The End of Power

Preface

Power is a broad, slippery term. It’s hard to define, let alone debate meaningfully. That’s exactly why Moisés Naím’s book, The End of Power, is so compelling. Naím knows the subject firsthand: he served as a government minister and later as an executive director of the World Bank.

What is Power?

There is no agreement on what power is exactly, even among the people who dedicate their lives researching it. Many great thinkers have their own views on the nature of power and on why most of the people seem to pursue it with such a passion. My favorite take on power was made by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan:

The power of a man is his present means, to obtain some future apparent good. … So that in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death. And the cause of this, is not always that a man hopes for a more intensive delight, than he has already attained to; or that he cannot be content with a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more.

― Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan

This is a nice definition, but it’s too abstract to have any meaningful discussion. Moisés Naím assumes a more simple and formal definition of power in order to make things clear:

Power is the ability to direct or prevent the current or future actions of other groups and individuals. Or, put differently, power is what we exercise over others that leads them to behave in ways they would not otherwise have behaved.

― Moisés Naím in The End of Power

Power and Technology

One of the main ideas of this book is that power closely follows technology. Centralization was a main theme of the previous century, and it made a lot of sense to scale up many of our systems from manufacturing to politics. Everything had an epic and extreme scale: factories, wars, political alliances and so on. We enjoyed many benefits of centralization such as cheaper costs of production, but we also suffered from world wars and extreme ideologies that wanted nothing less than to take over the world by any means necessary.

Centralization in Business

The interesting thing is that in the 21st century, scale becomes more of a drawback than a boon. Do we really want to have one point of failure? Let’s take “too big to fail” companies as an example. Are we comfortable bailing them out in case they make a mistake, just for the sake of stability? It feels unfair for many people because it is unfair but that’s the main outcome of centralization: people become dependent on a monopolist who promises to be “good” but has no interest in keeping that promise.

What About Governments?

In theory, democratic governments reflect the will of the people, but many are not democratic. That means billions live under a centralized power serving other interests at their expense.

In my view, this is just traditional US propaganda. There’s no real difference between “democracies” and “non‑democracies”, it’s a false dichotomy. There’s no such thing as a permanently unpopular government since truly unpopular ones are quickly replaced by more capable alternatives. So I’d argue every country is equally democratic (or, more accurately, equally undemocratic). If you’re interested in a deeper argument, I recommend reading Leviathan.

To add a more cynical layer: all governments are ultimately run in the interest of a ruling class. Once you see that, appeals to “democratic values” can only make you smile. This is a classical critique of state power, most famously associated with Marxist analysis but shared in various forms by anarchists and political realists like Machiavelli long before.

Shifts in Power

The author’s argument goes like this: The centralized political and business structures of the past are losing power to smaller players and automated tools. People are becoming less dependent on these institutions, reaching incredible levels of self‑sovereignty, but it comes at a cost.

Centralized governance can be effective for moving a nation forward. Less centralized systems often struggle to reach a consensus. Without a clear authority to make decisive choices, the whole system can grind to a halt. A recent example of this struggle is the Brexit process: a controversial, multi‑party effort where various veto powers simply blocked meaningful progress.

I’m not sold on this framing of the Brexit example. Using it to argue against decentralization feels politically loaded. The gridlock might say more about the specific, flawed design of that process than about decentralization itself.

Risks of the New Paradigm

There are many potential threats that come from the diffusion of power, but the author puts an extra accent on the following five risks:

• Disorder: abolishment of universal rules may bring chaos and anarchy.

• Loss of Knowledge: smaller organizations may lack tradition as well as an incentive to invest into large and expensive R&D projects.

• The Banalization of Social Movements: many of our society’s biggest problems require high-risk and high-scale orchestration and the diffusion of power makes it hard to unite for a common cause or drags people into pointless internal fights.

• Boosting Impatience: everyone is a broadcaster now, which sometimes shifts our attention from working on our long term goals to obsessing with the short term and emotionally charged issues. Short-terminism and emotions are the exact opposite of the Enlightenment values of rationality and the rule of law.

• Alienation: trust is a foundation of any successful society, we cannot achieve any progress without some basic level of trust between each other. The diffusion of power leads to the diffusion of trust. Most of the failed states of our days have a low level of trust between citizens, and the most successful countries also score high on the level of mutual trust which makes the deterioration of trust a very concerning development.

Conclusion

The End of Power is a great book that summarizes the recent shifts in our society, and our relationships with power. In my opinion, those trends won’t stop anytime soon, and we will see more radical diffusion of power in the future, but it’s still unknown how far it can go. I believe that this process will have a net positive effect on a society, but it won’t be easy for us to re-adjust for the new reality and there are still many uncertainties that we have to be concerned about because they may greatly affect our lives.