KING VS PEASANT EXAMPLE (on complexity of power from the podcast with Zach Elwood)

I want to share an excerpt from the great conversation I had with Zach Elwood on his podcast People Who Read People. 

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.