​I have for a long time been interested in meanings, which are basically ideas that exist in people's heads, ideas that people use to understand the world around them (and within them) and to interact with it. One scholarly framework that I find helpful for understanding how meanings work is symbolic interactionism.

According to this framework, people interact with the world symbolically: they see things always as symbols (and by "things" I mean anything that we need to deal with in our daily lives--including objects, living beings, other people, events, natural phenomena, and our own inner worlds). Seeing things as symbols means seeing them with some kind of meanings (ideas, associations, memories, values) attached to them. Some meanings are shared, others are individual (i.e., based on one's unique experiences). People are inherently social beings, and so--not surprisingly--meanings are often formed through social interactions (hence, the name of "symbolic interactionism"). One really important thing to understand about meanings is that they mostly appear natural ("that's just how this is") and absolute ("that's the only way to see this"). But they are not natural or absolute. In fact, seeing them as natural and absolute causes people much trouble. (Symbolic interactionist scholars do not focus on this last idea, as far as I know, but it is essential to consider. More on that below.) 

Now, if you have never thought about any of that, you might even wonder whether it is relevant to your everyday experiences. On this page I am going to argue that it is, indeed, relevant. To begin my explanation, let me quote a passage from my book Media Is Us (pp. 36-37):

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
In November 2010, when Barbara Holmes and Tom Williams moved into a new house in Sacramento, California, many people were shocked. They stopped by and questioned the couple: “Why would you do it? I would never.” The house was in bad condition, it’s true. It needed some major renovations. But it looked nice, and for a building this size, it was really cheap. So what was the problem? Why was the so-called “1426 F street” affordable yet still available after more than a decade of being empty?

The reason was simple: it used to be a dwelling of a serial killer, and the site of at least nine murders. In this location, an inconspicuous Dorothea Puente ran a boarding house where she preyed on elderly and mentally disabled boarders in order to cash their Social Security checks. In 1988, seven bodies were unearthed in the yard and Dorothea Puente went to jail.

Barbara Holmes and Tom Williams did not find this story a good enough reason not to seal the deal. For them, it was just a nice historic home in need of some reparations. (The fact that it was listed as “historic” was why it was not demolished after the gruesome crimes had been uncovered.) They liked the challenge and were not too bothered by the neighbors’ disbelief. In fact, Tom exercised his quirky sense of humor by adorning the house and its fence with plates that said, among other things, “Keep out from under the grass!” and “It was that awful, awful woman that did it! Don’t blame me!” signed “The House.” Not that Tom and Barbara thought that what had happened in the “1426 F street” was a laughing matter or that Puente’s victims should be forgotten. The new owners had another idea in mind: to show the Sacramento
community that the house was innocent. [note 5: This account is based on a short documentary The House Is Innocent directed by Nicholas Coles.]

This was a valuable lesson, indeed. It revealed something very important. People think of themselves a meaning-seekers, working hard to understand the world. But the meanings they “find” are actually produced by their brains, and this is where they reside. With a certain mental effort, even the most “obvious” and “natural” of these associations can be undermined. But until their human-made nature is brought to the surface, they may have a surprising
power over us.
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Symbolic interactionism scholars stress people's active participation in meaning-making. We are not passive recipients of meanings. Instead, we constantly negotiate them. Although active participation is essential to consider, I believe that it is only part of the story. Barbara Holmes and Tom Williams from the quote above were actively negotiating meanings of “1426 F street”. But their behavior seems more like an exception, under the circumstances. How many of us would like to live in a house where a gruesome crime was committed one day, whether last year or one hundred years ago? I suspect that not many people would like this place to be their home. Why? Because we often find it hard to challenge meanings that we encounter through social interactions. We often do not even try challenging them (as they seem so natural). Meanings do have power over us. And this power is important to recognize and explore. (As you might already know, I am really interested in exploring power.) 

Here I stop relying solely on symbolic interactionism and borrow ideas from a seemingly very different area: Buddhism. (Full disclaimer: I am neither a symbolic interactionist, nor Buddhist, nor any other -ist. I am just a scholar combining ideas that seem to fit together in interesting ways.) I am going to use Why Buddhism Is True by Robert Wright. In this book, Wright talks about Buddhism not as a religious practice, but as a source of wisdom formulated thousands of years ago, wisdom that has now been confirmed by discoveries in neuroscience and psychology. According to Wright, this wisdom can help us "learn to see the world, including ourselves, more clearly and so gain a deep and morally valid happiness" (quote from the description of the book here). Buddhist ideas are relevant for one's personal growth and also for dealing with such problems as social and political polarization (which Wright talks about in Chapter 16, although he does not use the word "polarization" in the book). 

He also does not talk about meanings of things as much as I do; instead, he talks about essences (in the context of the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness/formlessness). But as I kept reading his book, I realized that the idea of essences has important intersections with the idea of meanings. It turns out that Buddhism has a lot to say about meanings in the sense that symbolic interactionists talk about them; Buddhism also has a lot to say about power (people's power over meanings and meanings' power over people). Keeping in mind that I am not a Buddhist (or a specialist in Buddhism), I am going to offer below some ideas that I found in Wright's book, and explain how they are relevant for each one of us.

Two foundational ideas discussed in Why Buddhism Is True are no-self and emptiness. Both are really interesting and important (and, as it turns out, supported by discoveries of modern science). Here I am going to focus on emptiness, which (I argue) can be connected to the concept of meanings. (All quotes below are from Wright's book.)

According to Buddhism, "human beings often fail to see the world clearly, and this can lead them to suffer and make others suffer" (Appendix). According to modern science, people were "designed" by natural selection; and the main goal of natural selection is enhancing chances of survival of a species (in this case, Homo Sapiens). The goal of natural selection is not to help people see things clearly, or to eliminate individual suffering. 

In particular, not seeing clearly takes the form of seeing things through particular meanings (or essences), which are always associated with affective reactions (even if most of these reactions are very subtle and hard to articulate). Our affective reactions can be traced back to two basic reactions of all living organisms (including the simplest ones): approach or avoid. These reactions are essential for survival, as living organisms need to know (or feel) what is good for them and what is bad for them. In human beings, approach/avoid, like/dislike, love/have reactions take really complex forms that are further complicated by sophisticated ideas that human brains can generate. And although, from the natural selection's point of view, approach/avoid reactions are obviously important, according to modern science and to Buddhism these reactions can and do become a problem when left unexamined--when we let our lives be guided by them uncritically. In particular, according to Buddhism, these reactions translate into craving and aversion, which are two root causes of human suffering. 

According to Buddhism, we experience craving or aversion toward things (broadly defined) because we see these things as having essences. And vice versa, seeing things as having essences often means craving or avoiding them. Seeing things as having essences means having certain feelings about certain things; it means making judgments about them. And the ability/tendency to feel these feelings and make judgments is embedded in us by natural selection. As Wright puts it, "feelings, viewed in the context of their evolutionary purpose, are implicit judgments about things in the environment, about whether they are good for the organism or bad for the organism, and about what behaviors (approach, avoid, scream, flatter) will be useful for the organism, given these judgments... [But a]re those judgments accurate or inaccurate?” (Chapter 15). Indeed, they can be accurate and important, but often they are not accurate and actually harmful for individuals (as anybody who has experienced persistent craving for fatty or sugary foods could attest; and that's just one example). 

Essences/meanings that we see in things often come from social interaction, although not always. For example, it's not uncommon for men to be attracted to women, which means that for these men, women possess attractive essences, or meanings that encourage men to approach women. These essences/meanings can be easily traced back to evolutionary roots, as for men to be attracted to women and vice versa is essential for the survival of the human species. However, gender ideals vary across time and space. Women are attracted to certain men and men are attracted to certain women based on meanings of gender (i.e., "real men" and "real women"), love, romance, and beauty that are maintained (or challenged) through social interaction. Historically, we know that socially-constructed meanings could also lead men to be consistently attracted to other men (as it was common in Ancient Greece, for example).

The point here is not that all meanings and essences should be rejected and avoided, even if they are socially constructed or totally subjective. Seeing the world through meanings/essences is part of human nature; it is not inherently wrong and it can be beneficial. As Wrights puts it, “Even though, strictly speaking, it’s a self-serving feeling that makes your home seem to possess essence-of-home, I don’t see any reason to fight that feeling. It is fine to be drawn into your home, and it will lead to fewer uncomfortable encounters than being drawn into randomly selected homes. And once you’re in your home, by all means feel essence of dog or cat or son or daughter or spouse or partner (unless, perhaps, domestic tensions have transformed one of those essences from warm and fuzzy to cold and harsh). Up to a point, seeing the world from your particular perspective has its virtues from a standpoint of social efficiency and even social harmony and, yes, simple pleasure..." (Chapter 15).

But there are also plenty of examples when meanings/essences we see in things create suffering that Buddhism talks so much about. And the way to minimize this suffering lies through acknowledging our affective (however subtly) reactions to things; acknowledging the existence of meanings/essences we attach to aspects of the world we live in; acknowledging that these meanings/essences are not natural and absolute. For example, you might be craving something: a certain tasty treat, a certain new car, a certain stylish home, a certain conventionally attractive (according to your culture's standards) partner. Trying to achieve what you crave might cause you a lot of discomfort, and once you achieve it you might actually find yourself still unsatisfied, craving new things (as Wright points out, Buddhist notion of "suffering" could be also translated as unsatisfactoriness; see Chapter 1, Chapter 4, Appendix). It's in relation to this never-ending craving (and aversion) that we should ask ourselves: Are meanings/essences of things real? Or are they just a product of our minds, of our human nature, of our interactions with each other? 

Going back to the example of the innocent house from the story I used in my own book. Wright would say that for most people, this house has essence-of-place-where-gruesome-murders-were-committed. Let's imagine a theoretical situation. You have a home (house or apartment) and you like it. For you, it has mostly positive associations: essence-of-your-home. Then one day you discover that this place has a story similar to one of  “1426 F street”. Most people will immediately notice the presence of essence-of-place-where-gruesome-murders-were-committed in their mind, and the battle between the old and the new essence will begin. Some of us might go into denial ("maybe it is not true", "maybe it was not so bad") while others might even choose to move. Few people will be entirely unaffected by this discovery. But this will still be the same house! 

This process works the same in people's perceptions of each other. Say, you have a partner and you have very positive associations with this person: essence-of-loved-partner. Then one day you discover that this partner has cheated on you. It's still the same person, only now you might not even be able to be with them in one room, to say nothing about being in a relationship with them. All because now in your mind they don't have essence-of-loved-partner anymore; instead they have essence-of-dirty-cheater or essence-of-somebody-I-cannot-trust. Or, let's say, you have a colleague at work who you are not super close with, but she seems very nice. You chat with her a bit every day, sometimes you help each other out with work-related stuff. You trust her. She has essence-of-nice-colleague for you. Then one day you find out that she voted for a presidential candidate that you really hate. What happens next? Unfortunately, in the situation of political polarization, it might mean that essence-of-nice-colleague will be immediately and irrevocably changed in your mind to essence-of-idiot-who-voted-for-the-candidate-I-hate. End of nice workplace interactions. Yet again, the colleague in question will remain the same person; the only thing to change will be your perceptions. 

And which essence is "truer"? The one of “1426 F street” as just-a-house-anyone-can-live-in or place-where-gruesome-murders-were-committed? The one of your partner as loved-one or dirty-cheater? The essence of that person at work as nice-colleague or idiot-who-voted-for-the-candidate-I-hate? According to Buddhism, any particular essence is actually an illusion. And this is where the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness (or formlessness) comes in: the path toward enlightenment and liberation from suffering lies through understanding that things do not have essences. Or, to put it differently, they only truly have essences in our minds. This idea has clear intersections with the symbolic interactionist idea that meanings of things are not natural or absolute because they arise through social interactions. Symbolic interactionism does not talk about evolutionary underpinning of meanings we impose on the world around us (symbolic interactionism focuses on social interactions happening in the present moment). In contrast, Wright talks a lot about the evolutionary roots of our illusions. He shows that discoveries of neuroscience and evolutionary psychology make the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness appear much less outlandish than it might to someone who has never heard about it before: "What? Everything around me is empty and formless?" No, it is not literally empty and formless, but it is empty of meanings/essences that appear so natural and absolute. 

The world is not literally empty because it is indeed filled with things that have certain qualities. So, when you hear a sound, it's because there are actual sound waves hitting your ear. Question is, what does your brain do when your body interacts with the world? The answer: it takes these qualities and uses them to construct meanings (based on a lot of different factors--including the evolutionary history of human beings and your personal history, your cultural background, etc.). You perceive a sound as pleasant-sound or annoying-sound (or as neutral-sound that you ignore), but in reality is it just-a-sound.

To explain this idea, Wright tells a story about hearing a buzz saw while trying to meditate: "The point is just that a sound by itself is a passive, not an active, thing, neither pleasant nor unpleasant. So to make it unpleasant, you have to go out and, in a sense, do something to it ... Samadhiraja Sutra ... says that all things are 'without essence, but with qualities that can be seen.' This sutra isn’t denying the reality of the buzz-saw sound waves that were hitting my ear, the 'qualities' I was observing, but it seems to be saying that the 'essence' I normally see beneath the qualities—essence of buzz saw—is a matter of interpretation; it’s something I’m choosing to construct, or not, from the qualities. Essences don’t exist independent of human perception. This is the version of the emptiness doctrine that makes sense to me, and it’s the version most widely accepted by Buddhist scholars: not the absence of everything, but the absence of essence. To perceive emptiness is to perceive raw sensory data without doing what we’re naturally inclined to do: build a theory about what is at the heart of the data and then encapsulate that theory in a sense of essence" (Chapter 10). 

Wright then continues: "Yes, the buzz saw exists. It consists of things like a power cord, a blade, and a trigger. These, you might say, are among the buzz saw’s 'qualities.' But when I talk about the 'essence' of the buzz saw, I’m talking about something we perceive in a buzz saw that is more than the sum of such qualities, something that carries distinctive connotations and emotional resonance. And if I manage to divorce myself from some of those connotations and that resonance—enough that I can actually enjoy the sounds of a buzz saw—then that essence has started to erode. To put it another way, before this particular meditation retreat I might have said, 'It is part of the essence of buzz saws that they make unpleasant sounds.' But it turns out that making unpleasant sounds isn’t actually inherent in buzz saws. And if it isn’t inherent in them, how can it be part of their essence?" (Chapter 10).

Considering the emptiness of things is not supposed to make you feel depressed: "thinking of the perceived world as in some sense empty doesn’t have to strip your life of meaning. In fact, it can allow you to build a new framework of meaning that’s more valid—maybe even more conducive to happiness—than your old framework" (Chapter 10). And in case you have started to wonder whether perhaps this Buddhist denial of inherent meanings can be harmful (due to potential moral relativism, for example), Wright has a response for you: "I hasten to add that this doesn’t mean we live in a meaningless universe. Deeply embedded in Buddhist thought is the intrinsic moral value of sentient life—not just the value of human beings but the value of all organisms that have subjective experience and so are capable of pain and pleasure, of suffering and not suffering. And this value in turn imparts value to other things, such as helping people, being kind to dogs, and so on. Moral meaning is, in that sense, inherent in life. But ... as we go about our day-to-day lives, we impart a kind of narrative meaning to things. Ultimately these narratives assume large form. We decide that something we’ve done was a huge mistake, and if we had done something else instead, everything would be wonderful. Or we decide that we must have some particular possession or achievement, and if we don’t get it, everything will be horrible. Underlying these narratives, at their foundation, are elementary narrative judgments about the goodness or badness of things in themselves ... And this kind of meaning, which seems so firmly embedded in the texture of things, isn’t, in fact, an inherent feature of reality; it is something we impose on reality, a story we tell about reality. We build stories on stories on stories, and the problem with the stories begins at their foundation" (Chapter 10).

This is another link between Buddhism and symbolic interactionism. Story-telling is an inherently social process. We tell stories to each other, and we often tell stories to ourselves. There is a story behind our perception of a faithful partner vs. partner who cheated on us. There is a story (in fact, not even one story, but a great many of them) behind our perception of a nice college and a colleague who seemed nice but voted for a presidential candidate we hate. And there is most certainly a story behind the house that used to belong to the inconspicuous but deadly Dorothea Puente. In other words, we are constructing our world through stories we tell about it.

If you think of it, all of this actually makes a lot of sense considering our everyday experiences: "There is a pretty uncontroversial sense in which, when we apprehend the world out there, we’re not really apprehending the world out there but rather are 'constructing' it. After all, we don’t have much direct contact with the world; the things we see and smell and hear are some distance from our bodies, so all the brain can do is make inferences about them based on indirect evidence: molecules that waft across the street from a bakery, sound waves emanating from a jet plane, particles of light that bounce off trees" (Chapter 10). So, “the stories we tell about things, and thus the beliefs we have about their history and their nature, shape our experience of them, and thus our sense of their essence" (Chapter 11). And this is the great illusion that Buddhism works on dispelling: "that the 'essences' we sense in things really exist, that they inhabit the things we perceive, when in fact they are constructions of our minds, with no necessary correspondence to reality. Things come with stories, and the stories, whether true or false, shape how we feel about the things and thus shape the things themselves, giving them the full form we perceive” (Chapter 11).

In the grand scheme of things, it might not be that important whether I have negative or positive associations with a certain house. I might just choose to buy another one, and that will be the end of this problem. But, Wright points out, it is crucial to consider essences in our interactions with each other. Because our perceptions of essences might determine actions that will cause real suffering to fellow human beings. Indeed, our perceptions of each other's essences are riddled with illusions. For example, psychologists talk about fundamental attribution error, which is "the tendency to overestimate the role of disposition and underestimate the role of situation" (Chapter 12). We see people (like everything else in the world) through the like/dislike lens. When people we dislike do something we dislike, we attribute this to their nature ("he was late because he does not care"). In contrast, if someone we like does something we dislike, we tend to attribute this to the situation ("he was late because he is dealing with a lot of serious problems right now"). Or, "(1) if an enemy or rival does something good, we’re inclined to attribute it to circumstance—he’s just giving money to the beggar to impress a woman who happens to be standing there; (2) if a close friend or ally does something bad, then here too circumstance tends to loom large—she’s yelling at a beggar who asks for money because she’s been stressed out over her job" (Chapter 12). When we divide everybody into bad people and good people with unchangeable essences, this can really impair our ability to see situations in complex ways, to go beyond the us-vs.-them tribalism, and to efficiently solve problems that society is so ripe with. 

As someone really interested in paradoxes of the human condition, I want to stress this: meanings have power over us, but we also have power over meanings. Symbolic interactionists focus on how people actively negotiate meanings through everyday interactions. Similarly, Wright points out that "[p]erception is an active, not a passive, process, a process of constantly building models of the world. That’s one reason different people see different things in the abstract ink blots used in Rorschach tests: our minds try to turn even the most ambiguous patterns into something that makes sense. We like to have a story about what things are and what they mean" (Chapter 10). At the same time, Buddhism does talk about people being stuck in the cycle of suffering. And Wright points out that we do not control natural selection processes shaping us. Most individuals do not even fully understand how the natural selection "design" creates problems for them and others. There is no simple story about power here: people are neither absolutely powerful nor entirely powerless as related to meanings/essences. Our power lies in working to understand how  meanings/essences work, to notice when they negatively impact our lives, and to minimize this negative impact as much as possible. But all of that is often very hard to do. (To read more on paradoxes of power, see my project POWER of meanings // MEANINGS of power.)

So, keep this in mind: "Our entire notion of good and bad, our whole landscape of feelings—fear, lust, love, and the many other feelings, salient and subtle, that inform our everyday thoughts and perceptions—are products of the particular evolutionary history of our species” (Chapter 15). They are also products of everyday symbolic interactions between human beings, considering that these interactions are themselves products of the particular evolutionary history of our species. To come to this realization and to learn how to use it, you do not have to give up your possessions and live as a monk in the woods, meditating day and night. You also do not need to persuade yourself that you live in an entirely formless and meaningless world. But you might need to start making at least a small effort every day to see the world differently. And, considering the stakes, I agree with Wright: it is something really worth doing. ​

SOURCES:
About the Book "Why Buddhism Is True." (n.d.) Simon & Schuster. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Why-Buddhism-is-True/Robert-Wright/9781439195468

Coles, N. (2015). The House Is Innocent. Blackburn Pictures. [watch the film here]

Friesem, E. (2021). Media Is Us: Understanding Communication and Moving beyond Blame. Roman & Littlefield.

Friesem, E. (n.d.). POWER of meanings // MEANINGS of power. www.meaningsofpower.com

Symbolic Interaction Theory. (n.d.) Structural Learning. ​www.structural-learning.com/post/symbolic-interaction-theory

Wright, R. (2017). Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment. Simon & Schuster.

For a change from sad poems and philosophical discussions about power, let me share with you a picture of earrings that I made this summer using cicada wings. If you are not in Illinois, USA, you might not know about the crazy amount of cicadas we had here in June. They were everywhere! They were making lots of noise and falling on people. It was not dangerous, but also not fun (unless you are really into cicadas). I found some cicada wings lying around and saved them for my epoxy resin projects. 

I had previously shared this picture in my Newsletter #11. I am slowly preparing the next newsletter, and the plan is to send it out in about 1.5 months from now (so, around mid February). Stay tuned!

And if you like my epoxy resin creations, you can check out some more pictures here. I appreciate your interest and support!

Language can confuse us but it can also give us important insights, if we know how to ask. We should not treat language as merely labels that people put on things in order to be able to talk about the world. Language hides our assumptions, values, and beliefs. Words and phrases emerge because people name what they want to talk about and in a way that they want to talk about it. That’s why many words cannot be easily translated from one language to another. You need to know the context, and nuances of meanings. The more complex things we want to talk about are, the more difficult it is to find a translation that effectively conveys our ideas from one language to another.
 
For example, when I was translating into English one of the poems that I wrote many years ago in Russian, I was confronted by the challenge of choosing an adjective that would convey the meaning of the Russian word “зыбкий”  (pronounced “zybkiy,” with the stress on the underlined letter). Depending on the context, it can be translated into English as “fragile”, “shaky,” “unsteady,” “unstable,” “loose,” and “wobbly.” And if you look at examples of translation involving this word, you will see that it can be also rendered as “delicate,” “faint,” “elusive,” “ambiguous,” and “untrusty.” Clearly, there is no one word in English that conveys all the meanings of “зыбкий.”  We might not be able to tell precisely why a word containing all these meanings was coined in Russian. But the existence of this word – and of words with similar meanings in English – suggests that people want to talk about fragility, ambiguity, and untrustworthiness. It is very likely that words that convey these meanings can be found in many other languages, because people need to be able to discuss what and who they can trust, be sure of, or rely on. However, this understanding does not make the task of translating “зыбкий” into English any easier.

This does not mean that all words in a given language are as difficult to translate. Some words describe things that are more specific, something that can be observed in many different cultures—for example, “dog” or “table.” These words are usually easily translated in a specific context, for example, “I walk my dog every morning.” (This is not to say that these words don’t have subordinate meanings that differ between cultures. For example, in some cultures “dog” can be used to refer to an unpleasant, worthless person.)

It appears that words can tell us something about meaning shared by people in different cultures and communities. There is a basic literal meaning of “dog” shared in different cultures because dogs are domesticated animals that can be found around the world; they have played an important role in human civilizations since the time when these animals were domesticated thousands of years ago (precise time is a matter of debate among scholars). 

If a word for describing a certain phenomenon exists in many different cultures, we could sometimes even argue that this is something important for people as a species. Which does not mean that this something is understood exactly the same human beings everywhere. Take, for example, such word as “love.” It has many meaning and nuances (e.g., some languages have move words for “love” than others); yet, it is present in many cultures around the word, and there are intersections between meanings that have existed across time and space. Hence, we can conclude that love—in its many shapes and forms—is essential in the lives of human beings.
 
The topic of this book is power. So, I wondered: How do people talk about power in different languages? What can similarities in ways human beings talk about power across cultures tell us about phenomena hiding behind this word? Here, I am going to offer some thoughts. However, this is in no way an exhaustive linguistic exploration of the word “power” and its meaning across languages. Moreover, considering how tricky people's relationship with language is, I do not expect to discover some ultimate truth about power by exploring what words people use to talk about it.  Rather, I hope to find some themes and threads that will give me ideas on how to to explore the complex phenomena that we describe using the word "power."

Linguists divide languages into “families.” Languages that belong to the same family share a common ancestor, which is called “proto-language” of that particular family. A family of languages can belong to another family. For example, Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese (and a few other languages) belong to a language family known as “Romance languages.” But this family itself is part of the larger Indo-European family of languages, which includes many other languages native to Europe and South Asia.

The Indo-European family includes such diverse languages as English, Spanish, Russian, and Hindustani. This does not mean that the modern forms of these languages are similar, but some precious remnants of their commonality can be occasionally discovered in our everyday language. For example, I was surprised when I realized one day, many years ago, that the Russian word “будить” (“budit”), which means “to wake up,” is related to “Buddha,” which can be translated from Sanskrit as “awakened,” in the sense of “enlightened.” In this case, we can see how modern Russian is related to an ancient Ind0-Aryan language that emerged in South Asia a few thousands of years ago!
 
Dividing languages into families is a tricky business. Modern languages contain similar words because they have borrowed them from each other; this is not the same as having the same language ancestor. Some scholars say that there are close to 150 language families, others count several hundreds. This is not a linguistic book, and I am not a linguist. So, I won’t be able to dive into all the language families (and definitely not into all the living human languages, of which there are thousands) to explore “power” in all of them.  

I have a much more modest goal. I will take a look at “power” in English, Russian, Spanish, German, and French—which are the languages that I can read and speak, to a certain extent. Of these languages, Spanish and French belong to Romance family, German and English belong to Germanic family, and Russian belongs to the Balto-Slavic family. However, all these three families are different branches of the Indo-European mega-family that I already mentioned, and they can be traced back to the common language ancestor known as Proto-Indo-European.
 
Clearly, based on just these few languages, I cannot make conclusions about meaning of power in languages of all cultures. However, it is important to keep in mind that the Indo-European family of languages includes a great many very diverse languages. And a lot of crucial conversations about power in the modern world are happening in these languages. People having these conversations have a lot of… for the lack of better word, power (or at least, some form of power, which I discuss elsewhere). For instance, many scholarly conversations about power take place in English. 
 
So, let’s start with English, since this book is written in it. I will then discuss how the English word “power” translates into Russian, Spanish, French, and German.
 
Here are some of the meanings of “power” in English that we learn when we open Merriam-Webster. I will go ahead and bold some key words that appear in these definitions and, I believe, can help us better understand the meaning of “power” in English.
 
So, “power” in English can be understood as “ability to act or produce an effect,” “legal or official authority, capacity, or right,” “possession of control, authority, or influence over others” (also “one having such power—specifically: a sovereign state”), “a controlling group,” “a force of armed men” (archaic), “physical might,” “mental or moral efficacy,” “political control or influence.”
 
These are all meanings related to people and their relationships—what I will call in this book “social power.” However, there are also meanings not related to social power, and they are also worth mentioning. These meanings include “an order of angels” (in Christianity), “the number of times as indicated by an exponent that a number occurs as a factor” and “the product itself,” “cardinal number” (in one of its meanings), “a source or means of supplying energy” (especially “electricity”), “motive power” (which applies to motion in machinery), “the time rate at which work is done or energy emitted or transferred,” “magnification” (in one of its meanings), “scope” (in some of its meanings), and “the probability of rejecting the null hypothesis in a statistical test when a particular alternative hypothesis happens to be true.”

“Power” can also be a verb and an adjective. As a verb, it can mean “to supply with power and especially motive power,” “to give impetus to,” “to move about by means of motive power,” and “to move with great speed or force.” As an adjective, it can mean “operated mechanically or electrically rather than manually,” “of, relating to, or utilizing strength,” and “having prestige, or influence.”
 
Here are the words that I bolded: ability, effect, authority, capacity, right, control, influence, force, might, energy, impetus, strength, prestige. All these words can describe people, what they do, or relationships between them.
 
First of all, what this list suggests (in my opinion) is that “power” describes something that permeates people’s lives. If it wasn’t pervasive, it’s definition would be short a specific. Another thing that I notice just by looking at this list is that power is not something explicitly good or bad, but it can be interpreted as good or bad based on circumstances. For example, being in control can be perceived as something positive: “She is in control of her life”—or as something negative: “Stop trying to control me!” You probably heard conversations about people "in power" who do bad things to other people. On the other hand, we are all familiar with the word "empowerment," which is seen as something clearly positive. 
 
Let’s now move to the next language on my list: Russian (which happens to be my mother tongue). Notably, the English word “power” does not have a direct equivalent in Russian. What I mean is that in Russian, there is no one word that would have the same meanings as the word “power” in English. Instead, there are a number of words whose definitions intersect with definitions of “power” in English (which is similar to the situation with the word "zibkiy," mentioned earlier). In the list that follows, each word in Russian is a translation of the English “power.” What follows each word in Russian is its meanings translated back to English. I have bolded words in English that can help us broaden the definition of social power. They were not present in the Merriam-Webster list, but they are semantically related to the words on that list.
​

• власть: power, authority, rule, control, grip, dominion
• мощность: power, capacity, output, energy, duty, width
• сила: force, power, strength, intensity, might, energy
• мощь: power, might, capacity, vis
• энергия: energy, power, vigor, vitality, intensity, might
• способность: ability, capacity, power, capability, faculty, aptitude
• держава: power, orb, globe, mound
• степень: power, degree, extent, rate, stage, grade
• могущество: power, might, potency, puissance, potence
• влияние: influence, impact, effect, power, sway, action
• возможность: opportunity, possibility, potential, capacity, ability, power
• полномочие: authority, power, proxy, commission, competency, procuration
• производительность: performance, productivity, capacity, output, efficiency, power
• государственная власть: power
• сила увеличения: power
• бог, божество: deity, divinity, god, almighty, [higher] power
• сверхъестественные силы: [supernatural] power
• множество: multiplicity, plurality, variety, multitude, plenty, power
• силовой: power (adj.)
• моторный: motor, of engine, power (adj.)
• машинный: machine, mechanical, power, mechanic
• снабжать силовым двигателем: power (verb)
• много: many, much, more, a lot of, power

 
To reiterate, all these words can be used in Russian to talk about what in English people call “power.” I believe that it is especially important that almost each of the words has several translations besides “power”; when we look at these other translations, we see clear intersections with the meanings of “power” in English as listed in the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
 
To remind you, the list of words I extracted from Merriam-Webster definitions were these: 
ability, effect, authority, capacity, right, control, influence, force, might, energy, impetus, strength, prestige.
Now, after exploring meanings of power in Russian, we can add the following to our list: 
rule, grip, dominion, vigor, vitality, faculty, aptitude, impact, sway, action, proxy, competency, productivity.
 
At this point, there are two big themes that I see emerging in the way we talk about power: the first there has something to do with ability (the focus is on what a person can do) and the second one has something to do with influence (the focus is on how one can impact others). 

Ability: ability, capacity, energy, impetus, strength, vigor, vitality, faculty, aptitude, action, competency, productivity
Influence: effect, authority, right, control, influence, force, might, rule, dominion, grip, sway, proxy, prestige, impact

Turning to Spanish, we get a very similar list of meanings. Some additional definitions related to social power that we find here include “power of attorney” (one of the meanings of “el poder”), “drive” (for “la energía”), “pressure” (for “la fuerza”), and “clout, hold” (for “la influencia”).  In Spanish we also find one especially important detail: the main translation of power is “poder”;  it is a noun, but also verb that can be translated into English as “can.”
 
If we go back to English and Russian, we will see that the connection between “power” and the modal verb “can” is present in these languages as well. For example, in English, “can” means “to be able to,” which brings us to ability. In Russian, “can” is translated with the verb “мочь” (e.g., “I can” is “я могу”), which shares the root with the noun “мощь” (which I previously listed as one of the translations of “power” to Russian, with meanings “power, might, capacity, vis”). Notably, “мощь” goes back to the Proto-Indo-European root with the meaning "being able".
 
We find a similar situation in French, where the noun “pouvoir”—the main translation of “power” to French—is also the verb meaning “can.” This parallelism with Spanish is not surprising, since these two languages are closely related through their common ancestor, Latin (more recent than the Proto-Indo-European one).
 
We do not see the same parallelism of power/can in German, but we do see similar translations of power—including those with meanings of “force,” “might,” “strength,” “sway,” “output,” “vigor,” “energy,” “potency,” “capacity,” etc. Other additional meanings associated with social power that we get by translating “power” into German are “push” (for “die Energie“); „violence“ (for ”die Gewalt“); „warrant“ (for „die Befugnis“); „dominance“ (for „die Herrschaft“); and „propel, urge, move“ (for „antreiben”)—all of them appear to fall into the category of influence. At the same time, notably, one of the main translations of “power” in German is “die Macht,” which means “power, force, might, strength, potency, sway” but comes from the same Proto-Indo-European root with the meaning “being able” - the same root that the Russian words “мочь” and “мощь” come from. 

So, based on my admittedly superficial analysis, it appears that when speakers of at least a few Indo-European languages talk about things related to social power, what they are discussing is people’s abilities and influences. The difference between these two aspects of power is subtle but it is important to note. Ability is something that a person can be described as having or not having. Influence, on the other hand, is about interactions between people. Based on the variety of words that exist to help us discuss our abilities and influences, we can conclude that these aspects of social existence are considered important. That's why people created a lot of words to talk about abilities and influences, with their many nuances.
 
Indeed, people are constantly preoccupied with abilities and capacities, to the point that they apply the modal verb “can” to speak about each other, but also about numerous aspects of the world—both animate and inanimate, abstract and concrete. (Consider also the variety of words with suffixes "-able" and "-ible".) In fact, the English word “power” comes from Latin “posse,” which meant “be able.” People are obviously also preoccupied with influences and effects. And not without a good reason, since many if not most conflicts between human beings are about who impacts whom,  who decides how things should be, and whose interpretations of reality should be accepted by others.
 
A few more words need to be said about the modal verb “can.” In English, it is related to German “können” and comes from Old English “cunnan,” which meant “to know”—and could mean “know how to.” Notably, in modern Spanish and French, the verb that means “to know” is used in some contexts to express “to be able to” (as in "No se cantar" = "I can't sing"). In Russian, the synonym of “мочь” (mention earlier) is “уметь,” which has the root “ум” (“mind”)—thus, the reference to knowledge as a prerequisite to being able to do something is present there as well.
 
Notably, in Old English, different words were used for “be able to,” and “know how to”; yet another word was used to express “may.” Nowadays they are all translated to the modern English as “can” (see Megan Perry’s article Alfraed Grammaticus, in press). Indeed, you might notice that “can” is sometimes used to discuss abilities (“I can sing opera,” meaning I have this skill), and sometimes it is used to discuss what we are allowed to do (“I can sing in this room,” meaning I am allowed to sing in this space; I have a right to do that; I won't be punished if I do that).
 
“Being allowed to” can be described as lying somewhere on the intersection of ability and influence. As an ability, it is something that “belongs” to me, my characteristic; but it reflects influence of other people on me, and mine on others, since being allowed or not allowed to do something is all about my relationship with others.  
 
Now, I would like to take a look into yet one more language: Sanskrit. The reason for this choice lies in the importance of the Indian thought and philosophy in my personal life and scholarship (which I discuss in more detail elsewhere [link to be added]).
 
Sanskrit is the sacred language of Hinduism; it is the language of classical Hindu philosophy, and of historical texts of Buddhism. Sanskrit belongs to the same Indo-European family as Russian, English, German, Spanish, and French; but it has much deeper connections with its Proto-Indo-European ancestor than modern languages.
 
Two main translations of “power” to Sanskrit are “utsāha” and “shakti.” “Utsāha” can be translated back into English as “enthusiasm,” “zeal,” “energy,” “strength,” “power,” “fortitude,” “strength of will,” “resolution,” “firmness,” “effort,” “endurance,” “perseverance,” “cheerfulness,” “joy,” “happiness,” “initiative,” and “drive.”
 
These meanings have some intersections with the meanings of power in English, Russian, German, Spanish, and French. In these five languages, we already saw “strength,” “drive,” “energy,” and a few related words. But Sanskrit’s “utsāha” also offers some important additions that give us more food for thought. For example, we can think of power as something associated with effort, something that requires endurance. Indeed, this meaning is also present in the English phrasal verb “power through,” which stands for “to continue in a determined and strong manner until the end of something, even when it’s difficult.” We can also think of the link of power and joy. The five languages we looked into earlier similarly suggest that the word “power” and its meanings are not seen as something plainly negative or positive. For example, language signals that power is related to domination and violence, but also to energy and empowerment.
 
Finally, let’s turn to the Sanskrit word “shakti.” Literally, this word can be translated as “energy, ability, strength, effort, power, might, capability” (see Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary)—which are all important themes present in the five modern languages that I have briefly analyzed. But, interestingly, Shakti is much more that just a word to describe people’s abilities and influences. In Hinduism, Shakti is a goddess, or even the Universal Power that sustains all existence. It is the primordial cosmic energy that flows through the universe. 

This is how Shakti is described on the website of yoga center Kripalu:

“Shakti means power, energy, or force. Mythologically, Shakti is always described as feminine, often personified as the goddess, Devi, the divine feminine consort of the divine masculine god Shiva. But at the deepest level, Shakti transcends gender.

Metaphysically, in Indian tradition—as well as in Taoism (where they refer to Shakti as 'chi' or 'qi'), Shakti is the name given to the fundamental creative dynamism that gives rise to universes. She is considered the source of both matter and physical energy, as well as of just about everything else. Her dance is the dance of the cosmos.

It makes sense then, that there are different forms, levels, and expressions of Shakti in the universe. If you sit next to the Columbia River in Oregon, outside Portland Oregon, you’ll get a visceral sense of power flowing as the current. Following the river downstream, you’ll discover an enormous hydroelectric plant, converting the waterpower into electricity. That same electricity flows through the wiring in the local restaurant, runs the refrigerator, keeps the lights on, and lets you connect wirelessly to the Internet. These energies seem different and serve different purposes, but they are all forces, powers. They are all forms of Shakti. And, beyond the observable physical power is something much subtler and more multileveled: Shakti is the innate creativity at the heart of all living things. She’s the life force energy that makes the river flow just as she powers your breath, makes your heart beat, and fires your muscles and neurons. She is often equated with prana (the force within the breath), but she is also the subtle energy that gives rise to prana.”
 
This vision of power appears to be quite different from everything we have seen before! It goes beyond dividing power into “social” and “not social,” that I suggested earlier. This is power that exists everywhere, in all humans and beyond them. What might this mean, and is it even relevant for our conversation? I will be returning to these questions elsewhere.
 
In the meantime, taking the hint from language, I conclude that there are several things that we should consider as we are exploring power. First, there are at least three distinct aspects or forms of power worth looking into: (1) power as ability; (2) power as influence; (3) and what I call “may” power (referring to what one is allowed or disallowed to do). Next, it is important to discuss the duality of power: its negative aspects, revealed in such words as “violence” and “domination,” “control,” and “force”; and its positive aspects that can be found in such words as “energy,” “productivity,” “drive,” and “empowerment.” And it might be worth paying special attention to the idea of power as energy, in ways more specific and more philosophical (e.g., following insights from Sanskrit). 

In September, I wrote a post titled "In the age of growing polarization, the song 'Under Pressure' is a perfect anthem for empathy." It still remains a statement of my wholehearted belief. I am not going to talk about current politics here. You are probably getting enough of that through your daily media consumption. I just want to say that, no matter what is happening in the world, I still believe in the importance of connection. I believe that at the time when connection seems the most difficult thing to do, it is also the most important thing to do.

As a scholar, my challenge lies in providing well-researched arguments to support my beliefs. As a person who cares about what's going on in the world, I ask myself every day, Why is it exactly that we should struggle to connect, to understand each other, when it feels so hard to do?

My way to answer this question is through exploration of power. One could study connection or explain its importance in many different ways. Looking at connection through the idea of power might seem counterintuitive: What do these two things have in common? If you follow my work, you will see how I gradually develop my argument. Sometimes directions that my exploration is taking might seem too detached from my goal to explain why connection is essential no matter how hard it is to do. But trust me: this goal is always present in my mind and in my heart.

For example, here is a new page from the project POWER of meanings // MEANINGS of power. On this page, I explore the meaning of the word "power" in different languages. In other words, I asked myself this broad question: What do we talk about when we talk about power? To formulate an answer, I drew on my knowledge of five languages: Russian, English, Spanish, German, and French. All of them belong to the Indo-European family of languages, which means that they are related through a common language "ancestor" known as Proto-Indo-European. 

Clearly, based on just these few languages, I cannot make conclusions about the meaning of power in languages of all cultures. However, it is important to keep in mind that the Indo-European family of languages includes a great many very diverse languages. And a lot of crucial conversations about power in the modern world are happening in these languages. For instance, numerous scholarly conversations about power happen in English. (I also took a quick look into the meaning of power in Sanskrit.)

My admittedly superficial exploration of power in these languages yielded some interesting preliminary results, which I describe in more detail here. To sum it up:

• When we talk about power, we often talk about ability and influence.
• We actually talk about power and its aspects all the time, although we use many different words to talk about it (for example, modal verb "can" and its equivalents in other languages).
• Language allows us to talk about power as something bad (as in coercion and violence) but also as something good (and in energy and strength). 
• Language hints at an assumed connection between power and energy. (But what is this connection? I have some ideas and I will explore them in my future posts.)

By the way, if you speak languages that are outside of the Indo-European group, I would love to hear from you. Do the insights I listed above make sense in the context of your language? 

If you, like me, live in the United States, you run into political and cultural polarization in every corner. Polarization has become especially hard to avoid as we are getting close to the presidential election. But polarization is certainly not unique to the United States. We can probably argue that, as the world is getting more globalized, it is also becoming more polarized, with rifts within and between some countries growing over time.

Polarization is the opposite of connection, and connection has been an important theme running through my scholarship and writing over the last few years. I have been thinking a lot about the critical need to emphasize connection as people are dealing with problems in today's world. Back in 2020, when I was finishing my book Media Is Us: Understanding Communication and Moving Beyond Blame, I found a song that seemed to encapsulate, albeit cryptically, my thoughts about polarization and connection, and about such related themes as the human condition, empathy, and self-awareness. I am talking about "Under Pressure" by Queen and David Bowie.* (You can find lyrics here.)

My goal here is not to argue that my interpretation of the song is correct. We will probably never know exactly what Queen and Bowie meant. And maybe it's even not that important what they consciously meant. As some might say, real masterpieces happen when artists allow something greater than an individual speak through them. So, my goal here is merely to explain why I think that, in the age of growing polarization, "Under Pressure" is a perfect anthem for empathy.

First and foremost, the song talks about pressure that all people have to live with. It is a pressure that no one asks for. This pressure is simply a function of being human. Everybody has to deal with it, no matter how powerful or powerless they seem, although this pressure takes different forms for different people.

I talk about this pressure in my scholarship when I describe powerlessness that all human beings experience. For example, I write: "We are born into society governed by unspoken rules and by ideas that we do not fully comprehend. On top of that, we constantly have to deal with the limitations of our bodies, with forces and laws of nature indifferent towards our feelings."

This pressure sometimes manifests itself as an intense feeling of existential horror. If we think too much about what it means to be human, we might discover the deeply unsettling strangeness of life itself. What am I, really? Why am I here? What's the point? 

Another form of existential pressure is the need to make choices, to decide what's right and what's wrong. We can, of course, try the strategy proposed by the ancient skeptics and suspend all our judgment; but, as their critics pointed out, this would mean doing nothing, not living a life and not dealing with its problems. And, as the singer laments, you cannot pretend to be blind, you cannot spend your life sitting on the fence. It just does not work. Many people who choose to deal with pressing social problems come to this exact conclusion. 

As the song develops, the theme of pressure is intensifying. But the singer also reminds us that there is a glimpse of a better tomorrow, and this hope gives us wings, gets us higher... while the pressure keeps pulling us down. What kind of hope can we count on in this maddening game? If pressure was the main topic, this song would be dark and hopeless. But there is another key theme: love.

First, love itself appears hopeless. Can it really solve our problems? I get this doubt, I get it so well. How can I love someone whose worldviews are alien to mine? Whose choices, it seems, I would never replicate? When love is mentioned for the first time, it is described as something that the singer has to keep coming up with. The definition of "come up with" is "produce something, especially when pressured or challenged," which brings us back to the theme of pressure. We might want to try using love, as opposed to violence, in response to life's challenges, but this strategy does not necessarily produce immediate results. And we are not all Kings and Gandhis. Not surprisingly, our attempts at loving our enemies often seem to be doomed. Love we want to offer keeps getting torn and shredded.

Here, the song throws us back to one of the most existential questions. Why? The singer repeats it three times, the last one turning into a cry that signals desperation. But in response to this desperate plea for meaning, the other voice answers, firm in its certainty: "Love." The answer is simply love. I am not a religious person, but I believe that love must be our faith. I believe that, when conflicts keep escalating as each side responds with violence to violence, there will be no end to suffering unless we wholeheartedly believe that love is the answer and act upon this belief. Love will save us in our darkest hour, when we are breaking under pressure and going insane from sadness and grief.

Rolling on this juxtaposition of pressure and love, the song reaches its crescendo. At the time when the fate of the whole of humanity might be at stake (think about nuclear weapons, climate change, wars), the song tells us that we need to give ourselves one more chance--"ourselves" being people, collectively. Can't we do it?--the song asks. And it continues asking, dramatically: Why can't we give one more chance to love? Indeed, we must do it, even when everything seems so hopeless and the pressure is breaking us down and apart. Here, the song offers a beautiful play on words. The question about giving one more chance to love morphs into another vital question: Why can't we simply give love? The end of this last question, "give love" turns into a persistent echo. It turns into an imperative. If we want to save ourselves, save the world, we should stop responding with hate to hate. Love is the only answer. Remember King's words: "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."

But, of course, it is not easy, so not easy. We need to keep asking ourselves this question: Why can't we just give love? The song continues, reflecting on that. It calls the idea of love "old-fashioned". We are afraid that if we talk too much about love, we will be seen as "not cool", as too soft, as inferior to people of action who do stuff instead of trying to hug their problems away. Just to be clear, I am not talking here about some weak toothless love that allows everybody to step over it. Love must be strong, love must be proud, and this love can be perfectly well combined with resistance to violence. So, we should not think that love is something that's just for babies and romance. Love requires an effort. Loving your enemy while stopping him or her from doing harm to you or somebody else requires extra strength.

Love that will save the world in the age of growing conflicts and polarization is the kind of love that dares you. It dares you to care for people no matter how much you dislike their worldviews and actions. It dares you to empathize with "people of the night" no matter how much darkness you see in them.

Love dares us to change how we deal with each other, and it also dares us to change the way we take care of ourselves. Real change starts from within. We cannot love others until we learn to truly love ourselves and know ourselves. This is like a two-sided coin. Know yourself to know others, and the other way around. Love yourself to love others, and the other way around. Take care of yourself in order to take care of others, and the other way around.

This all is so not easy, but we must do it, as humanity, because this might be our last dance together on this planet. Our last dance, our last chance. Will we take it?

We keep dividing ourselves into us and them, but there is no us and them, because on this planet, we are all in this together. And in the grand scheme of things, there is nowhere else to go. This pressure of being human might be killing us. But the key to our survival is in our hands. Not ours as opposed to theirs. Just ours. There is nobody here, on this planet, but us--under the enormous pressure of being human.

This is just a quick post to share my self-portrait from this summer. I think it represents pretty accurately what's going on inside my brain! 

I previously shared it in my Newsletter #9. If you like the stuff I post here, please sign up to my newsletter (scroll down to the bottom of any page of this website to see the sign-up form).

Also, you can find more photos I took over the years here.

Zach: In a recent blog post of yours on your site, you talked about many people’s kind of simplistic idea of power. Like, there’s a king and there’s a peasant as a common example of… somebody having power over somebody else. Can you talk a little bit about what you wrote in that post and how you saw more complexity in that dynamic?

Elizaveta: Yeah. You’re referring to a page of my website. I have a website… that I specifically dedicated to exploring power as a paradox as opposed to power as a binary. Power as a binary – this is a common perception… we consider… that just some people have power, and some people lack power. Or power is something that you can clearly say, “Okay, I have it,” or, “I don’t have it and the other person has it or doesn’t have it.” Right? And I wanted to explain how [power is] more like a paradox that… it’s something that you can have and lack at the same time.

So, I thought that this example with a king and a peasant can describe it well because… Well, first of all, I wanted to take an example that is sort of detached from the modern debates because I feel like whenever we use examples from controversial issues, then very soon people just stop listening because they’re sort of feeling very strong emotions about those issues. So, I felt like king and peasant is something that is further removed from our everyday life, but also a very vivid example because you could think of a king as somebody who has absolute power over this peasant, right? So, [the] king has power and can do whatever he wants, and the peasant has zero power. I mean, he makes some choices in his everyday life, you know, when to harvest or whatnot. But then, if the king decides to send soldiers to arrest or kill the peasant, the peasant won’t be able to do anything, you know? This sort of relationship.

And so, I wanted to explain that when we think about power as a paradox, it’s not like we’re saying, “Well, a king and a peasant have the same amount of power.” It’s not like the king… doesn’t have power over the peasant, but the peasant has power over the king. You know, kind of reversing this relationship. This is just turning this simplistic binary around. It’s true that the king, in many situations, has more power than the peasant. A king can make a law and then the peasant has to obey this law, for example. Right? If we just focus on this relationship, it’s fairly clear who has power over whom. But it’s not like this is the only relationship in the world. Right? There are other relationships. There are a lot of people around the peasant and around the king... 

If we look at those other relationships, we start noticing that things are not as simple because, first of all, the king was born to be a king, right? And he doesn’t necessarily choose to do things that are expected of a king. Now, it might sound kind of vague, those examples, but I can give some life to it. I’ve been actually researching [the] life of Louis XIV because I thought this could be an interesting figure to dive into, and I’m now working on a page about his life based on a very extensive book that I read written by a historian... So, there are plenty of examples to show how Louis XIV, with all the power that he had… he also lacked power in many ways.

You know, he became king when he was four. And then as a child, he didn’t have much power at all. He was pushed around, and he needed to follow different ceremonies and he was used as a pawn in political games of his relatives and parents. And in general… living in a royal family in a court was tough. This all is not to say that he had it worse than a peasant. Obviously, a king like Louis XIV, I don’t think he ever experienced hunger, for example. But there are a lot of things that he couldn’t control. He wanted to control desperately because he was told… He was born into this meaning of absolute power, and he was told that he’s supposed to have it. But throughout his life, he had many instances when he couldn’t use power. He had to do what other people wanted him to do or expected him to do. And he had to live according to this idea of monarchy that he didn’t invent… the expectations for what it means to be a king. And those expectations, if you think of it, were created before him and supported not just by him… and embraced by everybody in France and in Europe of the time.

​So, in this sense, peasant does come into play because believing in the monarchy, believing in the power of religion that gave the king the divine rights to do whatever he wants, supposedly… everybody in his kingdom played some part in that. Although obviously, people did criticize him and dislike him… some people. Yeah, so that’s where it gets complicated.

I have not posted here for a while. First, I was busy with an exciting - but very time consuming - project for Oxford University Press. Then my mom was visiting, and I took a well-deserved break from work to enjoy Chicago during the precious weeks before the heat wave. (Although the cicada madness made that a tad difficult. If you are in Illinois, you know what I am talking about!)

My plan and hope was that I would be then able to do some writing and video-making before new paid tasks knock on my door. For better or worse, I have not had much time to focus on my personal projects - copyediting gigs are already piling up. Before I got sucked back into the vortex of work, I was able to make this short video based on an old (probably, from about fifteen years ago) poem that I wrote while still living in Russia.

I had no plans to leave Russia back then, yet now it is evident that this poem predicted my future. Back then, it seemed impossible. I even wrote it from a perspective of some male narrator - I was probably imagining an immigrant writer like Nabokov. You can hear that only in Russian, where verbs in the past tense are gendered. 

See the video or read the text in Russian (original) and English (translation) underneath. Special thanks go to Slava Korolev, who kindly allowed me to use his photos, and to Maarten Schellekens, whose beautiful music always fits perfectly the mood of my poems. 

My next newsletter won't be out for a while as I am busy with a big editing project for Oxford University Press. In the meantime, I am going to share here a recent podcast interview. A few month ago, I had a conversation with Zach Elwood, host of the podcast People Who Read People. We talked about social power, the oppressed/oppressor framework, free will, and empathy. It's my second time chatting with Zach on his podcast, and it is always a pleasure! 

You can listen to our conversation here.

As for my next newsletter, it will be coming out in June. Stay tuned!