A Field Guide to Feelings
Power and Powerlessness
When someone exerts power over you, they’ve turned you into a thing. Taken to the extreme, power turns you into a literal thing, a corpse. A step or two short, power turns you into an abstraction, a number, or an instrument with no will or dignity of your own.
When you’re not a thing, you count. You’re human. Your life has meaning and consequence. When you’re a human, you’re an end in yourself, not to be used, worn out, and cast aside. Much of life is not like that. You’re just another number, crushed under the wheels of circumstance without a thought about who you are.
Power, taken to the extreme, will kill; but it doesn’t need to kill to have an effect. Power’s ability to kill, reduce you into an outright thing, hangs over your head, ready to strike at any moment, which is to say, every moment. Power can turn you into an object under its control, into a thing while you’re still alive. It’s not easy to be a thing while you’re still alive. There’s no room for any impulse of your own. You’re a slave and must do the bidding of your master.
Here’s the part that people miss, though: power turns the powerful into things, too. Power may crush the powerless; but it intoxicates the powerful. The truth is, you don’t possess power; power possesses you. The human race is not divided up into the…
