Name: 【TED-Ed】How to understand power - Eric Liu
Uploaded: 2014-11-30T12:54:25.000Z
Duration: 7 min 2 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

you move through systems of power that other people made.

Power is something we are often uncomfortable talking about.

That's especially true in civic life, how we live together in community.

In a democracy, power is supposed to reside with the people, period.

Any further talk about power and who really has it

But power is no more inherently good or evil than fire or physics.

It governs how any form of  government works.

It determines who gets to determine the rules of the game.

So learning how power operates is key to being effective,

being taken seriously, and not being taken advantage of.

In this lesson, we'll look at where power comes from,

how it's exercised and what you can do to become more powerful in public life.

Power is the ability to make others do what you would have them do.

Of course, this plays out in  all arenas of life,

from family to the workplace  to our relationships.

where power means getting a community to make the choices

There are six main sources of civic power.

First, there's physical force and a capacity for violence.

Control of the means of force, whether in the police or a militia,

A second core source  of power is wealth.

Money creates the ability to buy results and to buy almost any other kind of power.

The third form of power is state action, government.

This is the use of law and  bureaucracy to compel people

In a democracy, for example, we the people, theoretically,

give government its power through elections.

In a dictatorship, state power emerges from the threat of force,

The fourth type of power is social norms or what other people think is okay.

Norms don't have the centralized machinery of government.

They operate in a softer way, peer to peer.

They can certainly make people change behavior and even change laws.

Think about how norms around marriage equality today are evolving.

An idea, individual liberties, say, or racial equality,

if it motivates enough people to change their thinking and actions.

And so the sixth source of  power is numbers, lots of humans.

A vocal mass of people creates power by expressing

Think of the Arab Spring or the rise of the Tea Party.

These are the six main sources of power, what power is.

So now, let's think about how power operates.

There are three laws of power  worth examining.

It's always either accumulating or decaying in a civic arena.

So if you aren't taking action, you're being acted upon.

It flows like a current  through everyday life.

Politics is the work of harnessing  that flow in a direction you prefer.

Policymaking is an effort to freeze and perpetuate a particular flow of power.

Power begets more power, and so does powerlessness.

The only thing that keeps law number three from leading to a situation

What rules do we set up so that a few people don't accumulate too much power,

and so that they can't enshrine their privilege in policy?

and you can see each of these laws at work in any news story.

Low wage workers organize to get higher pay.

Oil companies push to get a big pipeline approved.

Gay and lesbian couples seek the legal right to marry.

Whether you get what you want depends on how adept you are with power,

which brings us finally to what you can do to become more powerful in public life.

Here, it's useful to think in terms of literacy.

Your challenge is to learn how to read  power and write power.

To read power means to pay attention to as many texts of power as you can.

Don't like how things are in your campus or city or country?

Map out who has what kind of power, arrayed in what systems.

who's made it so,  and who wants to keep it so.

Study the strategies others in such situations used:

To write power requires first that you  believe you have the right to write,

As with any kind of writing, you learn to express yourself,

Organize your ideas,  then organize other people.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

【TED-Ed】How to understand power - Eric Liu

practice

people

life

force