Power Without Ground
Power once leaned on legitimacy — on law, representation, rationality, truth. Today these supports are collapsing. Authority still commands armies, courts, and capital, but its ground is thin, almost spectral. The genocide in Gaza reveals this starkly: governments, NGOs, UN resolutions, protests — all the mechanisms that once conferred legitimacy — are bypassed or ignored. Power persists, but without justification, without persuasion.
This is not weakness but a mutation. Power without legitimacy relies on sheer persistence: on repetition, distraction, and spectacle. It wields the fragility of truth itself, bending its uncertainty into justification. Even populations who know they are being lied to are asked to “choose” which lies to live with. Compliance becomes less about belief and more about comfort — an uneasy coexistence with ungrounded authority.
Decentralization fractures power’s old monopolies, but it also exposes power’s raw violence when no one consents. Authority without legitimacy must be louder, faster, more insistent. It cannot rely on law or order alone, so it occupies timelines, floods feeds, silences dissent. It commands not by being trusted but by being unavoidable.
To understand power now is to see it in crisis, but also in excess. It is simultaneously weakened by the erosion of its ground and made more dangerous by its willingness to rule without it. Power survives not by convincing, but by overwhelming.
PETER 