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the Mexican revolutionary, Emiliano Zapata, once exclaimed:
‘I rather die on my feet than live upon my knees.’
We need to consider, the people who drag us from our knees to
our feet, the catalysts who represent the fight for society’s
empowerment. Before, we looked at Galileo Galilei and Mohamed
Bouazizi, the tales of successful individuals who ignited society’s
battle for power against an overwhelming authority. What do we do
then if our revolutionary never surfaces? What happens to the
individuals who tried to grasp power and failed? Maybe they were
wiped from the world, permanently silenced, or more disturbingly,
maybe they never existed at all. Under the power of authority, the
rulers often strive to maintain their control by stifling the desire or
thought of power amongst the population. Soon, citizens are either
too afraid to consider rebellion, or too ignorant to consider that they
might be able to live free of oppression. Referring again to Orwell’s
novel 1984, the Party’s central mantra is to rule society completely
and utterly by controlling their thoughts and beliefs, ultimately
utilising their power to
suppress
the possibility of inner and ideological
conflict. Thoughtcrime, classed as the most heretical and heinous
crime, is at its core the Party’s means of ensuring that nobody can
even fathom the idea of anyone possessing power other than the
Party. Through Big Brother’s reign, the Party strips the citizens of
Oceania of nearly all forms of power, including knowledge, freedom
of speech, and even individuality. Subsequently, sometimes two plus
two has to equal five, because as the powerless, we have no reason or
footing to say otherwise. Without power, we become ignorant,
submissive, and too terrified to start conflict, but if we are all so
repressed, then how can we rely on anybody to protest for our power?
Many of our conflicts revolve around the notion of power, because
many of us desire and essentially need power to maintain basic
control over our lives. As humans, we crave a sense of awareness and
control, because when forces try to remove these powers, they also
rob us of what it is to be individual and intrinsically human. Often,
we need to struggle, to withstand the ramifications of conflict for
the sake of power, because as American psychoanalyst Esther
Harding once asserted, ‘
Conflict is the beginning of consciousness
.’
‘
The Fight
For Power
12