Power - In Literature #

Power comes from many sources, such as muscle, money, the barrel of a gun or from institutions, however in political terms, language, is the most powerful tool available to participants of a soiety. Articulate people have more influence than those who lack a good vocabulary.

As Kingman said in 1988,

“A democratic society needs people who have the linguistic abilities which enable them to discuss, evaluate, and make sense of what they are told, as well as to take effective action on the basis of understanding…………Otherwise there can be no genuine participation, - only the imposition of the ideas of those who are linguistically capable.

All power structures are insidious. Some maintain power is only gained by exercising it. This is at best a half truth. The most effective and enduring power is soft, non-coercive - inspirational. A great leader’s influence can last for eternity.

Aristotle claimed “Dignity does not consist in possessing honours, but in deserving them” which Twain updated to: “It is better to deserve and not have honours than to have them and not deserve them”.

It is in the nature of hard power to ally yourself with other powerful institutions, corporations and governments. Power is intoxicating, but ephemeral. The purpose of power is to accrue and consolidate your power so none can hold you to account. Since the mid-nineties there’s something noxious drifting through the world-wide body politic; the rapid decline of respectable institutions through combination of arrogance, anonymity, unaccountability associated with an air of irresponsibility – grab what you can for yourself and yours; bugger anyone else – self-interest trumps public interest.

Bureaucracies have become so commonplace and ingrained that we seldom question their purpose and authority, yet, according to anthropologist and anarchist, David Graeber, they inform every aspect of our existence – “bureaucracy has become the water in which we swim”. According to Dom Amerena, the best artistic satires occur in Kafka’s The Trial and in Heller’s Catch-22.

Graeber claims bureaucracies derive their power from the veiled threat of state sanctioned violence against non-compliance or even criticism. Some critics suggest that corporations and institutions have become the new evil “robber barons” with no public interest in mind. Some have found symptoms of psychopathy, e.g., the callous disregard for the feelings of other people, the incapacity to appreciate human relationships, the reckless disregard for the safety of others, the deceitfulness (continual lying to deceive for profit), the incapacity to experience guilt, and the failure to conform to social norms and respect the law.

In the 1950’s President Eisenhower was the first to warn us of the subtle incremental dangers of transformative power grabs like the rise of The Military Industrial Complex. Since then multitudes of other powerful bulwark organisations have risen that threaten our democracy by assuming untrammelled power; including, but not limited to: multi-national mining companies, the American Rifle Association, Monsanto, Drug and Medical Supply Companies, the telecommunication industry, the legal/judicial industry.……..

Power in Shakespeare #

Almost all of Shakespeare’s plays deal with the machinations of power either in domestic spheres or larger political arenas.

More @:

https://nebo-lit.com/drama/julius-caesar/julius-caesar-power.html#julius-caesar---power

Power in Orwell #

Orwell uses the device of O’Brien, a seemingly compassionate and understanding man, to reveal to Winston Smith how the party gained control and how it intends to rule forever; the ultimate power trip.

The book O’Brien gives Winston, outlines how the Party got to power legitimately, but then in order to perpetuate permanent power learned from the weaknesses of past totalitarian regimes, like the Medieval Despots, the Catholic Church and the Fascists.

O’Brien admits that the party seeks power for the sake of power, they are not interested in the common good, solely power over people and their minds.

“Power is not a means; it is an end.”

The Party has learned from the past and perfected absolute control over the masses in several ways. Firstly the power is collective; it is not controlled and dependent on one individual but a cabal that will continually renew itself and rule forever. Secondly, it maintains its power through suffering, pain, fear. There is no loyalty except towards the party. All trust between individuals, family members will be destroyed. Parsons is proud that he was dobbed in by his own daughter. People have lost all their rights, dignity and sense of freedom. As O’Brien states:

“if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human- face forever”.

The Party maintains power by destroying the dignity and nobility of humanity. The loss of privacy and politicisation of love and sex, propaganda or thought control through the degradation of language, control of history and distortion of truth, self initiated Terrorism, constant war, diversions such as fake lotteries and cheap beer/Gin, deprivation and Brutality. It learned from past totalitarian regimes not to create martyrs. Before anyone was killed (vaporised) their spirit had to be utterly destroyed. It is the brutal irony that self preservation wins out in the end and Julie and Winston betray each other and Winston can pronounce at the end that “He loved Big Brother” . This becomes the pen-ultimate defeat.

Power - In the Skin of a Lion #

The Bloor Street Viaduct, known as the Bridge, and the Waterworks, are two places where the Proletariat were exploited with poor working conditions and wages while the Bourgeoisie take the credit and reap the rewards. “They were paid one dollar a day.” This quote refers to the dyers who took animal skins and dyed them. This is juxtaposed at the end of the book where Patrick goes to the waterworks and confronts Harris about the workers and he says that the tiles “cost more than half our salaries put together”. Thus the difference between the lowliest and the higher order members of society is shown as the incongruity and disparity of the distribution of wealth.

Power and authority are another way in which the rich are separated from the powerless. Ambrose Small, who represents “bare-knuckled capitalism”, has power because he has the money. This means that he has the ability to control the workers by giving middlemen, such as Harris, the power to control the workers. As Ambrose works through other people, Patrick never suspects that Harris is not the one with the real power and Patrick attempts to attack the upper class through Harris, as Harris says: “You don’t understand Power”.

The Black Lives Matter is a valuable and necessary protest, but misdirected. A flawed concept of power causes many people to misdirect their attacks. The Police are merely the face of power; the real power lies higher up, invisible, invincible and inviolate – a smug court system, complacent mainstream media and anaemic political leaders. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness. —Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

Michael Ondaatje articulates it best:

“He was one of the few in power who had something tangible around him. But those with real power had nothing to show for themselves. They had paper. They didn’t carry a cent. Harris was an amateur in their midst. He had to sell himself every time.” Pg. 241-2

So much of the dispossessor’s energy is misguided in striking out at the façade of power rather than the heart of it.

The faceless rulers gauge the amount of public discontent carefully to maintain control. They know when to placate, appease or compromise so that public anger does not erupt and threaten their power.

Ondaatje writes from the perspective of the unacknowledged drones of society, the voiceless manual labourers who are scarcely regarded by society the rich or history. This derisory attitude is reinforced many times:

“A man is an extension of hammer, drill, flame.” Pg. 26

“In the tenth century, he (Small) liked to say, the price of a greyhound or a hawk was the same as that of a man”.

Harris: ‘You’re as much of the fabric as the aldermen and the millionaires. But you’re among the dwarfs of enterprise who never get accepted or acknowledged’

The puppet show illustrates this aptly. The migrants lack the language and cultural attributes to give them a voice in society. They are frustrated by their lack of power and influence in mainstream society and their only outlet is to ‘bang on the wooden floor as if to plead for help’. Indeed the purpose of the whole novel is to give a voice to the disenfranchised, the ones who did the work but missed out on getting the credit in nation building; the vast number of inarticulate migrants who form the basis of all developing countries. As the front piece claims: ‘Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one.’

It is from a flawed concept of power that causes many people to misdirect their attacks. Patrick believes that Harris and his Waterworks represent the epicentre of power and so he schemes to blow it up to achieve a sense of power, recognition and revenge. He doesn’t realise that Harris is merely the face of power; the real power lies higher up, invisible, invincible and inviolate.

“Earlier Harris had understood why the man had chosen him; he was one of the few in power who had something tangible around him. But those with real power had nothing to show for themselves. They had paper. They didn’t carry a cent. Harris was an amateur in their midst. He had to sell himself every time.” Pg. 241-2

As Harris tries to explain: ‘You’re as much of the fabric as the aldermen and the millionaires. But you’re among the dwarfs of enterprise who never get accepted or acknowledged’

A Marxist reading of the novel is relevant because complex societies are generally built up by the exploitation of cheap labour – sometimes slave, other times factory fodder from helpless migrants, but any single reading is restricted because you need to take a more objective approach to the story, focusing on the elements of power and its distribution through the characters while remaining distant from the characters themselves.

Havel - The Power of the Powerless #

Darius von Guttner Sporzynski Professor of History, Australian Catholic University, writing for The Conversation - Feb. 11, 2026.

When Czech political dissident, playwright and poet Václav Havel wrote The Power of the Powerless in October 1978, he was not offering a manifesto in any conventional political sense. Nor was he outlining a program for opposition or regime change.

Instead, he set out to analyse a distinctive form of domination that did not rely primarily on terror, spectacle or charismatic authority, but on routine compliance and the internalisation of untruth.

His central claim was disarmingly simple.

Systems of coercive power endure not only because of police power or elite control, but because ordinary people participate in them by acting as if they believe what they know to be false. They live, as Havel put it, “within a lie”.

His most famous example was of the greengrocer who displays the slogan “Workers of the world, unite!” – not to express revolutionary zeal but to signal conformity. The sign communicates obedience and a willingness to perform the expected ritual – thus helping to sustain a system whose strength lies in habituation. What matters is not belief, but participation. The slogan functions less as political content than as a social password, marking the bearer as safe and nonthreatening.

Havel’s originality lay in shifting attention away from rulers and institutions towards everyday behaviour. Tyranny, in his account, is not only upheld by party elites or security services, but by countless small acts of acquiescence that create what he described as a “post-totalitarian” order.

Such systems normalise untruth.

Havel’s essay, written nearly 50 years ago, speaks with striking force to the present moment. Across a range of democracies, leaders now display increasingly authoritarian reflexes, while public life is sustained by ritualised language masking the erosion of norms and constrains.

Addressing the World Economic Forum last month, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney invoked Havel’s essay, recalling his example of the greengrocer and his sign.

Carney suggested a contemporary “life within a lie” now operates at the level of the international system, where states perform commitment to rules, reciprocity and shared values as those principles are selectively applied or quietly abandoned. The danger lies less in open rule-breaking than in the collective pretence that the system still functions as advertised.

An ethical challenge

The enduring force of Havel’s essay lies in its re-framing of resistance as responsibility rather than victory. Tyranny is challenged not by seizing power, but by depriving falsehood of its audience. Havels’ target is not a particular regime, but a recurring human temptation: the willingness to trade truth for tranquillity.

In an era marked by strategic intimidation, economic pressure and rhetorical cynicism, Havel’s insistence on moral clarity retains its relevance.

To live in truth remains risky, inconvenient and uncertain in its outcomes. Yet Havel’s claim was never that truth guarantees success. It was that systems built on lies are strong only so long as those lies go unchallenged. Once named, their authority begins to weaken.

In this sense, The Power of the Powerless is less a historical document than an ethical challenge. It asks not who governs, but how individuals participate. It insists that even under conditions of asymmetry, the refusal to perform falsehood constitutes a form of power.

‘Living in truth’

According to Havel’s essay, in “post-totalitarian states”, ideology becomes less a doctrine to be argued over than a language to be performed. In this context, the most destabilising act is not armed rebellion or organised protest, but refusal. When an individual ceases to perform the ritual, he exposes it – revealing the emperor is naked.

From this diagnosis follows Havel’s most enduring concept, “living in truth”. This is not a policy platform or a political strategy in the usual sense. It is an existential stance with political consequences. To live in truth is to align one’s public actions with one’s private conscience, even when doing so carries material cost or social risk.

In a system built on universal pretence, even a modest act of honesty acquires disproportionate force. It disrupts the shared fiction on which authority depends, reminding others that alternatives are conceivable.

Havel’s argument was also deliberately unsettling for audiences outside east-central Europe. “Post-totalitarianism” was not a regional anomaly, but an intensified version of tendencies present in modern mass societies.

Comfort could be purchased at the price of indifference and freedom reduced to private consumption detached from public responsibility. In this sense, The Power of the Powerless was a diagnosis of modernity’s susceptibility to moral outsourcing and quiet complicity.

In modern, mass societies, comfort can be purchased at the price of indifference.

Sceptical of heroics

Havel saw the fall of communism, ultimately becoming the president of both Czechoslovakia (in 1989–92) and of the Czech Republic (1993–2003). He died in 2011.

His essay is often misread as a celebration of heroic dissent or moral exceptionalism. In fact, it is sceptical of heroics. The power of the powerless, he suggests, does not lie in spectacle, numbers or immediate success. It lies in example.

Truth operates politically not because it commands obedience, but because it awakens recognition. It speaks to what Havel described as the “hidden sphere” of social consciousness, the half-suppressed awareness that life organised around falsehood is corrosive and degrading.

This helps explain why Havel dismissed conventional measures of political effectiveness in societies dominated by totalitarian power. Elections, parties and platforms mean little when the public sphere itself has been hollowed out and emptied of genuine contestation.

What matters instead is the slow reconstruction of moral agency.

Independent cultural activity, unofficial networks and samizdat publishing, for instance, were not substitutes for politics, but its necessary groundwork. They preserved spaces in which truth could be spoken without immediate translation into slogans or coercive power.

A contemporary invocation

Carney’s argument at Davos turned on a familiar contradiction. Political leaders, diplomats and institutions speak the language of rules, reciprocity, and shared norms, while tolerating practices that hollow out those norms. Trade regimes are described as rules-based even as economic coercion becomes routine. Security arrangements are framed as collective while asymmetries of power grow more explicit.

The problem, in Havel’s terms, is not simply that rules are broken, but that everyone continues to behave as if they still function as advertised. This collective performance sustains an order that no longer delivers what it promises.

In this reading, the international order begins to resemble Havel’s post-totalitarian system. The slogans differ, but the logic is familiar. Language masks fear, dependency and imbalance. The global greengrocer hangs the sign not because he believes it, but because not hanging it appears too risky.

Carney’s proposed response was not withdrawal or isolation, but a call for what he described as “middle powers” to stop pretending. To live in truth at the level of international politics means acknowledging openly where the system fails, refusing convenient fictions and building coalitions grounded in actual shared interests rather than abstract formulae.

The danger of abstraction

Yet there is a risk that “living in truth” becomes an elevated moral injunction detached from the conditions of everyday life.

Havel’s greengrocer is not a philosopher or an essayist. He is a worker responsible for opening a shop, supplying scarce goods and navigating a collectivised economy. For him, refusal carries immediate and concrete consequences: such as loss of employment, harassment or exclusion.

By contrast, intellectuals such as Havel, writing three decades after the communist takeover, occupied a different position. Their capacity to articulate critique in essays, however restricted the audience, rested on forms of cultural capital and social insulation unavailable to most citizens. Havel understood this tension, but it remains a persistent problem in the reception of his ideas.

The same risk attends contemporary invocations such as Carney’s. Those preoccupied with meeting basic needs, managing precarious employment or coping with rising costs are unlikely to be moved by abstract calls for moral clarity in global governance. For them, the performance of ritual may appear not as cowardice, but as survival.

This does not invalidate Havel’s argument, but complicates its application. Revolutions and transformations do not arise from ideas alone. They occur when ideas intersect with lived experience in ways that make existing arrangements untenable. Havel’s insight acquires political force only when “living in truth’” ceases to sound like moral exhortation and begins to articulate shared grievances and recognisable realities.

The question is not whether truth matters, but how it is made audible to those whose compliance sustains the system in the first place.

In that unresolved tension lies the continuing relevance of The Power of the Powerless. It offers no guarantees, refusing consolation. It insists that participation is never neutral and even the smallest refusal carries ethical weight. Whether that refusal can once again ignite broader change depends on whether truth speaks to the conditions of ordinary life.

Darius von Guttner Sporzynski Professor of History, Australian Catholic University, writing for The Conversation - Feb. 11, 2026.