power
“If power were never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but to say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it? What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression.”
- Michel Foucault, Power / Knowledge (ed. Colin Gordon), taken from Food, Beauty, Mind (PhilosophyTube)
How horrible would it be to have power and lord it over others? But on the other hand, how horrible would it be to have power and not use it for the betterment of the world? Of course, those who use their power should constantly challenge themselves on how they are using it.
