NEW ESSAY: Power and Powerlessness Are Intertwined

This is the latest essay I published in my project POWER of meanings // MEANINGS of power. 

“Power” is one of the concepts we rely on most heavily to make sense of moral conflict. In everyday conversations, in political debates, and in activist language, power is usually understood as something people either have or lack. Some people are seen as powerful: they make decisions, influence outcomes, and shape the lives of others. Other people are seen as powerless: constrained, acted upon, deprived of meaningful choice.

This way of thinking about power feels intuitive. It helps us explain injustice, assign responsibility, and draw moral boundaries. It also supports a familiar narrative structure: those with power cause harm, those without power suffer it. From this perspective, wrongdoing appears as the result of freely chosen actions by people who could have acted differently but did not.

I want to argue that this understanding of power is incomplete.

Power is not a simple possession, and it is not distributed in clean moral or social categories. Human beings do not fall neatly into groups of the powerful and the powerless. Instead, power and powerlessness are intertwined in every person, including those who appear to hold great authority and those who appear to have very little.

This claim does not deny that power differences are real or that harm matters. It does not suggest that responsibility disappears once we acknowledge constraint. Rather, it points to a more accurate description of how human action actually works. People act from a mixture of capacity and limitation, agency and confusion, influence and constraint. Ignoring this mixture leads to moral oversimplification and distorted explanations of conflict.
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To understand power more clearly, we need to move away from binary thinking and toward a view of power as situational, partial, and always intertwined with powerlessness.

Continue reading here.

[This essay will be included via a link in Newsletter#21.]