The Effects of Power - Part 5 - Resistance to Power
Social Reality: Violence, Power, and Change
The Effects of Power - Part 5 - Resistance to Power
"Never trust in the Power" - charlie777pt
Introduction
The abuse of legitimate Power will always generate Resistance. We must fight and resist against Power.
We must fight the Power that does not think about the human race to reestablish our self-respect."When I heard Edward Snowden's story, it reminded me of my mother in a strange way. She was in the French resistance from early on, 1941. At that time, the Resistance were considered troublemakers - even traitors - in France." - Jean-Michel Jarre
1 - Resistance to Oppression
Resistance is the opposition to Power, that can be informal and clandestine or not, and it can be made by formal organizations.
The used mode of opposition can be expressed in armed dissident groups with an organized strategy to fight the Power, normally clandestine and against the oppression of a dominant group, that can start in revolts or riots, or simply finish a pacific exchange of powers with non-violence.(Example: the radical revolution in Portugal in April, 1974, from 50 years fascism to democracy was made with no blood and flowers in the guns of the soldiers).
Resistance to Power can disrupt in a total refuse of in force authority and its rules, by revealing total insubmission and even incapacity to negotiate or compromise, just because Power has gone too far and turned insupportable because it has passed the limits of the people's tolerance to submit.
Davies in 1969 defined the concept of "relative deprivation", enhancing the aspect that it's not the most explored, oppressed and poor people that revolt against the oppression of power.
In oligarchic systems, dissidence is born inside the cradle of totalitarianism, when social forces can't be stopped and the dissidents can create parallel circuits of collective dissimulated modes of Resistance. "To fight and conquer in all our battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting." - Sun Tzu
Besides that most of the movements today have turned non-violent, but media and governments tend to show it as violent to bring the fear of social change and new ideas to the reconfiguration of actual Power.
When Power gets too concentrated, Resistance will emerge to withstand and allow Social Change, resulting from struggles against overt domination, exploitation, and oppression.
Resistance challenges illegitimate Power, with new philosophical, theoretical and ethical views of the world to force change and become as well a possible future source of Power.
Excessive Power determines the ruler's balance of wealth distribution and the disrespect for freedom and individual right to choose.
The constitutions of countries should prescribe the means by which power is legitimated, accountable, and constrained, where its stability is measured by people's satisfaction and with control over the limits of action by public officials and politicians in office.
The actual Corruption growing with the power concentration is allowing the abuse of politicians that are empowered with a stolen collective will, and are immune to justice.
People in today's society, are being driven by Institutional Power by fear and insecurity and submitting to be ruled by an absolute sovereignty, allowing private surveillance in exchange for the assurance of protection and peace.
" Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." — Edward SnowdenPower today utilize structural, symbolic and cultural violence, using populism and wartime collective mesmerizer, the most demonstrative signs of the mass psychology of fascism, showing the relation between dictatorship, corruption, abuse of power, sadism, perversion, demanding total submission to interiorize and establish conformism.
We must resist the politicians manipulating the structures of the state and the propaganda as a factory of facts, that we make the world more secure by inventing facts that justify the actions of imperialist bombings to stop inexisting "nuclear guns" and "chemical wars".
Trump, May, and Macron want to rule and agglutinate people with the hate and blood of other "enemy" populations, like it happened in Germany with the Third Reich and the Indians in the US, where the militarist/gun power are "little men" with a "big guns in their hands" are threatening to destroy our eco-system to play their games.
"Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively are less free." - Edward SnowdenThe Power of Resistance as always an impact in changing the culture, the ideology and the social patterns of behavior.
"The path of least resistance is the path of the loser." - H. G. Wells
2 - The three States of Power
In my own simplistic theory, Power has three basic forms, the Solid, the Gaseous, and the Liquid States, that can change in this order, correlated with the types in social stability changes like Concentration, Disruption, and Stabilization.
Fascism is the state of Solid concentration of Power, and always one day this power will blow up by disruption, that brings the Gaseous State where Power is like vapor in the air but nobody can hold it.
And then it starts to go to the Liquid State with more distributed clusters of Power, bringing some social stabilization until it gets back to a concentrated Solid rock, and like today it is the "Steel State" that normally precedes Diruption and Chaos.
Because maybe Chaos is the explosion of the concentration of Power, the dark heavy cloud of solid domination caused by a concentration of use and abuse, like the collective repressed emotions busting and breaking the walls of oppression, of the ones that suffer from dependency and control.
This means that when a Solid Power is overthrown and vaporized in the Gaseous State , it will go back again to the cycle of building new forms and configurations of Powers that with crescent stabilization, will go the the Liquid State
The Solid Steel Power today can be seen in increasing social injustice, growing inequalities, blood and traumas of the imperial wars and gun dealers, economic collapse, and political and moral corruption.
"Control needs time like a junky needs junk" - Genesis P-Orridge from the industrial band Throbbing Gristle
3- Fight the Power
The practice of Resistance builds the spread of the awareness for the need for social change, like an antibody, made to combat the infection of power concentration.
"Power in defense of freedom is greater than power in behalf of tyranny and oppression, because power, real power, comes from our conviction which produces action, uncompromising action." - Malcolm XResistance appears in many different shapes like collective and/or individual protests, with anti-confrontation tactics or declared opposition, non-violent refusals to cooperate, e or the creation of alternatives to dissolute the existing ones.
Resistance can be outlined by individuals or groups with the objective of changing our political, social and environmental systems by challenging, subverting, find holes to penetrate its routines, evade or use violent confrontations, and create conditions for the emergence of new powers to change reality and culture.
Resistance can be performed by collective and individual acts, like art, activism, texts, memes, and language, just to mention some of the symbolisms associated to the social movements to re-arrange the dominant misfit power.
Where there is an exercise of excessive power, we must always fight and organize individual and collective combat.
Resistance moves the wheel of change in the House of Power to bring new values changing social life and culture by individual/collective awareness and intervention with activism.
Music is a POWER that can fight the Power
Public Enemy- Fight The Power (Full Version HQ VIDEO)
Last posts in this series on Social Reality: Violence, Power and Change
Introduction:
Social Reality: Violence, Power and Change A - Violence:
An Introduction to ViolenceThe Concepts of Violence, Aggression, and Aggressiveness
The Theories on Violence
The influencers of Violence -Part One - Culture and Social Context
The influencers of Violence -Part Two - Social , Cognitive and Environmental Factors
The ascend of Today's Violence
B -Power:
What is Power? - Introduction
The Nature of Power The Dynamics of Power:
- Part 1 - The Legitimacy of Authority
- Part 2 - The Models of Leadership
- Part 3 - Characteristics of Leadership
- Part 4 - The Relation in Leadership
- Part 5 - Decision-making and Leadership
- Part 1- Philosophical Rally on the Matrix of Power
- Part 2 - Deprivation
- Part 3- Submission
- Part 4- Corruption
- Part 5 - Resistance - this post
Articles from the next series of posts about Social Reality, Violence, Power and Change:
- Part 6 - Power in Cyberspace and Conclusions
C - Change:
Change and CultureThe Theories and conceptualization of Change
Factors determining Change
The Ways of Change
Social Change
This was a great series. Perhaps you should take your articles together and make a DBook out of it?
"Resistance is the opposition to Power, that can be informal and clandestine"
The "clandestine" is very interesting and true to the point. From my experience, resistance starts with the WILLINGNESS to change something. Before we take the corresponding action, nobody might see that we are actually developing resistance, hence clandestine. Great word selection!
Your state of matter theory ( solid, liquid, gaseous ) is brilliant. No teaching book at school or University will be so creative yet to the point.
Thanks a lot, for the suggestion, because I want to pass this important messages to expand the people's ability to understand how their lives are being manufactured and impacted by the actual concentration of power.
Since I was a kid I was always fascinated by the people that belonged to all the Resistances in Europe during the War and read all the books I could about this.
How can this people totally risk their lives for the collective freedom?
Well, the first time I saw this phenomenon of power as an energy , I was around a group of people changing color from black to white during a group session of LSD(more than 35 years ago), and I later interpreted that it was the Power of the egos being diluted, because, in the end, everybody was white, but soon our ego will get Solid again.
So the anxious waiting for the trip to come up, when it starts everybody is black and trying to solve the Solid power of the prison of the Ego, but after there is an explosion of light which is the Gaseous state(sense of some chaos to control us), after the middle of the trip, reality gets more Liquid and stabilized, and in the end we go back to the solid prison of our ego's Power(but relaxed because we have seen our darkness).
Later reading about power I saw that the process was the same in social reality, like Power being the "Ego of Reality."
And I related it to state I saw in 1974/75 after the fall of fascism in Portugal and its African colonies.
We have to be eternally curious and question reality as fundamental knowledge for survival.
keep it up @charlie777pt ......
Resistance has too many ways
But it must be peaceful
I do not like violence and I hate violence
Really great article