe a new policy gets passed, a few officials are swapped out, but the the economic structures, policing systems, and hierarchies of control at the root of the injustice remain intact. The spectacle of resistance becomes part of the system’s performance, a way to release pressure without changing the conditions that created it.
After the murder of George Floyd, there were mass uprisings nationwide. What was the result? Democrats passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a reform bill that banned chokeholds and no-knock warrants at the federal level but failed to defund or dismantle the police structures protesters condemned. Meanwhile, under Biden, police budgets continued to grow, and police killings increased every single year of his administration.
Nevertheless, when this strategy of co-opted resistance and ideological control no longer keeps people in line, the façade cracks, and raw force takes over. Instead of reforms, you get harsher laws criminalizing dissent, expanded surveillance, and police armed like soldiers. Now, in cities across the country Trump has lined the streets with military, transforming American cities into zones under armed watch, where the presence of occupation is unmistakable.The state is shifting from pretending to listen to openly crushing. The illusion of dialogue is being replaced with the reality of suppression. This is a tactic we’ve seen before and see in authoritative regimes throughout the world.
Protesters are labeled threats, their demands twisted into justifications for repression. Tear gas clouds the streets to disperse crowds and to send a message: step out of line, and this is what you get. For some protestors, a court case that drags on for years, a criminal record that locks you out of jobs, and a blacklisting from spaces of influence follows.
This is not an anomaly, its simply how power operates over time. Power swings between concession and crackdown. Whether through the soft language of reform or the hard fist of repression, the goal is always to protect the system’s core, to remind people that stepping too far out of bounds comes with a cost.
In another example, we have seen this play out recently in Atlanta. In response to protests against the construction of the massive police training facility known as Cop City in Atlanta, Georgia, the state ramped up repression by charging activists with domestic terrorism, an unprecedented move for environmental and anti-police protests. Georgia lawmakers then introduced harsher legislation, expanding the definition of domestic terrorism to include property damage and increasing penalties for protest-related offenses. This legal shift allows the state to treat activists like criminals and justify aggressive policing under the guise of maintaining public safety.
What is being described is a feedback loop. Acts of resistance trigger responses like more policing, stricter regulations, and propaganda campaigns that suppress dissent and reinforce the very structures being opposed.
Power is incredibly adept at turning resistance into proof of its own necessity. Every riot becomes a reason for more cops. Every act of defiance becomes evidence that 'order' must be restored. Even when resistance wins small victories, those wins are often contained within frameworks that prevent deeper transformation.
What’s more, power anticipates the familiar forms of opposition: marches, petitions, civil disobedience. These rituals of dissent are expected, and because they’re expected, they’re manageable. What did Einstein say? “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
The powers that be have established protocols for dealing with these resistance methods, such as crowd control tactics, legal channels to absorb demands, media strategies to frame the narrative. In this way, power digests resistance, metabolizes it, and grows stronger, all while projecting an image of flexibility and responsiveness.
Police run drills on surrounding crowds, cutting off escape routes, and forcing protesters into confusion and panic while coordinating movements through radios and surveillance. They practice dispersing marches, isolating leaders, and escalating just enough to justify crackdowns, while protesters arrive with no rehearsals, no shared playbook, and no institutional backing. It’s not a fair fight; it’s stepping onto a battlefield those in power have mapped, using tactics they’ve mastered, against forces trained to control every possible move.
It’s like taking the guys you play pick up basketball with at your local gym and challenging the Lakers. We may have more players, but we lack the cohesion, the training, and the resources, and every mistake we make becomes another advantage handed to them.
Power and the Organization of Desire
Through cultural norms, media saturation, education systems, and economic pressures, power directs attention toward goals that seem personal but conscript us in serving the system. This includes encouragement for climbing corporate ladders, collecting degrees, buying homes in neighborhoods with good school ratings, and curating identities on social media for likes and followers. Getting a graduate degree often means decades of debt that can only be paid off by staying in high-pressure jobs that demand loyalty to corporate or state interests. Buying a home ties people to thirty-year mortgages, locking them into banks and property values that rise with gentrification, making them complicit in pushing others out while chasing stability for themselves. The problem is not the desire for shelter, education, or meaningful work itself, but that the system twists these basic aspirations into mechanisms of control, where student debt pushes graduates into careers that serve corporate profit over public good and mortgages are bundled and traded in ways that inflate housing markets and make stability harder for everyone else.
It’s essential to see that desire isn’t some untouched, internal spark unique to each person. It’s crafted, shaped by the environments we navigate. In a capitalist economy, success is seen as productivity, accumulation, and display. A new car is a marker of having ‘made it.’ A promotion is validation that your time is worth more. People chase six-figure salaries, luxury apartments with skyline views, and job titles embossed on business cards, not because these things carry inherent meaning, but because they come with applause from peers, nods of respect from strangers, and a sense of security tied to numbers in a bank account.
This structuring of desire ensures that people actively participate in maintaining the system, believing their choices are their own even though they’re shaped by cues buried in everything from advertisements to classroom lessons. Once again, what makes this form of control so effective is its invisibility. It doesn’t need cartoonish propaganda posters or public pledges (even though sometimes that’s around, too). No one has to stand in a square reciting loyalty oaths to capitalism (even though some do this).
Instead, it shows up in the panic of falling behind, the shame of being ‘unproductive’ on a day off, the impulse to compare net worths, job titles, or follower counts as if they measure human value. You don’t have to believe in the system’s values for them to shape your life; you just have to act in ways that keep its wheels turning, such as logging extra hours to impress your boss, buying things you don’t need to feel accomplished, and equating busyness with purpose.
Power’s Temporal Logic: Control Over the Future
Power engineers how we understand the past and limits what we believe is possible in the future. It manufactures the timeline itself, stitching together a version of history and a vision of the future that makes the current system seem natural, inevitable, and permanent.
This happens in classrooms where history textbooks call land theft and slaughter “exploration,” skipping over the villages burned, the bodies left to rot, and the children ripped from their families. Labor struggles aren’t depicted through the bodies crushed in factory collapses, the fingers mangled or lost to unguarded machines, or the riots where police cracked skulls to protect company profits, but instead, they are shown as a neat timeline of reforms, as if safety laws simply appeared without bloodshed. Museums display gold-plated swords and royal jewels without mentioning the hands that mined them under whips, or the bodies worked to death to line imperial vaults. Media cycles glorify every new invention as the genius of a billionaire, erasing the workers who spent years refining the tech, the researchers whose discoveries were stolen, and the sweatshops where the devices are assembled by desperate individuals slaving away for starvation wages.
By controlling these narratives, power traps people in a manufactured sense of time where the present feels like the logical conclusion of the past and the only path forward. The idea that “there is no alternative” is a carefully constructed illusion. History gets flattened into a series of necessary steps, each one presented as the only possible outcome: feudalism gave way to capitalism, and capitalism is framed as the final, mature form of economic life, as if nothing else could exist. People stop asking, What else is possible? because they’ve been trained to believe that possibility itself is a closed door. What is gets mistaken for what must be.
Crises expose the cracks in this illusion, but even then, power knows how to maintain its grip. A financial collapse isn’t framed as proof of capitalism’s instability; it’s spun as a technical glitch, the fault of a few bad actors, fixable with bailouts and policy tweaks. Climate disasters aren’t indictments of endless economic growth, they’re ‘natural’ events, treated like unfortunate weather patterns rather than the logical outcome of extractive economies. Political uprisings aren’t cries for justice, they’re security threats, met with tear gas, curfews, and armored vehicles rolling through city streets, while politicians call for “peace” and “stability.”
Each rupture gets repackaged as an isolated incident, never connected to the system’s foundational rot. Demands for transformation are funneled into appeals for ‘stability,’ turning moments of potential upheaval into opportunities to reinforce the very structures that caused the crisis.
In this way, power controls the architecture of reality itself. It curates the past to justify the present, turns the present into a cage disguised as common sense, and paints the future as a narrow hallway with no exits.
Power as the Management of Legitimacy
As we’ve been discussing, power thrives on legitimacy. The ability to convince. Legitimacy is achieved when authority is seen as justified, when rules are deemed fair, when hierarchies are seen as reflections of natural order or individual merit instead of as the outcomes of conquest, theft, and exploitation that they are.
The system is legitimatized in courtroom rituals with judges in black robes presiding as if law is wisdom incarnate and in job interviews where the “right fit” often means knowing how to perform deference just enough to seem respectable without challenging the status quo.
Economic inequality is celebrated under the glossy myth of meritocracy. Billionaires are framed as entrepreneurial geniuses, visionaries whose wealth supposedly mirrors their worth. Their yachts are seen as symbols of ambition fulfilled. Meanwhile, the poor are cast as lazy, morally deficient, or unlucky, their struggles repackaged as personal failings instead of the predictable outcomes of systemic deprivation.
The legal system props all this up with a straight face, draped in the language of justice, while prisons swell with human beings crammed into metal cages, stripped of dignity, agency, and even the basic rhythms of a normal life. They eat slop that barely qualifies as food and their bodies are slowly wrecked by the meals’ excessive salt, starch, and rot. Every second is lived under the weight of constant surveillance, the threat of violence by guards, by other prisoners, and by the very walls themselves.
At any moment, an incarcerated individual can be swallowed by solitary confinement, locked in a filthy concrete box no bigger than a closet, where the light is never quite on or off, the toilet might not work if there even is a toilet, and the only company is their own mind unraveling. Some lie on cold tile floors for days, others for months, some for years or even decades, their sense of time eroding, their bodies deteriorating, their screams absorbed by thick walls that exist to make sure no one hears them.
Just stop for a moment, think about spending the next ten years of your life in a 4x6 cell without lights where you smell the defecation of inmates in cells next to you and hear their screams day in and day out. Can you imagine what that would be like? How long would it be before you join the chorus of screams?
Judges, politicians, and wardens call this justice. Would you?
Legitimacy is built through intentional framing, but it’s also maintained through what’s not allowed to be said. Dissenting voices are pushed to the margins through a subtle process of discrediting, distorting, and drowning them out. Revolutionary ideas are labeled “radical,” “unrealistic,” or “dangerous.” Protesters become “rioters.” Structural critiques are dismissed as “conspiracy theories” or “extremism.” Public discourse is carefully managed.
The true genius of power is that it manufactures consent. It doesn’t need to post guards at every door when people have been conditioned to lock themselves inside…
We have been conquered.
As the garrison keeps watch
We are monitored
By our own confabulated morals
Which emerged out of fear
Of risking revelation and losing love…
We defend the very systems that grind us down, argue for the rules that keep us trapped, all while believing that the world is natural, even good.
Power as a Relational Process
Power is not a thing you can seize or hold in your hands. It’s a force woven into the fabric of relationships, a current running through the spaces between people, institutions, and ideas. It doesn’t sit in a throne or hide in a vault. Rather, it moves, shifts, and adapts. Power operates by shaping who we believe we are, steering what we desire, scripting the stories we tell about our past, and convincing us that its grip is both natural and necessary. It feeds on both compliance and resistance, through the reproduction of social norms, institutional routines, and cultural beliefs that feel too familiar to question.
To understand power, we have to let go of the idea that it’s just something that flows from the top down. It’s not confined to governments, CEOs, or police forces. It’s embedded in the most ordinary interactions, from the language we use, to the assumptions we don’t notice, and the choices we think are ours.
Nevertheless, power is never invincible. Its greatest weakness is that it can’t sustain itself without constant upkeep. It has to be believed, repeated, performed day after day, generation after generation. Its legitimacy is fragile, always one revelation away from crumbling. It survives by hiding in plain sight, but when exposed, it trembles. Because in the end, power isn’t absolute. It’s a story that has to be told over and over, and stories can change.
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.
