Here is my main “positive” thought for you all. For most of my adult, thinking life, I have been sick to death of the understanding of power which says that most people/institutions are good and want to give their power up.
Those with systematic power, as a rule, want to KEEP their power. They either explicitly want this and will argue for it, or they want it so deep to their bones that they will come up with all sorts of other reasons why they shouldn’t take the actions which would relinquish their power.
And here’s the really sneaky bit, if you ask them if they want to keep their power, sometimes they’ll say no, but they actually do want to keep it! It’s wild, I know, but this kind of thing happens. It’s called bad faith (with themselves) or it’s called lying.
The idea that you can hold training courses where people will learn to give up the power they so dearly want to hand over, run awareness campaigns, educate them in your personal relationships one by tortuous one, completely depends on an understanding of the world in which they WANT to give it up.
They don’t. And the one “positive” thought I want to offer everyone, is that perhaps it will get harder now to maintain any kind of public consensus that they do, and that that is how our activism will succeed.
It won’t. You have to FORCE them to give it up. And you can’t, because they have POWER and power is POWERFUL. That’s the painful reality. You are up against people with more power than you who want to keep it and who will, by large, succeed in keeping it and even extending it.
Properly held, this is a positive thought. Because if you hold it, you won’t go mad trying to figure out what the hell is going on when everything you do seems to slip back, wash away, fail to connect. Face the reality, realise we are in a STRUGGLE not a debate, and pace yourself accordingly.
(I’m many centuries from being the first person to say this. But I’ll just keep on saying it, in different ways, because I think many haven’t heard - properly heard - it yet.)
To some extent recent mainstream liberal history has been an experiment, by the powerful, in whether it is worthwhile maintaining a fiction that they want to give up some of their power. The maintenance of that fiction obviously gained them some stuff, but it also cost them, both in the plain energy required to maintain it, but also in the way it gave marginalised folk some limited levers to work with. “Hey, you said you wanted to be better in this way?” “Uh, um, yeah, I guess I did say that, I guess.” “Ok well do this.” “Um… *looks around*… I guess…” And some of the recent developments have been an increase in the %age that are overly, “Nah, I don’t wanna give up the power” in their approach. Don’t flip out coz your crappy levers aren’t “working” on them - to a large extent many of those levers worked with the consent of the powerful, which they can easily withdraw (and are doing).
I don’t want to relapse into complete fatalism: less powerful still doesn’t mean powerLESS, and powerful doesn’t mean ALL-powerful. But tools that only worked because the powerful found it useful to maintain a polite fiction of good faith are not working as well, now.
As in my original post: don’t go mad trying to figure this out. It’s simple: they don’t wanna. We’re back to the struggle now.
