-
Every day of your life,
-
you move through systems of power
that other people made.
-
Do you sense them?
-
Do you understand power?
-
Do you realize why it matters?
-
Power is something we are often
uncomfortable talking about.
-
That's especially true in civic life,
how we live together in community.
-
In a democracy, power is supposed to
reside with the people, period.
-
Any further talk about power
and who really has it
-
seems a little dirty,
maybe even evil.
-
But power is no more inherently good or
evil than fire or physics.
-
It just is.
-
It governs how any form of
government works.
-
It determines who gets to determine
the rules of the game.
-
So learning how power operates is key
to being effective,
-
being taken seriously,
and not being taken advantage of.
-
In this lesson, we'll look at where
power comes from,
-
how it's exercised and what you can do to
become more powerful in public life.
-
Let's start with a basic definition.
-
Power is the ability to make others do
what you would have them do.
-
Of course, this plays out in
all arenas of life,
-
from family to the workplace
to our relationships.
-
Our focus is on the civic arena,
-
where power means getting a community
to make the choices
-
and to take the actions that you want.
-
There are six main sources of civic power.
-
First, there's physical force
and a capacity for violence.
-
Control of the means of force,
whether in the police or a militia,
-
is power at its most primal.
-
A second core source
of power is wealth.
-
Money creates the ability to buy results
and to buy almost any other kind of power.
-
The third form of power is state action,
government.
-
This is the use of law and
bureaucracy to compel people
-
to do or not do certain things.
-
In a democracy, for example,
we the people, theoretically,
-
give government its power
through elections.
-
In a dictatorship, state power emerges
from the threat of force,
-
not the consent of the governed.
-
The fourth type of power is social norms
or what other people think is okay.
-
Norms don't have the centralized
machinery of government.
-
They operate in a softer way,
peer to peer.
-
They can certainly make people
change behavior and even change laws.
-
Think about how norms around marriage
equality today are evolving.
-
The fifth form of power is ideas.
-
An idea, individual liberties, say,
or racial equality,
-
can generate boundless amounts
of power
-
if it motivates enough people to change
their thinking and actions.
-
And so the sixth source of
power is numbers, lots of humans.
-
A vocal mass of people creates
power by expressing
-
collective intensity of interest
-
and by asserting legitimacy.
-
Think of the Arab Spring
or the rise of the Tea Party.
-
Crowds count.
-
These are the six main sources of power,
what power is.
-
So now, let's think about how
power operates.
-
There are three laws of power
worth examining.
-
Law number one:
power is never static.
-
It's always either accumulating
or decaying in a civic arena.
-
So if you aren't taking action,
you're being acted upon.
-
Law number two:
power is like water.
-
It flows like a current
through everyday life.
-
Politics is the work of harnessing
that flow in a direction you prefer.
-
Policymaking is an effort to freeze
and perpetuate a particular flow of power.
-
Policy is power frozen.
-
Law number three:
power compounds.
-
Power begets more power,
and so does powerlessness.
-
The only thing that keeps law
number three from leading to a situation
-
where only one person has all the power
-
is how we apply laws one and two.
-
What rules do we set up so that a few
people don't accumulate too much power,
-
and so that they can't enshrine their
privilege in policy?
-
That's the question of democracy,
-
and you can see each of these laws at work
in any news story.
-
Low wage workers organize to
get higher pay.
-
Oil companies push to get a big
pipeline approved.
-
Gay and lesbian couples seek the legal
right to marry.
-
Urban parents demand school vouchers.
-
You may support these efforts or not.
-
Whether you get what you want depends
on how adept you are with power,
-
which brings us finally to what you can do
to become more powerful in public life.
-
Here, it's useful to think in
terms of literacy.
-
Your challenge is to learn how to read
power and write power.
-
To read power means to pay attention to
as many texts of power as you can.
-
I don't mean books only.
-
I mean seeing society as a set of texts.
-
Don't like how things are in your campus
or city or country?
-
Map out who has what kind of power,
arrayed in what systems.
-
Understand why it turned out this way,
-
who's made it so,
and who wants to keep it so.
-
Study the strategies others
in such situations used:
-
frontal attack or indirection,
-
coalitions or charismatic authority.
-
Read so you may write.
-
To write power requires first that you
believe you have the right to write,
-
to be an author of change.
-
You do.
-
As with any kind of writing,
you learn to express yourself,
-
speak up in a voice that's authentic.
-
Organize your ideas,
then organize other people.
-
Practice consensus building.
-
Practice conflict.
-
As with writing,
it's all about practice.
-
Every day you have a chance to practice,
in your neighborhood and beyond.
-
Set objectives, then bigger ones.
-
Watch the patterns, see what works.
-
Adapt, repeat.
-
This is citizenship.
-
In this short lesson, we've explored where
civic power comes from,
-
how it works
and what you can do to exercise it.
-
One big question remaining
is the "why" of power.
-
Do you want power to benefit everyone
or only you?
-
Are your purposes
pro-social or anti-social?
-
This question isn't about strategy.
-
It's about character,
and that's another set of lessons.
-
But remember this:
-
Power plus character
equals a great citizen,
-
and you have the power to be one.