knowledge and power

[Barking_Mad]

Anyone who wants an example of how power affects anyone should have to deal with local bureacrats, tax officers and parking wardens. You don't need to go to the extremes of genocide to see this!!

People stop becoming human beings to those people in certain forms of authority and instead become a statistic. Carl Jung made this point in one of his books where he made the comparison of picking out 20 stones from a river in order to find the average weight of them. Now those 20 stones may average 8.75lbs each, yet in reality its possible that none of those 20 actually weighed that amount at all, nor indeed may any (or more likely the vast majority) of the stones still left in the river - yet the claim maybe made that "The average weight of stones in this river is 8.75lbs". Its a completely arbitary and pointless number.

Now you only have to look how these abstract values are applied applied by the Government/media/science et al, to see that this simply reduces each individuals own personal power and turns us all into an arbitary statistic. As Kyzer said above the ramifications are obvious at first hand experience.

 

[fela fan]

Anyone who wants an example of how power affects anyone should have to deal with local bureacrats, tax officers and parking wardens. You don't need to go to the extremes of genocide to see this!!

Yes. You can add to that immigration and customs officials, fucking wankers that they are.

Power abuse happens even within family homes. It goes on at every level of society. The way to stop it is for the individual to work on themselves to find out what is right or wrong, and have awareness about their actions and the consequences of them.

Such people will not use the power they have at the expense of others. They don't take, they give.

You get them at every level of society too.

 

[fela fan]

Now you only have to look how these abstract values are applied applied by the Government/media/science et al, to see that this simply reduces each individuals own personal power and turns us all into an arbitary statistic. As Kyzer said above the ramifications are obvious at first hand experience.

Not just statistics, convenient labels too. Once you're established as this or that (job, religion, race, politics, gender, and so on), then you no longer have an individuality.

Perhaps power abuse can flourish when we have such departmentalising of people in this manner. Conversely, asserting one's individuality means rejecting power abuses.

 

[haggy]

http://www.colostate.edu/Depts/Speech/rccs/theory54.htm


this has useful stuff on it about foucault's take on power and knowledge. its very convincing in an annoying pomo kind of way.