Vis consilii expers mole ruit sua
Horace
Might as well…
The educational planets, much like their celestial counterparts, the planetary planets, have aligned in recent days, prompting the Director to opine frequently on the subject of power. Whether looking at the relative power of women in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Shelley’s meditation on transience in Ozymandias, or the sinister trinity of Satan, Sin, and Death in Paradise Lost, power has loomed large on the Director’s radar. Yet power is a slippery thing. We think we know what it is, but, like many of our assumptions, our confidence often proves quite wrong. Just ask the student who is convinced that doing no homework is an exercise in power.
Lakoff and Turner, in their wonderful book Metaphors We Live By, argue that our conceptual system is not merely a way of speaking but a way of thinking, shaping the very realities we inhabit. If this is true, then our understanding of power, who holds it, how it works, what it even is, isn’t just an abstract matter, but a foundational aspect of how we relate to the world. My hope is that today’s paltry words illuminate some of these assumptions as well as challenge them because, as I say, they’re often wrong.
There is, of course, no definition of power that does not begin to unravel like Macbeth’s sleeve of care, under even the lightest of scrutiny. What, then, can be said of this ravelled sleeve of power? It can be counted in the coinage of influence, authority, wealth, or brute force, yet it remains an elusive quality, existing perhaps only insofar as others acknowledge it. Power has toppled empires, built them, steered revolutions, and crushed them, ennobled the human spirit, and debased it. If we were to get back to basics, we might suggest that at its most fundamental, power is the ability to effect change. But whose change? To what end? Even the most ruthless dictator, armed with all the mechanisms of control, is powerless if the will of the people shifts beneath them; witness the many statues of the deposed gathering dust in the basements of history. Power, despite its outward displays of grandeur, is always conditional on some form of obedience, or belief, and the compliance of those who sustain it.
As well as this, as Stan Lee’s Spiderman and Shakepeare’s King Lear both learn at some cost to themselves: with great power comes great responsibility. King Lear speaks of this thusly:
Oh, I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp.
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just.
Lear, now reduced to a wretched, naked state, alone in a storm on a ravaged heath, realises how much more attention he should have paid to the powerless when he was able to wield power. Spiderman, unlike Lear, is serialised and so Spiderman gets to learn his lessons on a regular basis. But it’s more or less the same thing.
There is also a paradox of power in that the more one hoards it, the more brittle it becomes. Milton shows Satan’s rule in Hell as both absolute and meaningless, as both compelling and self-defeating. Authentic power is fluid, relational, and, at times, invisible. The most enduring forms of power do not rest in coercion but in persuasion. A monarch’s crown can be removed, a tyrant’s rule overthrown, but the power of ideas? Well now, that is an altogether different kettle of onions. It is why Plato’s Republic still shapes political philosophy, why the words of a long-dead poet can ignite revolutions, and why a teacher in a classroom can shape the minds of the future (while wondering whether they have any power at all over Year 8 on a Friday afternoon).
Hannah Arendt argues that true power does not reside in force or violence but in collective action. She distinguishes between power and violence, observing that violence is what those who have lost true power resort to. Power, for her, is the ability to act in concert with others; it is fundamentally tied to freedom and the capacity for collective agency. When institutions rely solely on violence to sustain themselves, it is a sign of their fragility, not their strength. Perhaps this explains why a teacher who must resort to threats of detention has, in power terms, already conceded defeat. I couldn’t possibly comment…
But power does not merely operate at the level of visible authority. Steven Lukes’ theory of power’s three dimensions is particularly useful in understanding how power functions beneath the surface. First, there is the overt power of direct decision-making: who gets to decide what and for whom. Then, there is the second dimension: the power of agenda-setting, determining what even gets discussed. Finally, and most insidiously, there is the third dimension: the power to shape desires, to make people potentially act against their own interests without even realising it. This is the kind of power Orwell warned of; power so deeply embedded in the fabric of life that it is invisible. It is also the power that ensures Year 9 do their homework, not through coercion, but through the subtle shaping of their ambitions and fears.
Our friend, Chomsky, with whom the Director rarely sees eye to eye these days, nonetheless offers a useful warning on this aspect of power: where it is not merely about laws or leaders but about the narratives we are fed and the ones we internalise. He argues that governments and corporations shape perceptions so subtly that we believe we are acting freely when, in reality, our choices are being directed. This is power not as brute force but as manufactured consent. Orwell sounded a similar alarm: the most effective power is not that which shouts the loudest, but that which determines what is heard at all, and these days increasingly, what is able to be labelled and dismissed as ‘fake news’.
‘But what about English philosopher, political economist, politician, civil servant and all round good egg, John Stuart Mill?’, I hear you ask, dear reader. Well if we can momentarily set aside his regrettable dalliance with Utilitarianism (a theory which, in its most basic form, suggests that actions are right in proportion to their promotion of happiness – yes, well…), we find something rather useful in his reflections on power. He reminds us that power, when wielded wisely, need not be a source of oppression. His On Liberty argues that the greatest threat to freedom is not just the tyranny of governments, but in a similar way to Chomsky and his pals, the tyranny of prevailing opinion. Namely, the pressure to conform, to think as others think, to live as others live. He warns that the suppression of dissenting voices, whether by law or social custom, is a form of power every bit as dangerous as brute force. True liberty, for Mill, is the freedom to challenge, to question, to think differently. The greatest wielders of power might then be not emperors but those who dare to dissent, whether it be the poet who refuses to tame their verse or the scientist who questions accepted wisdom. Or in his own quiet rebellion, the young Director, who in rebelling against his school’s ban on students wearing white socks instead went to school wearing a single white sock.
Speaking of things being upside down brings us nicely to Max Scheler’s hierarchy of values. His hierarchical pyramid begins with the lowest level of sinnliche Werte, or values of the senses i.e. things which we find either pleasant or unpleasant. Values of utility (or uselessness) are on the same level, since “nothing can meaningfully be called useful except as a means to pleasure; utility… in reality has no value except as a means to pleasure.” one in the eye for Utilitarianism there. The next level is that of Lebenswerte, or “values of life”: what is noble or admirable, such as courage, bravery, readiness to sacrifice, daring, magnanimity, loyalty, and humility, or, on the contrary, what is mean (gemein), such as cowardice, pusillanimity, self-seeking, small-mindedness, treachery, and arrogance. Then comes the realm of geistige Werte, values of the intellect or spirit; principally justice, beauty, and truth, along with their opposites. The final realm is that of das Heilige, the holy.
Now, the story we’ve been told is that, in a very cynical way, these values work the other way around; that the holy was invented only so that a caste of priests could wield power over the people. Goodness, beauty, and truth were invented as goals to help control the populace and ensure they behaved properly. In this evolutionary game, the ‘suckers’ are those who chase self-sacrifice, magnanimity, and generosity, while the exploiters win by amassing power because in the end, according to this view, the only thing that matters is power, the bottom level of this pyramid. But if power is the only value, then it becomes arbitrary; a game played for its own sake and heedless of, as well as blind to, its own limitations.
Power, then can be thought of as embedded in institutions and quiet mechanisms of control. It is not always loud, nor is it always visible and like a lot of things which flourish in the dark, is often also blind. Here we might find an apt metaphor in the olm, the peculiar blind salamander of subterranean caves. This creature, sightless, pale, and long-lived, has evolved to survive in darkness, sensing rather than seeing, navigating a world most creatures never glimpse. Much like the nature of power, which often retreats underground, lurking in institutions, systems, and hidden mechanisms of control, the olm thrives in underwater shadow. Power, too, thrives in hidden spaces, as we have mentioned, shaping systems rather than making proclamations. Our little blind olm shares much with this essence of power; a power which can operate not only through brute force but also through quiet, unseen influence. A power which feeds on small invertebrates and detritus and can survive for up to 10 years without food. Well ok, maybe not the last bit but you get the point.
But what happens when such power is exposed to the light? The olm is perfectly adapted to its world, but take it out of its cave, and it becomes helpless. Similarly, power, left unchecked in the dark, suffers the same fate when dragged into the open. It is this exposure that reveals power’s vulnerabilities, reminding us that what thrives in obscurity may falter in transparency.
And yet, if Arendt is right, the truest power is not in hoarding or coercion but in collective action, namely the ability to act in concert with others. It is this kind of power that is most often mistaken for weakness, because it does not dominate, but serves. Scheler, too, might remind us that power, when untethered from higher values, becomes empty, blind, and ultimately self-destructive. The highest form of power, then, is not found in conquest but in relinquishment.
Here, dear reader, we reach the deep paradox at the heart of Christianity: power made perfect in ‘weakness.’ The cross, perhaps the ultimate symbol of power overturned, is not an emblem of force, but of self-sacrifice. For Christians, it embodies a radical reversal of worldly power, where the last shall be first, the meek inherit the earth, and the servant, not the ruler, is greatest of all. This is power not as dominion, but as surrender; not as possession, but as gift. Perhaps, then, the highest form of power is not in amassing it, but in knowing when to let it go.
This challenge to perhaps more conventional ‘wisdom’ is not unique to Christianity. The Taoist wu wei (do non-doing, strive for non-striving) teaches that true influence comes not from force but from yielding, like a water-shaping stone. In Hindu thought, the Bhagavad Gita extols karma yoga, the path of selfless action, where the relinquishment of personal gain leads to true spiritual authority. In Buddhism, the bodhisattva ideal (from bodhi enlightenment + sattva being, referring to one on the path to enlightenment) holds that the greatest power lies in renouncing one’s own enlightenment for the sake of others. Across traditions, the message recurs: the strongest are not those who grasp at power, but those who let it go, power is seen not in mastery, but in service.
Perhaps the final question is not whether power endures, but what, if anything, remains after it passes away. If the world teaches that power is about control, life whispers otherwise. In the end, the most enduring power may be found not in ruling, but in relinquishing; not in conquest, but in compassion.
Until next time, Happy Reading/ Being Powerful
This week’s Director’s mailbag contained a coincidentally relevant joke, sent in by a Ms G Thribb. Thank you Ms Thribb – and keep them coming!
How many kings does it take to change a light bulb? One, but it takes forever because he just holds on and waits for the world to revolve around him.
Men, eh?