2.4.1 Power And Control In Society - Introduction

If you have read the previous Chapters (and you obviously have if you have arrived here – or maybe you skipped to this page just to have a look) you will know that I started my career in the helping professions as a street-worker.

And it was when I first started doing streetwork that I became aware of the real implications of powerlessness, how it affects us all, but in particular affects communities where many families are isolated from the mainstream as most of us experience it, i.e. are marginalised.

Even though I didn’t know it at the time, I was developing a systemic understanding of power and control. (There is a full Chapter on Systems Theory following; for now it suffices to know that systemic means how everything affects everything else).

For example in all the training that I have done, or books I have read on child protection, child development, community work, etc. over many years I have not come across it that much.  Or if I have, I considered the analysis to be weighted towards the Pillars’ perspective of power and control.

And as my understanding (and awareness) of it deepened I formed the opinion that not enough importance is afforded power and control in training in social work, social care, psychotherapy, youth work or similar disciplines.

I don’t believe that we are as aware as we could be, or should be of the historical origins and sociological contexts of inequality and poverty.

Yet I believe that many of us have a desire to be aware of not only the origins, but also the subtle ways that they are perpetuated and manifest in the modern world today.

And in this, I am talking about being aware, not rising up in arms!

In fact, in my experience, rising up in arms is not usually what vulnerable people – who we have put ourselves out there to help – want us to do.

Awareness on practitioners’ part is a valuable gift that we can give to ourselves, and by extension to families in the Focus Group. 

I believe that it opens our minds to what we can change, rather than 1): continually throwing our hands in the air (and our eyes, of course, to heaven) in frustration and desperation – blaming the system, or 2): spending vast amounts of time and energy trying to change something that we may never be able to change.

So here, for what it’s worth, is my polemic (there’s that word again) on Power and Control in Society – and – more specifically, how it influences community work and in particular the protection of vulnerable children.

In this Chapter I will be using some terms that I will describe briefly now.

Holism implies that we look at something in its entirety, and not just at one aspect of it. Emergence describes how from within, something new may emerge; (i.e. be created) with minimum (or no) external influence.

(We will describe holism, emergence and the uncertainty that inevitably accompanies emergence – in the natural world at least – in the Chapters entitled Systems Theory and Universal Theory of Change in Section Three in far more detail).

Also, in the Chapter on Systems Theory we will describe how living systems are open. 

For now, when I say open I mean that they are continually interacting with their environment, i.e. their sense of aliveness depends on their openness.  But their openness also makes the measuring (or the estimating, or the predicting) of anything within them, or about them, very challenging and full of uncertainty.

And we will also look at closed systems, and how in measurement, (for example in a laboratory) they remain closed, meaning that anything that will interfere with measurement is deliberately left outside, enabling much more certainty in predicting how they will behave under different conditions.

The quality of predictability that we associate with closed-ness will be important when reading this Chapter.

Totalitarianism is a political system where the state (or Government) exercises total and absolute control over everything (political life and discourse, the arts, sport, industry, the economy, health, education, even religion) within its jurisdiction.

For the purposes of our discussion I will call such a country closed.

People growing up nowadays in Ireland have an expectation that society will be open and free, but openness and freedom are, like poverty and wealth, relative terms.  For example, in the 1920’s, soon after the radio (in those days called the wireless) became popular, some clergy in the Catholic Church in Ireland tried to ban jazz, lest it corrupt our youth and dilute our Irishness – or more specifically – our Catholicism.  And when I was a teenager in the 1960’s many films and books were banned for the same reason. 

Now not many who were living at that time would really have described Ireland in the nineteen-sixties as a closed society, but looking back, in some ways, it was!

In the context of power and control, a human being can be considered to be an open system, as can, of course, a family, which is a collection of humans.  So communities, cities, countries and society (all just bigger groups of humans) also tend towards being open.

So, in terms of openness and closed-ness, true totalitarian regimes may be thought to be societal laboratories of sorts.  That is, they try to control, or predict with certainty, how their people will behave.

Rulers in such regimes try to concentrate power in the centre, and control their countries by making them closed, trying to get their citizens to conform, prohibiting them from leaving, forbidding visitors from other countries moving freely through their countries, and trying to ban foreign radio, TV, internet etc.

But, because human beings are open systems in their own right, and can grow in unpredictable ways, totalitarian societies have always proven to be unsustainable – and I would predict that current totalitarian regimes that are closed will either gradually become open, like ice becomes water when immersed in it, or suffer catastrophic implosion visited from the inside or outside. Unfortunately, the opening up of closed societies (in my lifetime anyway) has usually involved significant suffering, as those in power do not relinquish it without a fight.

However, it is not all one-way traffic.

Many societies that were thought to be relatively open, when under pressure in past times became closed.  Now, under different circumstances, they are open again. In what we now call the Western World, the fascist countries of central and southern Europe in the first half of the 20^th Century are the obvious examples here.

But I argue that while they appeared relatively open in, say, the latter half of the 19^th Century, true openness was not really embedded in their societies at that time.

I believe that it is difficult to go from true openness that an entire society embraces, with human rights checks and balances embedded both in the custom and the legal practices, to totalitarian closed-ness. But there are still powerful conservative forces (as there were in 19th Century Europe) who resist true openness, lurking in what we consider open societies.

For example, England and USA were two of the most open societies in the world when I was young, leading the way in the human potential movement, counter-culture, music, literature etc. Now they are far more closed than they were then.

But nowadays, generally, because of the speed and extent of communication, the world as we know it is more open than it has ever been in history.  This openness makes it increasingly more difficult for harsh, controlling rulers and regimes to impose closed-ness in their countries. 

Now – just a little thought for our consideration!

We in the Western democratic world are critical of other countries behaving what we might term to be a totalitarian manner, not having free and fair elections, restricting people’s access to foreign media etc.

But before we clap ourselves on the back because we have a free press it is good to remind ourselves that the news has always been managed (and massaged) by corporate-dominated media in the Western world to airbrush out horrifying stories of centuries-old western world cruelty and abuse that give us the standard of living that we enjoy today.

This will be dealt with more detail in the next Sub-Chapter when I describe corporate closed-ness.