Power is Knowledge: Part II

This is a continuation of the series on the essence of knowledge (epistemology) and its relation to power.

II) The Mystique of Power

Power is knowledge, and power has its mystique. The powerful knows something you do not. We can take as an example the mystique of the bureaucrat. The less you know of them, the more powerful they are. The more arcane their character, the more pointless their rules and regulations; the more removed they are from any logical, rational, tangible reality, the better for them and the worse for you. Their counter-intuitive rules are capable of entrenching themselves into the world of things and beings, until jumping through their hoops becomes an accepted facet of existence. Just by their strength alone (the strength of the State) they can carve themselves into reality.

The know-it-all is the smaller cousin of the bureaucrat. They do not express things for any useful end. They like appearing intelligent as a means of controlling others. They are an expression of power as knowledge – their power does not come from knowing anything, but from the pretention that they have an infinite well of knowledge to draw upon. Such a character, desperate to impress, understands the mystique of power. They are deceitful, epistemological sorcerers, who can produce nothing of value, attain no results, speak not a single truth, and yet still maintain power over others.

The mystique of power is what maintains its position. This is why the powerful present themselves as inevitable, eternal, inheritors of some legitimate reign. Power maintains itself when the powerless have no hope. Power hates imagination, because imagination quickly realizes the mystique. The powerless do not only need to know injustice - knowledge is not power. The powerless need imagination, to lead them to hope, and then to wage war against power, until it is vanquished, and knowledge freed from its tyranny.

III) Knowledge is part of us

Knowledge is not something removed from the whole human being. To think of knowledge as some dis-embodied (distanced from the body), floating, transcendent well of information is to forget that we are biological beings. Knowledge is literally attached to the human being, and this means it is entangled with everything that makes us what we are. For instance, the beliefs of a religious fundamentalist cannot be removed from their personhood, nor separated from their emotions. The two are bound together. Far have they carried their erroneous beliefs with them, a companion through the shift of time; a warm body to hold in the cold, existential night.

Knowledge can also become attached, quite literally, to an authority. For instance, in the patriarchal family unit the father is power and it is this power that allows him to dictate what is and isn't true. He is an embodiment of power; it is conflated with him.

Much of our never-ending journey to enlightenment consists in shedding off false-beliefs, with an occasional shift in world view (or rebirth). But evil (untruth) is literally contained inside of us, and that is why it can never wholly be vanquished. Philosophy can only go so far in equipping us with shields against untruth, and no spiritual fire can wholly scorch away our epistemological sins.

Selim Talat

Power is Knowledge: Part I

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

A poem for skeptics - By Ellese Elliott

A poem for skeptics

No word can depict the manifold

In a single living being

No names can imagine Gold

Nor the phenomena of seeing

No sentence could ever grasp

One's inkling of eternity

No language could describe

The meaning of infinity

Our logic renders us static

When we speak of one we love

We may seek refuge within mathematics

But then threatened by philosophy

All our dreams explained away

By the force of the enlightenment

But our science remains a foetus

In the belly of epistemology

A note on the poem:

Epistemology is the section of philosophy dedicated to thinking about knowledge: What it is and how do we obtain it. Episteme was a type of knowledge which was said to be divine or of the Gods and which only the gods could possess, however Protagorus (a pre-socratic philosopher (before Socrates)) pointed out that we can't know what the Gods know because we cannot know anything about the gods. Since then there has been much debate about what we can know for certain. Many philosophers have concluded we can always play the skeptic. To doubt everything including scientific claims as they rest upon a fallacious logic; for example, just because I observe something 'X' amount of times does not therefore mean it is now a golden rule. This form of reason is called induction and was said to have been founded by Aristotle, Plato's student over 2000 years ago. Even now Philosophers debate what we can know for sure and little has changed. The debate continues and will probably continue for some years to come. 

By Ellese Elliott