As Eric Liu begins in ‘How To Understand Power,’ we all move, each and every day, through systems and structures and guidelines—systems of power—that we’re not always fully in control of:
At first, this may seem a bit depressing, or, perhaps, even like a down-right lie: who is Liu to question? Who is he to say we do not wield full agency over our lives? But, as he notes, power isn’t really so much a question of ‘good’ or ‘bad’—it’s a force, an element of life, akin to fire or physics. The evaluation of power lies in how it’s deployed—what ends it achieves—rather than just some presumed, inherently negative ‘thing.’ It is a system of power, after all, which protects me from getting decked in the face every time I leave my apartment; it is, likewise, that very same system of power which suppressed my right to publicly love who I wanted to love in decades and centuries prior. …