By Jonathan Cook
February 24, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - If one thing drives me to write, especially these
blog posts, it is the urgent need for us to start
understanding power. Power is the force that shapes
almost everything about our lives and our deaths.
There is no more important issue. Understanding
power and overcoming it through that
understanding is the only path to liberation we
can take as individuals, as societies, and as a
species.
Which is why it should be simply
astonishing that no one in the media, supposedly a
free marketplace of ideas, ever directly addresses
matters of power beyond the shadow play of party
politics and celebrity scandals.
And yet, of course, the lack of interest in
analysing and understanding power is not surprising
at all. Because the corporate media is the key
tool or seen another way, the central expression
of power.
Very obviously the main concern of power is the
ability to conceal itself. Its exposure as power
weakens it, by definition. Once exposed, power faces
questions about its legitimacy, its methods, its
purposes. Power does not want to be seen, it does
not want to be confined, it does not want to be held
accountable. It wants absolute freedom to reproduce
itself, and ideally to amass more power.
That is why true power makes itself as invisible
and as inscrutable as it can. Like a mushroom, power
can grow only in darkness. That is why it is the
hardest thing to write about in ways that are
intelligible to those under its spell, which is most
of us, most of the time. Because power coopts
language, words are inadequate to the task of
describing the story of real power.
Ripples on the surface
Notice I refer to power, not the
powerful, because power should be understood
more as an idea made flesh, an ideological matrix of
structures, a way of understanding the world, than a
set of people or a cabal. It has its own logic
separate from the people who are considered
powerful. Yes, politicians, celebrities, royalty,
bankers and CEOs are part of its physical
expression. But they are not power, precisely
because those individuals are visible. The very
visibility of their power makes them vulnerable and
potentially expendable the very opposite of power.
The current predicaments of Prince Andrew in
Britain or Harvey Weinstein in the US are
illustrative of the vagaries of being powerful,
while telling us little meaningful about power
itself. Conversely, there is a truth in the
self-serving story of those in power the
corporate executives of an Exxon or a BP who note
on the rare occasions when they face a little
scrutiny that if they refused to do their jobs, to
oversee the destruction of the planet, someone else
would quickly step in to fill their shoes.
Rather than thinking in terms of individuals,
power is better visualised as the deep waters of a
lake, while the powerful are simply the ripples on
the surface. The ripples come and go, but the vast
body of water below remains untouched.
Superficially, the means by which power conceals
itself is through stories. Its needs narratives
mainly about those who appear powerful to create
political and social dramas that distract us from
thinking about deep power. But more fundamentally
still, power depends on ideology. Ideology cloaks
power in a real sense, it is power
because it is the source of powers invisibility.
