Knowledge and Power

“Knowledge is potential power. It becomes power only when it is acted upon.”

For the past few days I was reading Alvin Toffler’s book “Powershift”. Written in 1990, this book talks of how power centres in today’s world are influenced by knowledge. It has not always been so, for in the past, violence, and later wealth, controlled power centres.

But today we live in a knowledge era. What we know matters a lot. The book makes an interesting point that while muscle and money cannot be used simultaneously, knowledge can be, and concurrently used to create further knowledge. The power of knowledge and information is that it can be used to rapidly transform the lives of people, and efficiency can be improved on a rapid scale. In fact, much of our service industry is based on the premise of knowledge and information, and increasingly manufacturing and agriculture are also using knowledge to expand production and profits.

But what exactly do these two terms mean? The dictionary defines knowledge as “The psychological result of perception and learning and reasoning.” It also defines power as “Possession of controlling influence.”

Power has always been the ultimate desire of man. He has always sought to subordinate others around him, but since this is not possible for everyone, there have always been conflicts over power. Power is neutral. There is nothing inherently right or wrong about power; right and wrong occur when the power is suitably or unsuitably applied. In different eras, power has flown from different sources.

Before the 1950s, the world was dominated by manufacturing and agriculture. Work output in these professions required brute force. Workers were interchangeable; it did not matter as to which worker did the job. Thus, power remained in the hands of people who controlled farms and factories.

But then, the growth of the service industry began to change this. The work could now not always be performed by muscle-force, it also needed workers to think and adapt to particular situations. No longer were workers as easily interchangeable as before. Those who learnt to adapt to this change by becoming knowledge centres also obtained the power to shape the mosaic of the world.

Consider for example two industries, one highly respected, and the other most detested (no reason why it should be). The financial sector, which ostensibly seems to be doing nothing productive (looked from a tangible product point of view), controls the levers of all the great powers. Why? They have information. On the other end of the spectrum, we have the espionage services, which are also sought after, for they are useful for obtaining information that is secret, or information that can be obtained only by carefully sifting through the existing open sources. They are also extremely powerful, but that is never obvious owing to their covert ways.

In the past, power flowed from the barrel of a gun, and later, from the chest of the wealthy. But today, power flows from what is there in our cranium. Most importantly, we cannot rest on what we know now. Knowledge, by its very nature, is fluid and changing, and the only way to keep up is to keep learning. Nor can we expect to keep to ourselves what we know today. Knowledge and information have a nasty habit of seeping out into the open.

When this knowledge is put into action, power will come to the actor. So if you want to have power, then accumulate knowledge, one that can be put to immediate use. We should keep learning and not rely on the exclusiveness of our knowledge.

So, as the saying goes, “Knowledge is Power”. If you have power, you may do something good or bad, but if you don’t have power, you can do nothing. So, start accumulating knowledge. Well begun is half-done!