Power #1
Power has never possessed a stable ontology, because every attempt to define it immediately reveals not an essence but a topology of relations, an unstable geometry of permissions, coercions, recognitions, fears, symbolic inscriptions, economic asymmetries, inherited violence, linguistic conditioning, technological mediation, and ritualised obedience, all of which mutate according to historical density, material scarcity, mythological imagination, and institutional complexity, such that what one civilisation names authority another names oppression, what one era names legitimacy another era names barbarism, and what one subject experiences as protection another experiences as suffocation.
The liberal imagination reduced power to governance and law because it required a fiction of neutrality through which bourgeois stability could masquerade as civilisation itself, while monarchic structures anchored power in divine transcendence, fascist structures aestheticised it through spectacle and sacred blood, neoliberal structures dissolved it into algorithmic management and financial abstraction, and digital capitalism fragmented it even further into invisible architectures of behavioural prediction where domination no longer requires visible force because desire itself becomes preformatted before consciousness even recognises its own movements.
Michel Foucault already perceived that power could not be localised in sovereign command alone, because disciplinary society had dispersed coercion throughout schools, prisons, hospitals, factories, psychiatric institutions, bureaucratic procedures, linguistic taxonomies, sexual categories, and medical diagnostics, yet even this analysis now appears historically incomplete because contemporary infrastructures have transformed power into something post disciplinary and ambient, a planetary atmospheric condition operating through data extraction, predictive systems, recommendation engines, emotional modulation, precarity economics, biometric normalisation, and perpetual self exposition, where the individual internalises surveillance not as oppression but as participation.
The ancient fantasy according to which power belongs to kings or presidents survives only because modern societies require symbolic condensation points through which systemic complexity may become psychologically tolerable, although actual operational power increasingly resides in transnational financial systems, supply chain logistics, energy infrastructures, machine learning architectures, military industrial interoperability, pharmaceutical monopolies, cloud computation, and narrative manufacturing networks that possess neither face nor accountable centre, producing a civilisation where citizens continue arguing about elected personalities while their existential conditions are shaped elsewhere by mechanisms too abstract to emotionally perceive and too technically complex to democratically contest.
Even resistance itself becomes contaminated by the ontology of power it claims to oppose, because revolutionary movements often reproduce the exact metaphysical assumptions of domination through inverted hierarchies, purified moral vocabularies, sacrificial identity performances, and authoritarian desires concealed beneath emancipatory rhetoric, which explains why so many revolutions eventually regenerate structures of control almost identical to those they destroyed, differing only in symbolic aesthetics while preserving the deeper architecture of obedience, extraction, and coercive legitimacy.
In Buddhist philosophy, particularly within the Madhyamaka / मध्यमक (Middle Way) analysis articulated by , no phenomenon possesses svabhāva / स्वभाव (inherent self existence), and therefore power too cannot possess independent essence because it emerges only through dependent origination, pratītyasamutpāda / प्रतीत्यसमुत्पाद (interdependent co arising), meaning that ruler and ruled, oppressor and oppressed, authority and submission, are co generated conditions within a relational field rather than metaphysically isolated entities, yet this insight becomes politically explosive because it reveals that power survives not merely through external violence but through collective ontological participation in the very symbolic realities that sustain hierarchy.
The capitalist world system depends absolutely upon the concealment of this instability, because private property, wealth accumulation, border legitimacy, wage labour, and class stratification require power to appear natural, rational, inevitable, and morally justified, whereas in reality these formations persist only through continuous narrative reproduction backed by institutional force and cultural repetition, which is precisely why dominant systems invest extraordinary resources into education, media, entertainment, religion, advertising, and digital behavioural conditioning, since the greatest form of power is not physical coercion but epistemological occupation, namely the capacity to determine which realities are perceivable, which desires are legitimate, which futures are imaginable, and which forms of suffering become socially invisible.
Even spirituality is not immune from this fracture, because religions have historically oscillated between liberation and domination, between mystical dissolution of egoic hierarchy and rigid institutional control, between contemplative emancipation and empire legitimisation, such that monasteries, churches, temples, and spiritual movements may simultaneously function as sanctuaries against capitalist alienation and as instruments for reproducing obedience, purity structures, patriarchal authority, and metaphysical submission, thereby demonstrating once more that power cannot be stabilised into moral binaries since every structure capable of protecting life is equally capable of organising violence.
The contemporary crisis emerges because digital hyperconnectivity has exposed too many contradictory power ontologies simultaneously, causing civilisation itself to enter epistemic fragmentation, where state authority competes against influencer charisma, algorithmic visibility, corporate governance, decentralised networks, identity coalitions, financial oligarchies, machine intelligence, religious resurgence, and memetic warfare, none of which possesses sufficient legitimacy to fully stabilise collective reality anymore, producing populations psychologically exhausted by competing truth systems and therefore increasingly vulnerable either to authoritarian simplification or nihilistic withdrawal.
What collapses first under such conditions is not government but meaning itself, because once power loses ontological coherence, every institution begins revealing its theatrical dimension, every ritual of legitimacy starts appearing contingent, every law exposes its historical arbitrariness, every hierarchy reveals its dependence upon collective belief, and every civilisation discloses the terrifying possibility that beneath centuries of architecture, ideology, military force, and economic expansion there may never have existed a stable foundation at all, but only recursive agreements suspended above managed fear, inherited myth, and organised violence, endlessly re encoded through language, memory, spectacle, and exhaustion, while new configurations already emerge within the fractures left by the old ones, neither fully visible nor fully nameable, moving laterally through the ruins of certainty itself.
The modern subject continues speaking about power as though it were an object possessed by identifiable actors because the human nervous system evolved within scales of perception where causality remained visible, local, embodied, and temporally immediate, whereas contemporary civilisation operates through distributed abstraction layers so immense that no individual consciousness can fully map them, thereby producing a catastrophic mismatch between biological cognition and planetary systems, with the consequence that populations increasingly interpret structural violence through personalised narratives, scapegoated enemies, celebrity figures, electoral dramas, and moralistic simplifications, despite the fact that the actual mechanics determining survival probabilities, economic precarity, psychological fragmentation, ecological collapse, and informational conditioning emerge from nonlinear interactions among infrastructures whose operational scales exceed ordinary human intuitions of agency itself.
This explains why contemporary political discourse appears simultaneously hysterical and impotent, because citizens sense the existence of overwhelming power while remaining incapable of accurately locating it, resulting in a civilisation trapped between paranoia and helplessness, where every ideological camp constructs symbolic enemies to compensate for the unbearable opacity of systemic complexity, while the deeper architectures of extraction continue functioning almost uninterrupted beneath the spectacle of cultural conflict, electoral ritual, media outrage cycles, and algorithmically amplified tribal antagonism designed less to persuade than to perpetually fragment collective cognition into emotionally reactive micro realities incapable of coherent structural analysis.
The very language through which power is discussed has already been colonised by power, because vocabulary itself is never neutral but emerges historically from institutions seeking to stabilise specific forms of social organisation, meaning that words such as freedom, democracy, security, productivity, professionalism, citizenship, merit, criminality, success, and even sanity operate not merely descriptively but normatively, encoding invisible assumptions about acceptable behaviour, legitimate aspirations, temporal discipline, bodily regulation, emotional expression, and economic participation, such that entire populations unconsciously reproduce ideological frameworks through ordinary speech long before explicit political positions are ever articulated.
Under capitalism this linguistic occupation becomes totalising because market logic gradually transforms all human relations into transactional categories, converting friendship into networking, contemplation into optimisation, education into credential acquisition, creativity into monetisable branding, intimacy into performative desirability, and spirituality into consumable self enhancement, thereby dissolving qualitative dimensions of existence into quantifiable exchange metrics whose apparent neutrality conceals profoundly political decisions regarding what forms of life deserve visibility, reward, legitimacy, or survival within the social field.
Even the body itself becomes an arena where ontological instability manifests, because power no longer merely disciplines external behaviour but increasingly intervenes directly into biological rhythms, hormonal regulation, sleep cycles, attention spans, emotional states, reproductive capacities, dietary habits, and neurochemical modulation, while pharmaceutical industries, advertising systems, fitness cultures, beauty standards, biometric technologies, and social media platforms continuously redefine the boundaries between health and pathology, enhancement and deficiency, authenticity and performance, until the individual subject experiences embodiment not as immediate lived presence but as an endlessly managed project requiring perpetual calibration against external metrics of value and visibility.
The ancient distinction between internal and external domination therefore begins dissolving, because surveillance has migrated inward into self monitoring consciousness itself, producing individuals who voluntarily expose, quantify, optimise, censor, and market their own identities without requiring overt coercion, while digital platforms transform psychological expression into extractable behavioural data whose predictive utility generates enormous concentrations of economic and political influence inaccessible to democratic accountability, meaning that power increasingly operates through anticipatory modulation rather than retrospective punishment, shaping probabilities before choices fully crystallise into awareness.
This transformation carries immense metaphysical implications because it destabilises the Enlightenment conception of autonomous subjectivity upon which liberal democracies were theoretically constructed, revealing instead that identity, desire, memory, belief, and perception emerge within technologically mediated environments saturated by invisible feedback systems capable of continuously influencing emotional orientation and cognitive framing, such that the individual self appears less as sovereign interiority than as a temporary convergence point within overlapping informational ecologies whose dynamics remain largely opaque to conscious introspection.
Within Buddhist analysis this corresponds with the doctrine of anattā / अनत्ता (non self), although contemporary technocapitalism weaponises fragmentation rather than liberating through it, because whereas contemplative traditions dissolve egoic solidity in order to reduce attachment and suffering, digital systems dissolve coherence in order to increase manipulability, dependency, compulsive engagement, and economic extraction, producing subjects simultaneously hyper stimulated and existentially hollow, permanently connected yet increasingly incapable of sustained attention, reflective silence, or collective solidarity.
Power therefore ceases to resemble command and increasingly resembles environmental design, atmospheric conditioning, probabilistic architecture, and ontological engineering, operating through subtle manipulations of context rather than explicit prohibition, which is why contemporary domination often feels strangely immaterial despite generating immense material suffering, since populations rarely encounter visible tyrants yet nevertheless experience chronic exhaustion, anxiety, precarity, loneliness, debt dependence, ecological grief, informational overload, and psychological disintegration without being able to clearly identify the mechanisms producing these conditions.
The crisis intensifies because artificial intelligence introduces forms of epistemic asymmetry unprecedented in human history, where computational systems trained upon planetary scale behavioural datasets acquire capacities for prediction, persuasion, optimisation, surveillance, and symbolic generation that vastly exceed ordinary human interpretive abilities, while ownership of these systems remains concentrated within corporate and military infrastructures structurally incentivised toward profit maximisation, geopolitical dominance, and behavioural control, thereby creating conditions under which power may increasingly operate beyond the threshold of human comprehensibility itself.
Civilisation consequently approaches a threshold where traditional categories such as ruler, citizen, institution, ideology, law, and even resistance may no longer adequately describe the actual dynamics shaping collective existence, because the field has become too distributed, recursive, technologically mediated, and ontologically unstable for inherited political vocabularies to maintain explanatory coherence, while populations educated within obsolete conceptual frameworks continue searching for singular causes and identifiable authorities inside systems whose operations increasingly resemble self reproducing cybernetic ecologies rather than classical hierarchical structures.
What emerges from this fracture is not liberation but vertigo, because once every definition of power dissolves into relational instability, the human desire for certainty becomes vulnerable to increasingly extreme forms of simplification, mythic restoration fantasies, authoritarian nostalgia, digital cult formation, and violent identity consolidation, all of which promise ontological clarity precisely at the historical moment when reality itself becomes irreducibly multipolar, fluid, fragmented, and recursively mediated across scales of technological, ecological, psychological, and symbolic interaction still unfolding beyond the conceptual horizon of existing civilisation.
The longing for absolute authority emerges most violently precisely when the ontology of power disintegrates, because populations subjected to accelerating instability, informational saturation, economic precarity, ecological anxiety, and symbolic fragmentation begin craving not freedom in any meaningful philosophical sense but cognitive relief from ambiguity itself, which explains why authoritarian movements repeatedly arise not merely from ideological conviction but from exhausted nervous systems seeking reduction, simplification, certainty, and the restoration of stable metaphysical coordinates within environments perceived as intolerably fluid and psychologically uninhabitable.
This is why fascism historically presents itself not as complexity but as purification, not as distributed systemic analysis but as emotional condensation around race, nation, blood, religion, masculinity, border, tradition, and sacred violence, because fragmented societies become susceptible to narratives capable of converting structural contradictions into morally legible enemies, thereby transforming diffuse anxiety into directed hatred while simultaneously reconstructing collective identity through ritualised belonging and mythological coherence, even though the actual material crises generating instability continue unresolved beneath the symbolic theatre of unity and purification.
Yet liberalism, despite presenting itself as the antidote to authoritarianism, remains structurally incapable of addressing the deeper ontological crisis because it still depends upon Enlightenment assumptions regarding rational individuals, transparent institutions, neutral law, objective information, and consensual reality formation, all of which become increasingly untenable within digitally mediated environments where perception itself is algorithmically fragmented, economic inequality undermines democratic participation, and information ecosystems operate through engagement maximisation rather than epistemic integrity, causing liberal societies to defend procedural form while substantive legitimacy steadily erodes underneath them.
The contradiction intensifies because contemporary capitalism simultaneously requires and destroys stable identity structures, since markets depend upon predictable consumer categories, disciplined labour behaviour, and reproducible aspiration patterns, while perpetual innovation, technological disruption, financial acceleration, and globalised competition continuously dissolve inherited cultural frameworks, communal continuity, intergenerational coherence, and existential meaning, producing populations existentially uprooted yet economically compelled to interpret their own fragmentation as personal failure rather than systemic consequence.
Within such conditions the distinction between domination and participation becomes increasingly impossible to stabilise, because subjects are not merely oppressed by systems external to themselves but actively reproduce those systems through everyday desires, aspirations, anxieties, consumption habits, digital behaviours, and symbolic investments, meaning that power circulates through pleasure as much as coercion, through aspiration as much as punishment, through voluntary identification as much as imposed obedience, thereby rendering simplistic revolutionary narratives psychologically inadequate since there exists no pure exterior position untouched by the infrastructures one seeks to oppose.
This was already visible in Guy Debord’s analysis of the spectacle, where social relations become mediated through images and representations detached from lived reality, although contemporary conditions have intensified this process beyond anything twentieth century theorists could fully anticipate, because digital platforms no longer merely represent experience but actively structure perception itself through algorithmic filtration, emotional amplification, and behavioural feedback loops that recursively reshape collective attention, memory formation, emotional intensity, and symbolic salience on a planetary scale, creating civilisational conditions where reality increasingly competes against its own simulations for cognitive legitimacy.
Under these circumstances political identity becomes performative theatre rather than transformative praxis, because visibility replaces material organisation, symbolic alignment replaces structural intervention, and outrage replaces analysis, allowing capitalist systems to metabolise dissent itself into profitable engagement metrics while preserving the underlying architectures of extraction, surveillance, ecological destruction, and wealth concentration, such that rebellion increasingly functions as aesthetic variation within the system rather than genuine existential threat against it.
Even critiques of power become vulnerable to commodification, because academic discourse, radical aesthetics, countercultural symbolism, mindfulness practices, therapeutic language, ecological consciousness, and revolutionary imagery may all be absorbed into market circulation as lifestyle identities purchasable through consumption rather than enacted through material transformation, thereby generating a civilisation where resistance risks becoming another mode of self branding within digital attention economies governed by the very structures being criticised.
The crisis therefore penetrates consciousness at extraordinary depth because individuals increasingly experience themselves as divided across incompatible ontological registers, simultaneously understanding the destructiveness of capitalist hyperconsumption while remaining materially dependent upon it, simultaneously recognising the manipulative dimensions of digital infrastructures while psychologically attached to them, simultaneously desiring authentic community while operating through competitive individualism, simultaneously seeking freedom while fearing the instability that genuine liberation would entail, resulting in profound existential dissonance concealed beneath ordinary routines of work, entertainment, communication, and social performance.
From the perspective of dependent origination, pratītyasamutpāda / प्रतीत्यसमुत्पाद (interdependent co arising), this fragmentation is not accidental but structurally inevitable within systems organised around perpetual expansion, because capitalism cannot stabilise meaning without limiting accumulation, yet cannot limit accumulation without destabilising itself, forcing civilisation into an accelerating cycle where technological development continuously outpaces ethical adaptation, symbolic coherence, ecological sustainability, and psychological integration, thereby generating societies materially sophisticated yet spiritually disoriented, informationally connected yet existentially atomised.
Artificial intelligence intensifies this fracture because it externalises cognitive processes previously associated with human uniqueness, thereby destabilising inherited assumptions regarding creativity, labour, authorship, expertise, and even consciousness itself, while simultaneously concentrating immense infrastructural power within entities possessing computational resources inaccessible to ordinary populations, creating asymmetries not merely of wealth but of epistemic capacity, predictive modelling, and symbolic influence so extreme that democratic frameworks developed during industrial modernity may become increasingly incapable of regulating the systems now shaping collective existence.
The mythology according to which technology is neutral collapses under scrutiny because every technological system embodies implicit political assumptions regarding efficiency, visibility, optimisation, hierarchy, accessibility, ownership, temporality, and acceptable forms of human behaviour, meaning that infrastructures are never passive tools but active ontological environments shaping cognition, desire, embodiment, and social organisation long before explicit ideological discourse intervenes, which is why the struggle over technological architecture increasingly constitutes the struggle over reality production itself.
Power thus reveals itself not as a possession but as a metastable field of recursive conditioning operating simultaneously through matter, language, emotion, infrastructure, memory, desire, mythology, code, labour, and perception, with no stable centre and no final essence, while civilisation continues attempting to narrate this fluidity through obsolete categories inherited from earlier epochs whose metaphysical assumptions no longer correspond to the distributed complexity of planetary technocapitalist systems now reorganising human existence at scales both microscopic and civilisational, opening fractures through which entirely new configurations of domination, consciousness, resistance, and post human subjectivity are already beginning to emerge without yet possessing names adequate to their own becoming.