so power um okay uh Power is uh the you know it's critical important um but very elusive Concepts in political science I was at a a retreat um and that came up as kind of one of the concepts um that we're using just talk about like implementing a new way of thinking about something um well how are we gonna do it where are we going to power out of the resource blah blah blah like power is a tricky idea um you know we can have definitions again like your understanding of politics you can come to
terms with what you think is power I honestly at this point I don't even really have a good concept of what I think is power I'm willing to listen to ideas about what power is so the idea of you know to make someone do what they otherwise would not do I don't know what that means I mean I'm forced to cut the lawn and does everybody who cuts the lawn refractive a power resource maybe maybe not I I don't know um and so like what's the role in ideology and making you think that you're choosing
freely and independently when you're not you know the whole like subliminal advertising or like you know impulse buying and stuff like that like a lot of our choices are made by things that are you know weirdly outside of our control like we we propagate flowers because they're pretty to us so it entices the flowers to become pretty and then humans pick the pretty flowers it's it's so weird so like we think that we're picking something that's beautiful but the flowers are making themselves more beautiful so they get picked more so we we choose them right
so I don't know is that power I have no idea no idea so they're often invisible and hidden deeply embedded in rules practices institution and structures um they're clearly not experienced by everyone the same way um you know clearly the Machiavellian Prince has a very different experience of what power is than the people who are experiencing their power right um and so it could be micro it could be individual it's definitely intersectional it's often systemic um it can involve you know the back to the originally just your ability to speak on a subject and your
ability to have voice or not have voice back to the the pigs compared to the human hand right like there's questions about you know if we if you know let's Charlotte's Web if we could hear the animals speak would we change the way that we consumed them right I don't know um and so when we're thinking about this we can do it in very kind of systemic individual ways so the the latest report the UN report on human development uh the one of the latest ones talks quite a bit about the impacts of climate change
on Mental Health so mental health is a complicated interior process by which you might not even be able to recognize what it is that you are feeling right which means you don't even know why it is you're feeling these things but we do know that there's a correlation between these things now in political science everything is correlation very little causation we we just use high degrees of correlation to make arguments back to the experiment stuff we don't experiment in political science we study right and we study what's going on and we try to study the
relationship between things and so we see this relationship between things but there's not like even individual nation states can't necessarily claim change climate change and individual nation states are often the consequence their decisions are the consequence that result in mental health problems so in terms of power then we have these three framings in in the book again they're fine analytical categories are they exhaustive I don't think so but they help us kind of understand what we're doing right power two power over power knowledge so the first this one's power two the ability to achieve political
ends through individual and Collective action um so this is you know idealized back to our typology this is kind of what we would like in Liberal democracies to happen the idea that you know um we get to make free choices um but all of that's Complicated by the you know the expression of the ideas who gets to articulate the ideas where do we hear them how do they how are they articulated it made a lot more sense when you know we would have fireside chats where there's three channels on the TV and the president in
the US gets to come on or they're on the radio or the TV when there's only a couple channels and everybody hears the same thing so then we get to have a political discussion about the same ideas but when you can go down your own Rabbit Hole or your own subreddit or your own Discord Channel and just talk with other people in that Discord Channel and have these ideas propagate in these very narrow confined spaces we're not sure that we're going to be able to have a discussion all in the same place right and so
they're always going to be in so I mediated they're always going to be mediated by you know what the newspapers are saying or will allow you to say or the types of discussions that we're going to have or whatever is popular at the moment the moral Panic of the moment it because we go through moral panics all the time where everybody's this is so terrible how dare that happened and then 10 years later we totally forgot it happened right and so there is a power of the people the demos as I said both left and
right-wing chauvinisms which is this is the way it should be and what I mean by both left and right-wing chauvinisms is like this is the way that Canada should be um can be can be like we need to provide these resources for all Canadians so all Canadians should have you know a minimum wage um but migrant workers well you know we've got different categories for them right or you know we can do this with all things everybody should have access to these resources but in order to do that we got to take a lot of
resources away from these people to give access to everybody right it's a public good it's inherently good right so you know we can do this both ways and so the chauvinism of them is is that like I know best about the way to do this that this is a singular way that it should be done and I can do it why because I'm Canadian boy because I'm American why because I'm like whatever it is right you're articulating that that view of viewing it that those people articulate that claim right and so we have these debates
all the time about social movements Mass protest rebellions about different people articulating claims over what should be about how it should be done and who should do it right power to achieve and so then the question becomes how does social change happen so that's the type of thing that we could study um and we would end up focusing on one of these different mechanisms right social movements Mass protest rebellions how effective they are does their effectiveness change over time remember we are not in a closed system we're in an open system so protests that might
have worked in the past might not work anymore why everybody develops a kind of numbness to it right the campaigns where we all feel Outreach in this ice bucket challenge we all want to do it but then the next one comes along I already did that right so people are also kind of have to be mobilized and those resources aren't static they change and so the power to do things resolves results from different and this is what pluralism is different forms of groups mobilizing in order to advocate for interests and so these happen over time
and they happen Community organization interest groups advocacy associations all different different organizations which directly Lobby like you know a municipal group may want more um you know flowers in our Green Space or we might want you know to food not Lawns so there's organization in London used to operate still kind of around um says you know if you've got the opportunity plant of uh trees that give fruit or bushes that give fruit so people can have access to food cheaper right not just bulldoze everything and put in parking lots that type of stuff um you
know parent teacher organizations Community associations environmental growth athletic clubs like sports teams whatever it is and so the sports teams you know want defibrillators at the hockey arena and so we you know Stephen Harper says okay we're doing that we're putting the money behind that and then other groups are like wait a minute we have heart attacks over here too why don't we get them here and why don't we get them there well because they mobilize the resources and we're able to to do that um and so this largely frames pluralism frames democracy is a
hive of competing groups representing different issues or interests and so the bunch of the assumptions built in so that's the kind of the the sympathetic reading the the critical reading is that everybody has the ability to organize and Advance their interest in the same way um you know famously like far far um kind of more outside the norm religious organizations in Canada can't get mobilized because we're too small the population over two larger territory against cold um people don't want to go and protest in Edmonton and minus 30 right and so you can't mobilize resources
and say because you simply don't have the resources right um and so all of this then assumes this everybody has the equal ability to organize Advance their interests right this is you know did a professor Doreen loves The Simpsons stuff but this is you know the Homer famously I'm a white male age 18 to 35 well whatever I want I get right so gum and nuts and peanut butter or something he had and so the different levels of voice capacity and resources are very much built in kind of ableist assumptions about the capacity to speak
so people who have different levels of capacity to speak um uh especially as all Western democracies are aging we have more and more people where we're going to have to deal with different levels of able and infirmity relating to age and so who can advocate for those who don't have that how do they get the capacity to do so how do we deal with people who don't have the capacity to make choices reliably for themselves who is responsible for making those choices and how do they advocate for them right um and so we get these
kind of assumptions that are built into these structures that are tend to be ableists tend to be majoritarian because it can you know what a lot of people believe is easier to mobilize and then it tends to be very citizen-based back to Aristotle so those who have different status or different ways of thinking require those citizens to act on their behalf and so this is the like do you want your City to be tourist friendly right like no maybe I want my resources to be dedicated to making this you know the most effective fastest route
for me to get from my job to my work I don't really care about a tourist attraction I don't care about having the the biggest I don't know the Apple in wherever you know Coburg or whatever it's those types of articulation of claims we're going to put resources towards the biggest diamond in the world so people will visit here yes because it drives more economy and resources and we become known for that thing right um but that might not be what everybody thinks is the best use of resources and so pluralism then tends to be
kind of ideological about what it thinks is good so these other kind of like the extreme voter die voting matters election matters that that's the importance of politics is in in the vote which happens every four years and then you know first past the post system you get to pick the party and the party picks the leader so you know there's several mechanisms quite removed from pluralism prelims of pluralism tends to reinforce the status quo majoritarian thinking ableist thinking and citizen organized goals um which isn't necessarily the same as democracy per se it's a type
of or an expression of democracy so like picking is picking the leader the same as the democracy like I get to choose well I get to hopefully choose the party that wins that then picks who the leader is it seems a little removed from what we would call Democratic it's absolutely a form of democracy we can be sympathetic and say no this is the most effective form you know famously Churchill it's the worst form of democracy except all the democracy is the worst form of politics and political systems except for all the others we've tried
right so it's not that it's the best it's just the the least worst right so we can do it in even a critical sympathetic way which is yeah try to figure out a better system you're not going to find one um and so the idea then is that to what extent is pluralism going to actually produce better outcomes or is it just going to produce competing outcomes right so and that competition is going to result in majoritarianism which is why we have the protection of individual rights because majoritarians are always going to try to trample
individuals because that's their nature right and so there's an inherent kind of social framing of mobilization um which is to say that this is another assumption of pluralism that groups aren't advocating like the death of other groups or that groups aren't advocating let's overthrow the system we have so that we are always in power right or that we we don't Advocate like the indiscriminate targeting of civilians in order to achieve our political ends right that those rebellions are somehow social not anti-social and pluralism is an assumption of sociality in the way that we organize ourselves
which doesn't make a ton of sense um and so pluralism likes to idealize the ideas that individuals can make a difference so you know Viola Desmond challenging kind of racist uh uh policies and Norms in Nova Scotia Greta thurnberg challenging the Swedish Parliament to to take its commitment to the Future seriously and climate change seriously or the the protests Against anti-black Racism in the the aftermath of George Floyd's uh death that this is something that individuals can get involved with to to to participate in social change and maybe individuals result in social change but they're
also media by their group membership right um because we have lots of examples of indigenous kids activism in Canada advocating for very similar things that don't get the same reflection of values and interest as somebody in a dominant group might be that that's just not talk about Greta's non-intersectionality because she's got lots of intersectionality to make sure voice unique as well but that the intersectionality tends to reflect what the dominant groups think is something that they think is new and interesting right um and so we're mediated by a group membership by our online versus offline
group membership and and I mean that in a literal way in the ways in which that we have a public and a private space the internet has flipped some of those but of course we we act performatively in ways in public that we may act differently in private and you know the canceling the metoo movement has said yeah it kind of got to be more conscious of the personal being political right um and so the question becomes are we building consensus or dissensis so we disagree with the majoritarian opinion and we are building our own
vision of how things should be or we're building a vision of how everybody should agree with what I'm doing and this is the consensus model we should also think about this is what Fiora called the pedagogy of the press which is to say that any group that is in a minority when it becomes the majority will inevitably produce its own biases on everyone else which is there is an oppressor in all of it that's a characterization of which shillium does this as well it's the idea that we're not going to escape our roles in our
intersectionality causing tacit explicit and sometimes explicit harm on others by the positions we advocate so I want this resource in my town I want the biggest diamond in the world in my town and that's going to suck up all the resources that was going to you know climate change or or you know helping people with infirmity whatever it is right um and so the idea then is that we have to accomplish the way in which power to reproduces power dynamics and reproduces forms of Oppression and exclusion and so here's just a picture of Greta and
then here's a picture from black lives matter Toronto of different ways we do this and this is at the pride and this has become a deeply contested event as well so that's power two and the next one we'll talk about power over
