A well known saying runs thus: Knowledge is power. Whoever has the most knowledge has the ability to exert power over those with less knowledge. In war, the military with greater intelligence can deploy its forces most effectively. A marketing firm can predict what customers will want and tailor their message to manipulate them. A government can keep state secrets where it is in their interests to do so.
This all seems rather straight-forward and obvious. Accumulating knowledge allows an individual or institution to stand on a vantage point and control others. However there is one flaw in the maxim that knowledge is power. And that is the deeply philosophical question of 'what is knowledge?'
Knowledge is not just a fact about the universe. For instance, there are not a hundred trees in that small wood. With language we create the concept of a small wood and categorize the trees as belonging to it. But those trees are just there - they do not add up to a hundred unless you count them first so. You will only make them do so if there is a reason for you to do so. Once you have that reason, the hundred trees in the small wood become knowledge.
Knowledge consists of justified facts about something useful to human interests. On a large scale, what is useful to interests is ultimately determined by power; the most powerful of all being the ones who influence the narrative we all live in. For that is all human reality is, a narrative we grow accustomed to. It is a fiction, and if you dig deeply enough you will discover that nobody really knows anything - other than their story.
An obvious example of this is the creation of false Gods throughout history. A power group in days of yore developed this idea of God and made him the ultimate source of all knowledge. Thereafter, all ideas of what were or not were not true knowledge were compared to this God.
What is knowledge, what information is ultimately useful to us, is determined by the power paradigm of the age. It is not the case that human beings looked out into the world, gained knowledge, and then managed to impose their power on others. Power defined what useful knowledge was, and then they wrestled for control of it. This is not just to say, whatever the King says is true is true. Knowledge still has to be justified with evidence. Only, what knowledge we actually seek, and to what end we use our knowledge, is determined by the power structure we live within. This does not mean it is in the control of a secret cabal of human rulers, only that the chaotic juggernauts of power in the human world; what we call States, determines the ends of our accumulated knowledge.
It is only because of the endless power struggle gripping every human era that we are left with the sorry maxim: power is knowledge. In the post-power age to come, knowledge will become power, and knowledge will reign supreme.
Selim Talat
