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

Power’s most devastating trick is convincing us that it’s something external—something you can fight, overthrow, or escape. Insidiously, power isn’t just in institutions, police batons, or government decrees. It’s inside us, 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—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 even when you think you’re breaking free—flipping the script, rewriting the rules, tearing down the old order—you’re often just turning to another page in the same book. Power shapes the very way we think, the narratives we tell, and the options we believe exist.

Even rebellion can become a reflection of power, mirroring its structure and logic 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 isn’t just metal and gunpowder—it’s the distilled essence of state power, a miniature version of the authority they claim to defy. This is not rebellion; it’s a relic of the very system they hate, dressed up as resistance. The swagger, the hardened stare, the readiness to dominate or destroy—these are the aesthetics of power, borrowed straight from the playbook of the oppressor.

Take a closer look at the performance. The squared shoulders, the clenched jaw, the calculated threat in their voice. It’s not instinct; it’s choreography. It’s the same posture worn by soldiers, cops, political strongmen—the body language of authority. They’ve been taught, directly or indirectly, that to command respect, to assert control, you must embody fear itself. Power has written the script, and in trying to flip it, they’ve 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—taking on its tools, its symbols, its gestures—for subversion, as if flipping the chessboard means you’re no longer playing the game.

But the rules are still in place. The logic is still intact.

They haven’t escaped the system—they’ve become another actor on its stage, performing resistance in a costume tailored by the forces they believe they’re fighting.

Militant revolutionary strategy, when premised upon violence, inevitably recreates the binary fiction of heroes and villains, failing to recognize that morality and identity are fluid rather than fixed. Consider the rebel who fires upon a police officer, believing they are striking a decisive blow against oppression. Yet that officer is not a static symbol; he's someone's brother, someone's cousin, someone's childhood friend—seen by his community not as an enemy, but simply as John, who helps neighbors shovel snow or coaches his son's baseball team.

When John is killed, his community does not see liberation; they feel a visceral loss, confusion, and simmering rage. The rebel, who thought himself a freedom fighter, is now perceived as a threat, an outsider imposing an alien justice. His violence seeds distrust and paranoia within the movement itself; some join or remain involved reluctantly, fearing the repercussions of refusal—accusations of cowardice or betrayal—leading to compliance born of dread, not conviction. Others, observing from the periphery, become enraged by the bloodshed inflicted upon people they loved, solidifying opposition rather than building solidarity.

This mirrors precisely the logic employed by the police against marginalized communities—poor, Black neighborhoods already 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—only a grim march toward deeper coercion, precisely the opposite of the inclusive, compassionate community the revolution sought to create, perpetuating suffering under new banners but familiar boots.

This is the psychic trap of power: it doesn’t just suppress rebellion; it prepares it, 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—they are the ones storming peaceful demonstrations, violently dismantling communal kitchens, evicting communities from 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 confrontation—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. Instead, we must recognize the fundamental uncertainty of life itself, including the fluidity of our identities and those around us.

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. What this demonstrates clearly, irrespective of whether those particular movements employed violence, is the profound truth that 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. True revolutionary strength lies precisely in the courage to extend compassion, patience, and openness—even to those who presently stand against you.

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

When someone lashes out to fill the void of humiliation and powerlessness, they’re stuck in the power loop—the cycle of replicating the same domination they suffered instead of escaping it. They’ve been handed the master’s anvil and convinced that swinging them makes them free. But those tools weren’t designed to build anything—only to destroy, to dominate, to reduce people into objects, threats, targets.

This is the vicious cycle: 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, like two sides of the same blade. And when the anger turns inward, it festers into self-destruction—addiction, self-harm, 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 closed loop—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 often takes 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, raw even, but it’s funneled into gestures designed less to challenge power and more to be consumed—by an audience, by algorithms, 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 rush—a spike of adrenaline, a fleeting sense of purpose—that comes with standing up, flipping off authority, 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. It’s like screaming into a mirror: loud, intense, but ultimately bouncing back to you without moving the world an inch.

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, a trending topic, a commodity.

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 supermarket worker stocking shelves at dawn, the pharmacist managing prescriptions with quiet patience, the nurse silently navigating exhaustion at the hospital, and the 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 the same forces it thrives on: 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.

Direct confrontation may feel urgent and cathartic, but when framed within the logic of defeating an enemy, it reinforces the same power relations it seeks to dismantle. The system thrives on binary struggles, positioning people as either dominators or the dominated, leaving no space to imagine existence outside of that framework.

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 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, isn’t just asserting authority—they’re 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, isn’t radiating confidence—they’re desperate to outrun the quiet terror that being wrong might mean being unseen, unworthy, or disposable.

The person obsessed with dominance in relationships isn’t strong—they’re afraid. 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.

But this performance comes at a price: inauthenticity.

To maintain the illusion of autonomy, people have to lie—not just to others, but 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, from themselves. They mistake rigidity for strength, boundaries for selfhood, domination for security.

Yet, what power struggles to escape—the fact that nothing is fixed, that everything exists in relationship—isn’t a threat. It’s freedom. A self that isn’t permanent isn’t a self lost—it’s a self that can change, adapt, and connect without being confined to a rigid identity. A world without absolute control isn’t chaos—it’s a world where people shape their lives through cooperation rather than coercion.

But 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. The more power tries to hold onto control, the more fragile it becomes—because what it’s clinging to was never stable in the first place.

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 isn’t passive surrender—it’s an active unbinding, an engaged withdrawal, a deliberate refusal to participate in the rituals that keep hierarchies alive. It’s not about stepping back; it’s about 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. Care isn’t some abstract ideal; it’s 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 isn’t a weakness to hide—it’s 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 aren’t transactions—they 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 isn’t a scarce commodity to be hoarded—it’s 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, not in competition.

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—facilitators emerge, adapt, and step back when needed. Conflict isn’t a threat to stability that must be crushed or ignored—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 don’t have to be managed or controlled—they 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—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. Not out of obligation, but because cooperation is just how life works when no one’s holding power over anyone else.

In such spaces, the very act of doing anything becomes transformative. Cooking together, growing food, caring for one another, creating art, making decisions collectively—these are not just alternative activities but radical acts because they reorient the basis of social relations. Over time, these practices reshape not only external behaviors but internal dispositions, 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.

When there’s no scarcity to exploit, no hierarchies to defend, and no roles to perform beyond what arises naturally, power loses its foundation. What’s left isn’t some fantastical utopia—it’s 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—the scaffolding that power relies on to maintain its facade. 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. When your car breaks down and a stranger helps push it to the side of the road, or when a neighbor waters your plants without being asked, that’s relation—not charity, not transaction, just the quiet ways we hold each other up without even thinking about it.

This isn’t something we need to build from scratch. It’s already here, woven into every part of life, 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. Not because we’ve destroyed it, but because we’ve simply stopped feeding it.

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.