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's not a thing. Instead, power 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.

Power doesn’t exist outside of these relationships; it is a force that determines and governs relationships. It doesn’t hover outside of society; it is the architecture of social life itself. Let’s be more precise. Power takes form through laws, social norms, institutions, and even the routines of our daily lives. Its role isn’t just about controlling people or dominating others. Power is fundamentally creative. It works to create, organize, and sustain specific arrangements of people, resources, and behaviors—arrangements that keep these systems running and stable over time.

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—not through obvious threats, but through the quiet, relentless force that defines who we are and what we’re supposed to be. Power tells us what to do by telling us who we are. This isn’t about 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 don’t just teach math or history—they teach obedience, punctuality, 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—shaping behavior through routine, expectation, and authority built into the system.

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, a trip to the principal’s office—each one sends a message about what kind of person you are becoming. Over time, you don’t just learn the rules; 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. It doesn’t feel like someone’s opinion—it feels like the way the world is. You start to see yourself through this lens: a good student, a problem, or maybe just average, but 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, performance reviews—they all 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: not necessarily getting terminated, but 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, to shrink yourself just enough to fit the mold—because the cost of stepping outside isn’t always loud or immediate, but it’s there, lurking in the subtle punishments that keep you compliant without anyone having to say a word.

Legal systems go even deeper. They don’t just define crimes; they define people. Being labeled a “felon,” a “refugee,” or an “illegal immigrant” isn’t just a description—it’s 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. And 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.

This is how normalization works. It’s the process of making certain behaviors, identities, and roles seem natural—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? Not because this is the right way to live, but 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.

The result is self-regulation—people don’t need to be forced into compliance when deviating from the system extracts an even heavier toll. And once inside, the debt, the job, the obligations tighten around them, making exit feel not just difficult, but unthinkable. People conform not because someone is watching, but because they believe it’s the only way to survive, succeed, or even be accepted.

Step outside the lines, and the consequences aren’t always a shouting boss or an arresting cop—they’re quieter. They show up as an eviction notice taped to your door, an empty fridge at the end of the month, medical bills stacked like threats you can’t ignore. They’re 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 works to present this as normal, but it is also quick to punish you when you refuse to play along, not always with fists, but with the slow violence of deprivation, isolation, and insecurity. What makes power so effective is this: it doesn’t just control actions—it shapes desires, fears, and the very sense of what’s possible. And that’s why it lasts.

Power as Self-Reinforcing Through Resistance

Power is not fragile in the face of opposition. In fact, it often relies on conflict to justify its continuation. Systems of control are built not just to withstand resistance but to absorb it, 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 for power, it’s often business as usual. The system knows how to respond: deploy riot cops, control the media narrative, and when the dust settles, introduce reforms that appear progressive but leave the foundations untouched. Maybe a new policy gets passed, a few officials are swapped out, but the core machinery—the economic structures, the policing systems, the hierarchies of control—remains 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 George Floyd uprisings, 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, proving that the system’s response to rebellion isn’t transformation—it’s adaptation, reinforcing its power under the guise of reform.

But when co-opted resistance and ideological control no longer keep 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. The state shifts from pretending to listen to openly crushing. The illusion of dialogue is replaced with the reality of suppression.

Protesters are labeled threats, their demands twisted into justifications for repression. Tear gas clouds the streets, not just to disperse crowds but to send a message: step out of line, and this is what you get. It’s not just the baton that enforces order—it’s the court case that drags on for years, the felony record that locks you out of jobs, the quiet blacklisting from spaces of influence. Power swings between concession and crackdown, not out of confusion, but calculation. Whether through the soft language of reform or the hard fist of repression, the goal is the same: to protect the system’s core, to remind people that stepping too far out of bounds comes with a cost that doesn’t always bleed but always bruises.

In fact, 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—more policing, stricter regulations, 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. There are established protocols for dealing with them—crowd control tactics, legal channels to absorb demands, media strategies to frame the narrative. In this way, power doesn’t just survive resistance; it digests it, metabolizes it, and grows stronger, all while projecting an image of flexibility and responsiveness.

Power prepares for this—we don’t. 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 they’ve mapped, using tactics they’ve mastered, against forces trained to control every possible move.

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 serve the system: climbing corporate ladders, collecting degrees, buying homes in neighborhoods with good school ratings, curating identities on social media for likes and followers.

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 about 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 systems of reward: applause from peers, nods of respect from strangers, a sense of security tied to numbers in a bank account.

This isn’t random. This structuring of desire ensures that people actively participate in maintaining the system, believing their choices are their own when 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. No one has to stand in a square reciting loyalty oaths to capitalism.

Instead, it shows up in the quiet 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: logging extra hours to impress your boss, buying things you don’t need to feel accomplished, equating busyness with purpose.

This compliance feels voluntary, even empowering, because it operates beneath awareness. But it’s not freedom; it’s conditioning woven so tightly into daily life that it feels natural, like gravity—just the way things are.

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, the children ripped from their families. Where enslaved people aren’t shown breaking their chains, burning plantations, and taking freedom with their own hands, but are instead reduced to silent figures in grainy photos, as if emancipation was given to them. Where labor struggles aren’t the bodies crushed in factory collapses, the fingers lost to unguarded machines, or the riots where police cracked skulls to protect company profits—but instead, a neat timeline of reforms, as if safety laws simply appeared without bloodshed. It happens in museums that 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. It’s in media cycles that 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, the sweatshops where the devices are assembled 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 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. Not just the ability to control, but the ability to convince. Legitimacy is achieved when authority is seen as justified, when rules are deemed fair, when hierarchies aren’t seen as the outcomes of conquest, theft, and exploitation but reflections of natural order or individual merit.

Power thrives because the system is legitimatized in school curriculums that teach civics like a sacred script, 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.

This illusion is crafted through ideological machinery designed to feel neutral, objective, or even benevolent—law, religion, science, media—all dressed in the language of fairness and fact. But pull at the seams, and you find systems hard at work manufacturing stories that keep power intact.

Economic inequality isn’t just tolerated; it’s celebrated under the glossy myth of meritocracy. Billionaires aren’t framed as the culmination of exploitation and systemic theft—they’re entrepreneurial geniuses, visionaries whose wealth supposedly mirrors their worth. Their yachts are seen as symbols of ambition fulfilled, not as floating monuments to a rigged system where wealth accumulates through extraction, tax loopholes, and labor squeezed from people paid just enough to survive.

Meanwhile, the poor aren’t recognized as casualties of structural violence—they’re 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, meals designed to be cheap, not nourishing, their bodies slowly wrecked by salt, starch, and rot while medical care is a privilege, not a right. Every second is lived under the weight of constant surveillance, the threat of violence—by guards, by other prisoners, by the very walls themselves. At any moment, they 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, and the only company is their own mind unraveling. Some lie on cold tile floors for days, others for months, some for years, their sense of time eroding, their bodies deteriorating, their screams absorbed by thick walls that exist to make sure no one hears them. And outside, judges, politicians, and wardens call this justice, while the world moves on, forgetting the people who were buried alive in steel and stone.

But legitimacy isn’t just built through what’s said—it’s maintained through what’s not allowed to be said. Dissenting voices are pushed to the margins, not always through overt censorship, but through a more 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, not with iron chains but with invisible boundaries—lines you’re not supposed to cross, questions you’re not supposed to ask.

This is the true genius of power: it doesn’t just command obedience; it manufactures consent. It doesn’t need to post guards at every door when people have been conditioned to lock themselves inside. It makes people defend the very systems that grind them down, argue for the rules that keep them trapped, and believe that the world as it is—brutal, unequal, rigged—isn’t just inevitable, but 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—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, not through grand displays of dominance but through the quiet, relentless 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—in the language we use, the assumptions we don’t notice, the choices we think are ours. Its real strength isn’t in brute force but in its ability to shape how people see the world and themselves within it. It teaches us not just what to do, but how to think about what we do, burying itself so deep that its influence feels like common sense.

But 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.