This will be an attempt to articulate a perspective on power within a given society. We will define categories of power according to a sphere model as opposed to a top down pyramid model. Thus there are outer, intermediate, and core categories of power. A category of power refers to a set of humans within a society that wields power at a specific place within the sphere of power. Thus all categories can be considered to refer to a specific layer of power, or a specific class of power.
Examples of the core power of a society would be the politicians in the highest offices of government, board members of corporations that wield influence across the entire nation, or similar. Examples of outer power would be the electorate class or the public, which hold no official office at all and control no larger organisation. Between these there are intermediate degrees of power, or regional power, such as local communites, counties, or states.
The closer you get to core power, the more formalized it become. Core power is formal, centralized, have strict procedures, the people within the core power category wields institutional power. Outer power is informal and dissipated. There are very few formal proceedings, it arises naturally trough processes of interaction between the public and intermediate or core power strctures, or trough interactions of the public with itself.
The word dissipated is used here to differentiate it from decentralized power. A decentralized set of power are still bound up in formalized structures, these structures are merely scattered and kept somewhat independent of eachother. Dissipated power arise as a phenomena of its wielders interaction with their surrounding world. It does not need to be bound within a formal structure, rather it depends on mechanisms that allows it to arise organically.
This is critical to understand the way the average, electoral class, the voters, can affect true political weight within a society. Most elections are held once every four years. A voter will thus participate in a formal proceeding of exercicing power once every four years. They may have a handful of other elections, raising this direct participiation only slightly. However, this is not the only way a voter can exercize power. He may instead use dissipated power. He observes and comments on his surroundings. He purchases goods and services. He interacts with people in his environment to form, refine and recalibrate his worldviews. He uses those worldviews to interpret reality. This interpretation helps form his opinions. Everyone around himself does the same. Thus cultural values, national trends, issues to be discussed arise from his everyday actions. He also builds places where he can feel comfortable. Places such as clubs, workplaces, social networks, homes, families, businuesses or other communities. These help fulfill various needs within the society. Power is exercised, but it is done so in an informal and indirect manner.
In modern times, in the west, there is a trend where the outer power category - the public – is loosing power. There is a failure to recognize the value of the mechanisms necessary for them to exercize their power. Technological trends may weaken these mechanisms. Idelogical trends fail to understand their value. In addition their ability to put formal pressure on core power structures – trough voting, protesting, and similar – may be weakened due to several factors. The result is that the outer power layers are held in little regard, percieved as a threat, and weakened. Dissipated power is often something people barely acknowledge, if they are even dimly aware it exists. This is a grave mistake. A fundamental approach to mitigate and manage the potenial for abuse and misuse of power, from any layer of power, is to balance and spread power out, both within a single layer and between layers. Thus if any layer grows weaker, the balance is thrown out of order, the risk from misuse by other layers increase. If the power of outer layers weaken, if the ability of the public to use dissipated power to balance the power of core layers, then the risk of those core layers abusing, misusing and comitting grave errors increases. Diminishing the publics ability to express dissipated power in order to diminish the potential for the abuse of that power only shifts the potential for abuse from the public into the hands of authority. A careful balance has to be maintained.
Woke progressivism is a form of progressivism that became popular in the latter half of the 00s decade – sometime after 2005. It is the contemporary type of progressivism that have become prevalent all across the US and Europe. Originally woke progressivism was unnamed, with its adherents making no distinction between it and older forms of progressivism. The term Woke was only coined several years later.
The main idea of woke progressivism is to lie about what people are. Woke progressives will lie about what people are in order to incentivize institutions to persecute those people. Institutions here does not only refer to governmental institutions but any formal organization. It can be a governmental department, a corporation providing a service or employment, or even a small organized community such as a local club or hobbyist gathering.
Large parts of woke progressivism is institutional progressivism – woke progressives seek to disempower private individuals and empower institutions – so that lying about what people are becomes a more effective means of controlling spaces woke progressives inhabit.
Woke progressivism is a worldview that has become dysfunctional. It no longer accurately interprets reality. The core assumptions that builds it up are incorrect but also carries with them beliefs with which to shut down adversal information that could disrupt the worldview. Contrary worldviews are percieved by woke progressive adherents as a threat, and as a result perspectives, opinions, and information that indicates the worldview is inaccurate and needs to be revised is fought back against instead of utilized. This is done by persecuting those who express contrary worldviews.
The persecution woke progressivism supports takes many forms; abuse, exclusion, censorship, harrasment, even violence. When the current degree of persecution becomes insufficient to maintain the lies of woke progressivism, the result is not reforming the worldview by discarding incorrect beliefs, but instead to escalate the degree of persecution to a point that is sufficient to maintain the lies of woke progressivism. This degree eventually proves insufficient to maintain the lies thus requiring even greater degrees of persecution, that persecution requiring more incorrect beliefs, those beliefs causing woke progressives to become even more dysfunctional. In this manner woke progressivism becomes stuck in a spiral of requiring increasingly extreme means to maintain itself.
Woke progressivism being a lie is critical in understanding both it and the criticism against it. It does not support the people it claims to support, its suggested policies does not do what it claims they do, and the people it targets are not what it claims they are. Instead of reforming itself, it tries to hide the above by diminishing the power of people and increasing the power of institutions in the hope that it can leverage those institutions to persecute people who stands up against it.
Here follows an excerpt from Power of the Powerless.
”Yet, as we have seen, ideology becomes at the same time an increasingly important component of power, a pillar providing it with both excusatory legitimacy and an inner coherence. As this aspect grows ín importance, and as it gradually loses touch with reality, it acquires a peculiar but very real strength. It becomes reality itself, albeit a reality altogether self-contained, one that on certain levels (chietly inside the power structure) may have even greater weight than reality as such. Increasingly, the virtuosity of the ritual becomes more important than the reality hidden behind it. The significance of phenomena no longer derives from the phenomena themselves, but from their locus as concepts in the ideological context. Reality does not shape theory, but rather the reverse. Thus power gradually draws closer to ideology than it does to reality; it draws its strength from theory and becomes entirely dependent on it. This inevitably leads, of course, to a paradoxical result: rather than theory, or rather ideology, serving power, power begins to serve ideology. It is as though ideology had appropriated power from power, as though it had become dictator itself. It then appears that theory itself, ritual itself, ideology itself, makes decisions that affect people, and not the other way around.”
Power of the Powerless is an essay written in 1978 by Vaclav Havel in what was then Checkoslovakia. It it is an extremely interesting essay, in particular for anyone living in Europe or North America in contemporary times. It is a strong recommendation.
An archived version can be found here.
For those who are not aware of who Vaclav Havel is, it is recommended to read the essay first, then look up who he was and what happened to him.
Within this essay Vaclav Havel introduces and explores a large number of concepts that are highly useful to anyone wishing to gain a better understanding of worldviews, and in particulary dysfunctional predominant worldviews.
The original essay was part of a workspace organized at the time of its writing. You were supposed to read it, think about it, and discuss it. It is recommended to do so. Because of this, no immediate analysis of it will be made. Excerpts and quotes from the essay might still be used.
The following could be considered problems within contemporary culture;
A dysfunctional worldview has become predominant:
-A worldview, in this instance an ideology – progressivism – has mutated into a dysfunctional form: woke progressivism. This means it no longer does what a worldview should do: allow the people who hold it to accurately intepret some aspects of reality. Instead of doing this, a dysfunctional worldview encourages its adherents to maintain the worldview to a harmful degree.
Worldviews are composed of assumptions of how the world works, or what things mean, and each worldview always have some assumptions to make it stable – stop people from holding it to discard it to easily. Assumptions that helps justify it. In a dysfunctional worldview these assumptions have grown excessive. It has become to difficult to discard it or even reform it. This is what has happened within woke progressivism. Woke progressivism makes incorrect assumptions about the things progressivism seeks to intepret, and part of those incorrect assumptions is what people opposing it are, and what criticism of it is. As a result it cannot change into a healthier state.
-What is worse, this dysfunctional worldview has become predominant – it has been adopted at a large scale within a large number of societies.
-Because woke progressivism no longer interprets reality correctly, and because it needs to maintain its incorrect assumptions, it no longer upholds the principles it proclaims. These principles are hollowed out in favor of appearances. A dysfunctional worldview cares about looking good, not being good. The dysfunctional worldview is maintained at the cost of the healthy worldview.
-Aside from intepreting reality incorrectly, dysfunctional worldviews tend to grow worse over time. All worldviews will drift over time, they will become less accurate over time. People who maintain their worldviews in a healthy state will recalibrate and refine them over time. This will occur as a natural result of their interaction with others. If their worldview grows to inaccurate, they will start to clash to much with other worldviews, people will start to turn away from them, things they attempt to accomplish will fail, and eventually they will identify the incorrect assumptions that cause these failures, and those assumptions will be discarded or corrected. In this way their worldviews can be kept at a healthy state where they will maintain an ability to intepret reality with adequate accuracy.
This does not happen with a dysfunctional worldview. Opposing worldviews will be percieved as a threat to be suppressed, people who turn away from the worldview will be percieved as evil, and failures of the worldview will be blamed on its perceived enemies. This means that as the worldview meets with greater failure, it will justify greater means of suppressing opposing perspectives, and therefore construct ever more incorrect assumptions about why these means are required. In the case of woke progressivism one of these assumptions have been that power should be shifted from individuals to institutions, so that challenges to woke progressivism can keep being suppressed.
-To summarize:
This leads us into a second problem:
The power of individuals is being diminished and the power of institutions is being increased.
Power here refers to the ’capacity to make choices, disregarding what others think about those choices’. The bigger choices you can make, and the more people you can disregard while making those choices, the more power you have.
Institutions here refers to any formal organization; public institutions: such as governmental departments or governmental power structures, private institutions: such as corproations, and civil institutions: such as clubs, hobby organisations, or activist organisations.
Core power refers to the power structures with the most reach – and usually a fairly small size – such as a governmental parliament composed of a few hundred people, able to affect tens or hundreds of millions. A large scale corporation or a huge activist organisation could also be viewed as a core powerstructure.
Dissipated power or outer power refers to the power structures with the least reach – and usually fairly large – such as a hundred million citizens, each with barely an ability to affect anyone else outside their immediate vicinity.
A dissipated mechanism of power is something that allows a normal individual – without access to much if any formal power – to still express some degree of power within a society.
-Due to a dysfunctional worldview having become dominant, there is a lot of pressure to shield it from worldviews that will challenge it.
Due to advancing technology, there is a lot of new opportunities for suppressing individuals that did not exist previously.
Simple population increase might make it more difficult for individuals to affect social trends, due to the population increase causing far more inertia when trying to affect institutions.
The problems of an increased imbalance of power between inner and outer layers are many. As the imbalance grows the risk of abuse of power grows from the side favored by the imbalance - in this case core power. As the imbalance grows towards core power the risk of failing policies increases - they can no longer be challenged and worked against as efficiently. As the imbalance grows towards core power, society stagnates - the imbalance occurs trough the suppression of normal people, their ability to share information, engage in businuess, access a fair legal system; the things needed for efficient innovation. As the imbalance grows towards core power, there is a greater risk of delusion from all layers of society - neither the public nor institutions are able to access the stimuli required to maintain an accurate interpretation of reality. They grow increasingly out of touch until they are delusional.
-One of the most common arguments for diminishing the power of individuals is that it will diminish the abuse of power from select individuals or malicious trends. However this thinking is badly flawed. Because the predominant worldview has become dysfunctional, what is considered malicious, and what individuals are considered harmful is really just whatever challenges the worldview. The dysfunctional worldview cannot percieve reality accurately. Even if it could, this wouldn’t help – the power is not taken from select individuals, it is taken from the entire outer layer of power. This is because the means of diminishing the power of outer layers is trough the dismantling or diminishing of dissipated mechanisms of power.
Whereas core power derives from formal processes within organizations - dissipated power derives from informal processes within crowds. The most immediate way to diminish the power of select groups within outer power is then to diminish these mechanisms of dissipated power. When these mechanisms are targeted or diminished, it affects everyone.
The targeted groups will not be as harmful or abusive as is said, and it is impossible to only harm select groups.
The third reason why overly diminishing the power of outer power is a bad idea is because the risk of abuse is only shifted towards inner power structures. This is not limited to intentional abuse of power based off maliciousness, but includes accidental abuse of power trough incompetence, as well as accidental abuse of power trough delusion. The inaccurate interpretation of reality.
When the public cannot make its voice heard, cannot challenge flawed policies, have difficulty accomplishing various projects, cannot take actions that institutions do not approve of – then institutions no longer have to refine their policies, and most of the time won’t be able to.
The reason why outer layers of power should retain a large amount of power is not because this is a nice thing to have, not because giving power to the public is some luxury that they can enjoy. Rather it is an absolutely vital part of a healthy society. All power can be abused, but core power can be abused at a much larger scale. If the policies and initiatives taken by core power structures cannot be challenged, then inevitable failing policies will prevail and those will damage society on a large scale. Whereas abuse of outer layers of power will be much more localized in nature due to their limited reach, abuse of core power can reach everywhere within a society. The potential for damage is high.
This potential is also increased over time. A worldview that is not regularly challenged and forced to interact with other worldviews will grow inaccurate over time. When worldviews grow to inaccurate, the people who hold them start becoming delusional. When that happens to core powers - such as the rulers of a nation – the result becomes some of the most obviously dumb decisions you could imagine enacted on a tremendeous scale.
There is another issue which is that an increased supression of normal individuals inevitable result in stagnation. When mechanisms of dissipated power are weakened, it grossly limits innovation. This is because such mechanisms are the ability of normal people to share information, obtain and process resources, collaborate with others, challenge incorrect beliefs, build places of their own and attempt to fulfill the needs of their life to the best of their own ability, all of which are pre-requisites to develop and build new things. When a society becomes too stable, it does so by becoming oppressive and stagnant.
To summarize:
In order to adress the above two problems the theory then becomes to strengthen mechanisms of dissipated power in order to counteract these problems.
Mechanisms of dissipated power are anything that allows outer layers of power to express power. The outer layer being the large crowds of the public that possess little formal power. And power here meaning the capacity to make choices while disregarding what other people think of those choices. And in particular choices with reach across society.
Some examples of mechanisms of dissipated power could then be:
The above list is not absolute – there could be others, and it could be worded differently.
However, if normal individuals lack formal power, and the means by which they express their informal power – their dissipated power – are crippled or diminished, how can they strengthen those mechanisms?
Maybe it is impossible. The problems may be to large to ’fix’. However, even in such a cause there is an argument to still try to do so. If a dysfunctional worldview cannot be reformed, perhaps it can at least be mitigated. If institutions grow to powerful, perhaps they can still, in some small way be worked around. If nothing else maintaining the knowledge of why such things are suboptimal or dangerous, and that they have real costs and tradeoffs, might help others in the future should an opportunity for reform arise.
On the other hand, it might be possible. Things can often look darker than they are. It can be difficult to keep perspective.
Regardless, public inviduals may have difficulty affecting core power when they can no longer depend on mechanisms of dissipated power. It becomes difficult to vote on a genuinely good candidate for a political position when not only your voice is suppressed, but you cannot hear other people’s voices either. It becomes difficult to compete with a large corporation when your ability to run a businuess becomes crippled.
This means that in order to strengthen mechanisms of dissipated power you would need to consider not only core power but every layer of power. Considering not only what one can change on a national or international level, but also on a regional, local, and personal level.
So then by identifying mechanisms of dissipated power, or how mechanisms of dissipated power can be strengthened on various levels such as:
This could help allow one to make such suggestions more concrete.
It is important that whatever suggestions are grounded in real world applications. Trying to affect a dysfunctional worldview only by abstract theory, ideological discussions or vague implications of principle is likely doomed to failure.
So in the places where theory has to be tested against reality, it is important that reality is valued more, and that theory is adapted to work alongside the real world and the genuine needs of peoples lives.
Strengthening mechanisms of dissipated power should therefore be anchored in concrete policies adapted to the area they would be implemented in.
So we percieve the types of power according to a sphere model, where the core of the model represents focused systems of power and the surface of the model represents dissipated systems of power. So that the core is composed of centralized organizations wielding power trough formal processes and the command of vast resources And the surface is composed of disparate individuals wielding power trough informal processes and mechanisms of dissipated power.
With power in this context being 'The capacity to make choices while ignoring what other people thinks of those choices. The larger choices you can make, and the more people you can ignore while making those choices - the more power you have'.
Mechanisms of dissipated power allows otherwise powerless individuals to exercise power. Power here is defined as 'the capacity to make choices while ignoring what other people think of those choices'. Dissipated power refers to informal, non organized forms of power - the power wielded by individuals, not organizations. Mechanisms of dissipated power allows individuals to make choices while ignoring what others think of those choices. Some examples of such mechanisms include: monetary transactions; money allows you to buy things without concerning yourself what other people think of your purchases, freedom of speech; you are able to say things without other people being able to stop you, right to utilities; the electricity company cannot stop serving you just because they don't like something you do: you can ignore their opinions while making choices.
Recently these mechanisms have grown weaker due to technological advancaement and dysfunctional beliefs. There are arguments that these mechanisms must be weakened or removed so as to avoid the abuse of power from normal people, make people powerless in order to hinder them from abusing their power. Abuse here refers to both intentional and unintentional misue of power; failures arising from incompetence, corruption, or incorrect assumptions. Abuse here refers to both intentional and unintentional misue of power; failures arising from incompetence, corruption, or incorrect assumptions. However - the abuse of dissipated power is localized by its nature. If one person is incompetent, or corrupt, or delusional, the harm that person does will be localized to his surroundings. It will be limited in scope. In contrast the abuse of focused power hits everywhere. If a government or a huge corporation which everyone depends on is incompetent, or corrupt, or delusional, the harm from their failures will affect everyone that depends on them. This means that weakening mechanisms of dissipated power is a huge risk.
Dissipated power is flexibile, agile, quick, and reactive. When people are able to exert dissipated power the places in which they live can adress problems that occur in those place faster, cheaper, and with higher rates of success than focused power is capable of. Dissipated power also have a much easier time noticing problems than focused power has, and are able to notice problems which focused power would either completely miss, or otherwise choose to ignore. Focused power is concentrated, far reaching, and potent. It is far more adept at focusing resources towards a specific task than dissipated power can hope to be. This means that both dissipated power and focused power is required to efficiently adress problems, but one or the other may be more adept at adressing a specific problem.
Dissipated power helps with innovation. The more private individuals can make choices while disregarding what people think of those choices, the more they are able to challenge the status quo, succeed on their own merits, and develop their own ideas. While an increase in freedom likely helps with innovation, the degree to which it helps - and the degree to which other factors play a role - would be of immense interest as towards the need of mechanisms of dissipated power.
Power trends inwards - from dissipated structures to focused structures. This means there is a need to consciously reassert the ability of dissipated power to be exercised in a society.
Here follows a series of assumptions in regards to dissipated and focused power:
It may be impossible to limit focused power to an ideal state where dissipated power is dominant but not excessive. Instead of a cycle where a system goes from a place of anarchy towards a place of suppression and then collapses back into an anarchy, it might be more accurate to think of trends of retraction and expansion where power flows towards and away from the center. Even if a system that has grown unstable due to excessive focused power collapses, it may not expand back to a more ideal balance of powers, but rather only as far as to render it stable once more. It may also be easy to get stuck in a stagnant state where power cannot shift towards the outer layers sufficiently for the system to innovate or progress anymore.
However from that does not follow that pursuing mechanisms of dissipated power is futile. Being in a miserable state is far superior to being in a hellish state. Partial failure is still far better than complete failure. It is better to live in a stagnant system that still allow for some degree of innovation than to be entirely stuck in a supressed system that cannot enable people to prosper in even small ways. And living in a totalitarian system must be counteracted, as it is grievously harmful and wasteful.
Here follows some suggestions for strengthening dissipated power:
There have been numerous incidents in recent years where people - including on a few occasions established politicians - have been shunted out of financial services on highly inappropriate grounds. In one such incident a well established highly reputable bank was proven to have debanked a politician based on social media articles and news media hit pieces. Everyone should have a right to a bank account, with the ability to recieve and transfer funds trough digital means. Similar problems occur in other types of financial services as well. Payment processors may close down accounts immediately and without explanation. Not only is it commonplace to immediately and without notice cancel people's account, in the case where the company provide a subscription service: allowing users to sign up to pay someone a monthly fee - the company will not allow the user to shift those subscriptions to another service; effictevely cutting them off from a revenue stream. It would be better if some categories of companies were required to provide a grace period of one or a few months before cutting out services. In particular companies comitted to processing peoples income. It would also be better if subscriptions were owned by the person or company providing the service those subscriptions are signed up for, so that if a third party platform decides to end the account of either party they cannot also cancel the subscriptions, but instead must provide a means to export those subscriptions to another service.
When cancelling an account it would be good if a company was required to state a reason for that cancellation.
There has been a trend to make people's possessions less accessible - more difficult to repair. By providing schematics and parts to third party retailers or customers themselves people would not only have a greater ability to repair their own posessions - those so interested would have a greater ability to learn about everyday technology and hone their own skills.
Fundamental online infrastructure consists of a huge chain of dependencies, each part composed of a set of companies or institutions. It would be much better if more parts of this chain where treated as common carriers, where they were simply required to provide their service in much the same way as you'd expect an electricity company to do. This would especially apply to those parts of this chain that provides fundamental services; where only a few companies exist and where they service other companies in this chain -
Speech supression laws should be overwritten by laws asserting the right to free expression within the places individuals or organisations own or operate. The ability of common individuals to express themselves is not a desirable thing, it is a necessity. It helps everyone retain their sanity. It is in particular important to not supress speech in law: if the law allows for people to freely share their perspective, intermediate places can then decide for themselves whether to be permissive, absolutist, or extremely suppressive. If the law is suppressive those places do not have a choice - the result is inevitable harm.