Edward E. Wilson

The Political situation isn’t a matter of loss of freedom but of loss of power.

Thinking about it in terms of power rather than freedom does not change much in the experience but a lot in the avenues of response. Power is a percentage. Simply put it is the percentage of influence that a single participant, be it a person or a corporation, has over the outcome of the situation. Given the infinitesimal amount power held by individuals in modern societies, even tiny improvements could lead to great changes in the experienced power of a person or group.

There are always multiple avenues for power to be expressed. If we are losing power in one we can shift focus to another. More importantly we can leverage our power from one to improve our power in another. This is what the corporate elite have been doing for decades. They’ve used their concentrated wealth power to gain control of media’s reality framing power to disempower us and gain control of the political power.

If we want to empower ourselves we have to work on these three fronts and work to sever the corporatists ability to leverage their financial power over the other two fronts. Thanks to the internet, the media and communications realm is the one in which we have the most opportunities for power. The strategies of the corporations, centralization of their power and separation of the population into individuals is perhaps one of the best strategies that we could take. Division for the corporate power blocks and concentration of popular power.

If we wish to enact this strategy in the political realm we need to rally behind the only slogan that matters at the moment, “Power to the People.” We need to remember that the mainstream media is owned by the same corporate interests that have taken our power so we need to ignore their attempts to create wedge issues. Wedge issues are merely how the corporate elite divides and conquers the public. After people have more say in the running of their countries then we can work out the other issues.