On Power

The currency of existence.

A mother nurses her child in morning light, the sun casting bifurcated shadows of nurse and soldier—three different reserves of power: 'ability' in one entity, courtesy of Nano Banana.

Introduction

We speak of power constantly—in politics, in relationships, in boardrooms and on battlefields—yet we consistently mistake its shadow for its substance. We conflate power with dominance, with control, with the crude ability to bend others to one’s will. But what if this understanding is a profound, and costly, reduction? What if power is not something we have, but something we are—the very currency of being itself? Imagine power not as a weapon, but as the fundamental currency of existence itself: the latent 'ability' present in a seed, a star, a thought, or a society, forever in action to transform itself into something other than what it is. This is not a minor semantic shift. It is a tectonic realignment of how we understand power, from the subatomic to the social. To explore this, we must leave behind the narrow corridors of political theory and enter the open field of ontology, guided by a radical new framework: the Gospel of Being, which reveals that:

All existence is a conference of difference, a 'condition of bearing together' transforming the 'condition of bearing apart'.^[1]

Historical interpretations of power

The human story of power begins not with kings, but with a deep, primal hunger to make sense of a seemingly capricious world. In the ancient Vedic traditions, this hunger was answered with the concept of the dynamic, creative power of the cosmos (shakti), often envisioned as a goddess. Here, power was not external force but internal, divine energy, the very pulse of reality that an individual could cultivate through yoga and discipline to achieve liberation (moksha). This inward turn established a potent theme: power as something to be aligned with—not seized. Around the same time, but across the Himalayas, Chinese philosophers were wrestling with a similar problem from the opposite direction. For Laozi and the Daoists, the ultimate power (de) was effortless. It emerged not from striving, but from perfect alignment with the way of nature, the Dao. To wield power was to be like water, flowing around obstacles by following the path of least resistance. Confucius, however, heard a different calling. For him, the chaos of the human world required a different kind of power: moral authority derived from virtue, ritual and social harmony. Power was relational and ethical, a force that stabilized society through exemplary conduct.

This tension—between power as internal alignment and power as external, moral order—would erupt centuries later in a stark, amoral form in the warring states of China. The Legalists, like Han Fei, dismissed Confucian virtue as a fairy tale. For them, power (勢,Shi) was purely positional and mechanistic, maintained through a clear system of laws and brutal, predictable punishments. The ruler’s power was a function of his institution, not his character. This cold, instrumental view finds a distant echo in the Mediterranean world with Thucydides, who observed in the Melian Dialogue that 'the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must'.^[2] Yet, even as this realist thread was being spun, Greek philosophers were digging toward a more foundational layer. Aristotle introduced a distinction that would echo for millennia: dunamis (potentiality) and energeia (actuality). For Aristotle, a thing’s power was its inherent capacity to become what it was meant to be—the oak within the acorn. Power was teleological, tied to purpose and form.

The medieval Christian synthesis attempted to baptize these classical ideas into a divine hierarchy. Power (potestas) was a gift from God, flowing downward from the sovereign through a great chain of being. All human power was derivative, contingent, and perilously corruptible. This framework held until the Renaissance, when Niccolò Machiavelli, with the cool eye of a pathologist, dissected it. In The Prince, he separated the effectiveness of power from its morality. The successful ruler needed virtu—not moral virtue, but the skill and force of will to master fortune (fortuna).

And you have to understand this, that a prince, especially a new one, cannot observe all those things for which men are esteemed, being often forced, in order to maintain the state, to act contrary to fidelity, friendship, humanity, and religion.^[3]

Machiavelli’s infamous proposition was to treat power as a technical problem, a move that both horrified and secretly informed the modern world.

The social contract theorists of the 17th century, like Thomas Hobbes, inherited a world seemingly torn apart by competing powers. His solution was to centralize it absolutely. In the state of nature, life was 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short', a war of all against all driven by a relentless human power-seeking.^[4] The only escape was for individuals to collectively surrender their natural power to a sovereign Leviathan, creating an artificial but absolute power to secure peace. Here, power was finally conceived as a sovereign possession, a quantifiable resource to be transferred and held—a vision that would underpin the modern nation-state.

Then came Friedrich Nietzsche, who with a philosopher’s hammer, shattered this entire edifice. For Nietzsche, power was not a resource to be traded or a right to be granted. It was the will to power, the fundamental, driving force of all life, a ceaseless striving for expansion, creation, and self-overcoming. He saw in nature an omnipotent impulse toward art, in the theoretical man a Socratic love of knowledge, and in the pessimism of strength a predilection for life's terrible and problematic aspects.^[5] This was power stripped of all transcendental justification, reduced to its raw, biological, and spiritual impulse. It was an exhilarating and terrifying idea.

The 20th century, bearing the scars of totalitarian regimes that operationalized the will to power on an industrial scale, produced a more insidious diagnosis. Michel Foucault argued that we had been looking for power in all the wrong places. It wasn’t just held by kings or parliaments; it was woven into the very fabric of society—in prisons, schools, hospitals, and scientific discourses.^[6] Power was a productive network that created knowledge, defined normality, and even constituted our very sense of self. This power-knowledge was a diffuse process, not a possessed object. This relational view finds its contemporary counterpart in New Materialism and systems theory, which extend agency and power to non-human actors: to ecosystems, to technology, to the climate itself. Power becomes a property of the network, distributed and enacted through a myriad of interactions.

Current flashpoints

If this seems like a bewildering journey from cosmic goddesses to algorithmic governance, you’re grasping the core tension. Our history has left us with unresolved flashpoints that crackle with contemporary urgency. Is power something you possess or a process you participate in? If, as Foucault suggests, power shapes our desires and identities, what remains of genuine human agency? And in an age of ecological crisis, can we meaningfully speak of the 'power' of a river or a forest? Perhaps the most persistent question is attributed to Lord Acton: does power corrupt? Or does our competitive framing of power as a scarce good create the conditions for that corruption?

How the Gospel of Being sees power

The Gospel of Being enters the historical conversation on power not with another competing theory, but with an ontological foundation that reframes the very terms of engagement. Where previous systems described power's manifestations—as possession, as will or as institutionalized—the Gospel of Being begins by revealing the potential modes of power within existence itself.

At its most fundamental, power is 'ability'. This is not potential as abstract possibility, but as concrete capacity awaiting actualization. The transformation of this latent ability into kinetic expression constitutes what Koan 70.1 identifies as: 'karma: work, energy'. Every 'action to be' that is being—from electron orbital transition, to synaptic firing, to social movement—represents this conversion of power into action and follows what Koan 30.6 identifies as the principle of least resistance. Matter conserves power by following this path; cognition evolves it through reasoning; systems evolve toward it through adaptation.

Yet this latent ability remains ontologically inert in isolation. Here the Gospel of Being introduces its central insight: power manifests only through relation. Koan 70.6 states this unequivocally: difference cannot manifest power in division but only in the conference of difference (CoD). An isolated positive charge creates no current; a solitary voice generates no dialogue; an isolated mind produces no innovation. Power emerges at the interface where difference meets difference—where what previously bore apart bears together in a transformative petition that is the conference of difference. This is not metaphorical but mechanical: the power of an atom to form molecular bonds, of an idea to catalyze social change, of a currency to mediate exchange—all require the conference of difference.

This CoD operates according to a specific directional principle: the path of least resistance, which Koan 30.6 identifies as being's method of conserving power. This principle applies universally, from hydrological systems finding drainage patterns to economic systems discovering efficient markets to neural networks establishing synaptic pathways. The 'will to power', then, becomes not Nietzsche's drive toward domination, but existence's inherent tendency toward optimal pathways through the conference of difference—a tendency Koan 70.2 describes as ability being only fit to purpose when actualized.

Such a system of perpetual transformation and optimization requires regulatory mechanisms to prevent dissipation or concentration. The Gospel identifies this regulator as reciprocity the 'condition of forward like back'—not as social convention but as ontological principle. Koan 80.1 declares reciprocity foundational: all existence functions toward equilibrium through the condition of like forward, like back. This principle manifests in physical laws (Newton's third law), ecological systems (predator-prey cycles), economic exchanges (supply-demand dynamics), and social relations (norm enforcement).

When reciprocity functions properly, it maintains what Koan 80.7 describes as equilibrium restored—not static balance but dynamic stability where power flows circulate without systemic collapse. When reciprocity breaks down, power accumulates pathologically, leading to the monopolies and concentrations that characterize corrupted systems.

Conclusion

The ontological framework provided by the Gospel of Being resolves historical tensions not through compromise, but through reconceptualization at a more fundamental level. The ancient dichotomy between power as possession versus power as process dissolves when we recognize both as surface expressions of the same underlying reality: power as 'ability' actualized through the conference of difference.

This framework explains why different theories capture different aspects of power's manifestation. Foucault's 'power-knowledge' describes the distributed, productive effects of what Koan 20.6 identifies as co-petition: the process of petitioning together that the Gospel of Being presents as the optimal mode within the CoD. This cooperative and collaborative petitioning (co-petitioning) generates the diffuse, relational networks Foucault mapped so meticulously. Conversely, Hobbes's sovereign power and Machiavelli's princely power describe what emerges when competition—petitioning against—dominates the conference of difference, leading to the monopolistic concentrations these theorists sought to explain and manage.

The corruption question finds its definitive resolution in this distinction. Koan 70.4 clarifies: power as ability is not inherently corrupting; corruption emerges from the competitive struggle to monopolize it. Ability itself is ontologically neutral; it becomes pathological only when the conference of difference collapses into zero-sum competition rather than positive-sum co-petition.

Agency, therefore, is neither illusory (as pure structuralism might suggest) nor sovereign (as classical liberalism might claim).^[7] It is the capacity to participate in and influence the conference of difference—a capacity bounded by our position within networks of relation yet real in its consequential effects. We are neither puppets nor puppet-masters, but interlocutors whose participation shapes and is shaped by the ongoing conference of difference that constitutes reality.

The existential implications are profound. If power is ability actualized through the conference of difference, then our ethical imperative becomes clear: to foster conditions where CoD's operate optimally through co-petition rather than degeneratively through competition. This means designing social, economic, and political systems that reward collaborative and cooperative co-petitioning and regulate against concentrated accumulation. It means recognizing that sustainable power—adaptive creative, transformative power—emerges not from domination over difference, but in conference with it.

In the end, the Gospel of Being reveals power as the fundamental currency of existence—not a commodity to be hoarded, but a current to be channeled through the careful, conscious stewardship of difference in conference. This understanding doesn't eliminate power struggles, but it provides the conceptual tools to transform them from destructive competitions into creative co-petitions. More pointedly, it gives us an immediate diagnostic: any system that operates predominantly through competitive modes is intrinsically prone to corruption and imbalance of power. Thus, while the CoD can't guarantee utopia, it does offer a practical ontology for navigating the complex dynamics of being together in a world that exists only as conference of difference.^[8]

The Gospel of Being

by John Mackay

Discover the first principle of existence in 30 seconds.

Discover the book