The Shape of Power

 

“If there is no transformation inside of us, all the structural change in the world will have no impact on our institutions.”
- Peter Block

We’ve believed for centuries that once power falls and the oppressed rise, all will be made right. We imagine a world where everyone sings campfire songs and roasts marshmallows. But that’s not the reality. Let’s look back at recent history - these examples are still fresh. Mussolini, Stalin, Pol Pot... they all rose on the backs of the oppressed, only to become the very tyrants they once fought.

Mussolini rose as a revolutionary socialist, a man of the people, before morphing into the architect of Italian fascism. Stalin took the Soviet dream of worker emancipation and turned it into a machinery of purges, show trials, gulags, and fear. Pol Pot promised power to the peasants but ended up emptying the cities, banning books, and murdering nearly a quarter of Cambodia’s population in pursuit of a purified agrarian utopia. Anyone remember the movie The Killing Fields? I do. I watched it as a teenager, and it hit me hard. That wasn’t just a movie. It was a look at what happens when ideology forgets its soul.

Ideology often makes us forget that we are human. We become so wrapped up in the cause, we lose sight of the basic decency we once fought to preserve.

I was talking to an senior doctor in India - kind, soft-spoken, deeply respected in his community. He helps everyone, charges nothing to the poor, lives modestly. Overall, he’s a good person. We were talking about justice, movements, and power, and I brought up the atrocities Stalin committed - his purges, his terror. At one point, without missing a beat, he said:

“You have to eliminate the weed.”

It struck me. He wasn’t being cruel; it was just said so casually. This wasn’t an act of cruelty; it was the certainty that had permeated his life.

We cheer on mass deportations. We nod along as habeas corpus is quietly dismantled. We tell ourselves: It’s for the greater good. That’s how it starts. Not with cruelty, but with certainty. The same certainty that led to Stalin’s concentration camps.

Let’s move on to a more personal experience. A smaller scale, but no less revealing.

My father worked in a railroad locomotive workshop, which, in the British era, was Asia’s largest. In the 1970s, there was an all-India railway workers' strike, and with it came a kind of fear that crawled into your bones. My father was sacked for striking. We had to leave the railway quarters. For two years, the case dragged through the courts. We depended solely on my mother’s salary and borrowed money from family to buy a modest house in town.

Eventually, through a Supreme Court decision, the striking labor union won. The workers were reinstated, and my father returned to his position. But when he went back, he discovered something unsettling. The local union boss, a man with enough authority to bend things his way, wasn’t showing up for work anymore. Others were punching his timecard. He was collecting a full paycheck, exercising power, and avoiding accountability. My father suspended him. He wasn’t perfect, but he had strong ethics.

The response was swift. Workers staged a sit-in protest, refusing to let him leave his office until he lifted the suspension. But my father refused. “Go ahead,” he said. “Keep picketing. I’ll just sit in my office as long as you want.” He didn’t yell. He didn’t beg. He didn’t moralize. He just sat. Eventually, they lifted the picket. The suspension stood.

Years later, I came across a short science fiction story by Alan E. Nourse called Meeting of the Board. It’s a satire, and eerily, it mirrors real life. In the story, unions take over corporations. The old power structure is gone. Labor runs everything now. But it doesn’t take long before things fall apart. Those who once fought for the workers start protecting their own comfort. Board meetings become just as absurd, corrupt, and performative as they were under capitalist control - just wearing new overalls. The story was written in 1955, but I read it decades later, and it hit like a memory I had forgotten to remember.

Again, I am NOT anti-union. We’re simply exploring the shape of power.

When we say “power corrupts,” we don’t mean the idea of power. We mean the structure of power — which mutates, replicates, and survives, no matter who sits in the chair. Even after a righteous struggle, even after justice is won in court, the same patterns of entitlement, evasion, and protectionism slip right back into place.

I’d genuinely welcome your thoughts — whether you agree or disagree. But if you feel like sharing, I’m especially interested in your personal reflections… how you navigate these questions, if they matter to you. And if this resonates, feel free to share it with others who think or wonder along similar lines.

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What Comes Next

Maybe power just reveals what was already waiting underneath. Or maybe it creates something entirely new -a hunger, a comfort, a forgetting.

And then someone like my father - or someone like José Mujica, who we’ll talk about next - refuses to forget.

They remember the principle.
They remember that power isn’t meant to be held.

That’s where resistance begins. The kind that just sits in the office and waits.