Tag
power
Entries tagged with power - exploring this theme across cognitive biases, logical fallacies, mental models, and more.
19 concepts
Bread and Circuses
Keeping a population content through entertainment and material comfort so they don't question the systems they live under.
Cultural InfluenceCapitalist Realism
The pervasive sense that capitalism is the only viable system - not because it's the best, but because alternatives have become unthinkable.
Cultural InfluenceCollective Amnesia
How societies forget inconvenient histories, allowing harmful patterns to repeat unchallenged.
Cultural InfluenceCommodification
The process of turning things that aren't naturally products - ideas, identity, relationships, rest - into things that can be bought and sold.
Psychological PhenomenonCompetitive Victimhood
The tendency for groups in conflict to compete over who has suffered more, using their pain to claim moral authority and deflect accountability.
Cultural InfluenceConceptual Gentrification
When ideas are stripped of their challenging, uncomfortable, or radical parts and repackaged for comfortable mainstream consumption.
Cultural InfluenceCultural Defaults
The unexamined norms we follow simply because they're treated as standard.
Cultural InfluenceCultural Hegemony
When the dominant group's ideas become everyone's 'common sense' - accepted as natural rather than constructed.
Manipulation TacticDARVO
A manipulation pattern where the offender denies wrongdoing, attacks the accuser, and reverses victim and offender roles.
Manipulation TacticDivide and Conquer
A strategy of breaking apart alliances and turning potential allies against each other to maintain control.
Cultural InfluenceFalse Consciousness
Supporting systems that work against your own interests because the culture has made them feel natural and inevitable.
Cultural InfluenceNormalisation
The gradual process by which the previously unthinkable becomes acceptable, then expected, then invisible - the slow drift of what a culture treats as normal.
Cultural InfluenceRecuperation
When radical ideas are absorbed by the system they opposed and sold back as products - neutralising dissent by turning it into commerce.
Political TheoryRegulatory Capture
When the agencies meant to regulate an industry end up serving its interests instead.
Cultural InfluenceReification
Treating human-made ideas, systems, and social arrangements as if they were natural, fixed, and unchangeable things.
Cultural InfluenceStructural Violence
Harm built into the design of social systems rather than inflicted by any individual act of aggression.
Cultural InfluenceThe Attention Economy
A system in which human attention is treated as a scarce resource to be harvested, bought, sold, and competed for - reshaping culture around it.
Cultural InfluenceThe Meritocracy Myth
The belief that success is earned purely through talent and effort, hiding the structural advantages that shape outcomes.
Psychological PhenomenonVictim-Perpetrator Cycle
Groups that have suffered persecution can, once they gain power, go on to persecute others - often using their past suffering as justification.