LOCATION AND FORM OF POWER

Locations and forms of power

To begin my presentation about forms and locations of power, I think it will be necessary to define what power means. In the Oxford dictionary, power refers to the ability to influence the behavior of others or the political or social authority exercised by a government, individuals or an institution. In class we have seen most of the different forms of power. It could be interesting to study who has the power, today, in our world.

To answer this key question, I will speak about two sorts of power. First I will deal with political power and then with economic power.

        So, political power is the power used to direct a nation. We can highlight two sorts of political power. We have dictatorships with dictators like Kim Jong Un, who directs the North-Korea, and democracies with a president elected by people, like Emmanuel Macron in France. We have seen in class a movie directed by Luc Besson called The Lady about the life of an incredible Burmese woman called Aung San Suu Kyi. In this movie, we can see the political fight between the government in place, run by the army, and Suu, who is supported by the people who are looking for a changeover. We can tell that the power of guns is opposed to the power of love, with the pacific campaign of Suu who is very popular. At the end, Suu wins the election against the army. It’s a good example to see that violence is not necessarily the better choice to really have power. In fact, violence just breeds violence. The political power comes from the support of a nation. A dictator takes the power without the support of the people, that’s why he won’t really have power. Other people who look like Suu have the power. We can say that religious people or celebrities like Gandhi or Marc Zuckerberg have power.

Now we are going to see the importance of the economic power.

When I talk about economic power, I mean all rich people in our world.

we can say that rich people who have money are powerful because they have influence on others. They can also have influence on the economy.To illustrate what I say, Bill Gates is one of the richest people in the world and all he says to the press is listened. Benjamin Zephaniah understood this very well and shows that in his poem written in 1992 named Money. He tells us that the money that we have defines the type of people we are in our society. He denounces all the inequalities between the North and the South, the corruption of the system and the fact that nobody can believe in nobody, because everybodylooks for money, for different reasons, to be more powerful than another, etc. One quotation of William Gaddis illustrates this well : “power doesn’t corrupt people, people corrupt power”.

In your society, if you don’t have money, you will only have a little influence. You will not have power.

To sum up, there is not really one person who has power. In fact politicians, people who have money, people considered heroes have power in our society. But I think that people who have money have the really power. They can influence many people, also politicians. There is one famous quotation most famous : “ money can’t make happiness”. But in a lot of situation, money can change many things. People with money have the power to make the world change and improve it.

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