#powerlessness

Why Connection—Not Control—is Our Greatest Source of Power

What if our greatest strength isn’t control, but connection? In a time of crisis, even the smallest acts carry forward—through memory, resistance, and deep time.

James B. Greenberg

Jul 30, 2025

We are living through a moment in which authoritarianism is no longer merely a threat. It is an organizing principle, a mode of governance that normalizes cruelty, criminalizes dissent, and hollows out the very institutions built to protect the public. The executive orders and legislative measures being pushed today are not bureaucratic accidents. They are acts of political redesign.

What replaces democratic law doesn’t need new institutions. It rewires the ones we already have to serve a different purpose. Law is not discarded; it is weaponized—not to defend the public, but to protect power.

To resist this is not only a political act. It is a historical one. We are shaping the memory of what was accepted, what was contested, and what was possible. Each refusal to comply, each protest, legal challenge, policy safeguard, or act of moral courage becomes part of the long record that future generations will study when they ask what we did in the face of creeping tyranny.

Authoritarianism doesn’t only rely on repression. It thrives on resignation. It tells us nothing can be done, that resistance is futile, that hope is naïve. But history does not support this. The fall of every repressive system—from the plantation economy to apartheid to the Berlin Wall—was not the result of inevitability but of struggle. Accumulated over time. Advanced at great cost. But sustained.

Standing up now may not mean defeating a regime in a single act. It may mean refusing collaboration, protecting a threatened colleague, exposing corruption, or showing up for a neighbor. These acts may seem small. They are not. They are part of the infrastructure of resistance: the human infrastructure on which every democratic revival has depended.

The same perspective holds when we confront climate collapse. The atmosphere, like history, records everything. Carbon released in 1850 is still warming the Earth. The emissions we generate today will linger for centuries. And the ecological systems we’ve disrupted—ice sheets, ocean currents, forests—are shifting in response on timescales far longer than those of our institutions.

We are told it’s too late. That the damage is done. That nothing we do matters. But that defeatism only makes collapse more likely. The truth is: every tenth of a degree we prevent, every ecosystem we protect, every just policy we implement shapes the conditions of life for generations. These are not gestures. They are boundaries: of habitability, of hope, of survival.

This isn’t just an environmental issue. It’s a civilizational one. Climate change magnifies inequality, accelerates displacement, and exposes every crack in the systems meant to mediate power. Its effects fall heaviest on those least responsible. It is not a problem of carbon alone, but of political economy—of systems that reward extraction, commodify nature, and externalize harm.

But not all futures are lost. The choices we make now matter, not only for their immediate effects but for the pathways they open or foreclose. Resistance and renewal are not separate acts. They are part of the same long arc of care. That arc is held up by relationships: between people and place, between generations, between those who came before and those who are not yet born.

We are the inheritors of choices others made. And we are now the ones who must choose what to defend, what to dismantle, what to remember, and what to become.

This all matters because the dominant systems we live under are designed to make us forget. Authoritarianism relies not only on force but on erasure: of memory, of alternative ways of being, of solidarity, of history itself. Political repression and climate denial function in similar ways. Both depend on distraction and disconnection. They thrive on making the unacceptable seem inevitable.

But memory is a form of resistance. And attention is a form of care. Choosing what to remember, what to notice, teach, preserve, and defend is one way we stay human under systems that seek to render us fungible.

None of this guarantees an outcome. But it guarantees that nothing we do is meaningless. Every action, every refusal, every effort to repair is a form of presence that extends beyond the self. We are not spectators. We are participants in a long and tangled chain of causality. That brings with it responsibility, but also the extraordinary potential for transformation.

With what’s going on, we often feel powerless, as if history is something done to us rather than something we participate in. But that sense of smallness obscures a deeper truth: each of us shapes history, not only in our own time but for generations to come. Every action has consequences. Some are immediate, visible, and measurable. Most ripple outward in ways we rarely see, accumulating like sediment in a riverbed, altering the course of things long after we’re gone.

Our very existence is the product of such accumulations. The atoms in our bodies were forged in stars that exploded billions of years ago. We are composed of particles born in the Big Bang, shaped by cosmic events we’ll never witness. Our biological inheritance stretches back through eons, through the first self-replicating molecules in a primeval sea, through ancestors who endured, adapted, resisted.

What we call the present is only a cross-section of that deeper continuity: of energy, matter, and meaning moving forward. And we too are part of that movement. Our choices today, even the smallest ones, carry forward into futures we cannot predict. The same is true for information and practice. Knowledge accumulates, adapts, and corrects itself—but it doesn’t vanish. What we record, teach, preserve, or refuse becomes part of an ongoing inheritance. It enters the world as something real, with the potential to grow, resist, or transform.

A deep time ethic demands more than imagination. It requires commitment—to act not only for today’s outcomes, but for consequences that unfold over decades, centuries, or longer. Most of our systems, political, economic, even academic, are built around short-term returns. But the crises we face now—ecological collapse, democratic erosion, systemic dispossession—unfold on long and uneven timelines. Meeting them requires a horizon of responsibility that stretches far beyond our own comfort or lifespan.

From an anthropological view, agency is not only personal; it is always social. It emerges through relationship, memory, and the accumulation of shared action. Movements arise not from singular events but from networks of care, refusal, and solidarity. They rarely move in straight lines. They advance by persistence, retreat, reconfiguration. And over time, they reshape what is possible.

No authoritarian regime, no extractive order, no imperial system has lasted forever. All have eventually been undone by the patient force of collective will. But that will must be cultivated and remembered.

Indigenous traditions remind us of this differently. In many of these worldviews, we do not stand apart from time—we are woven into it. We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our grandchildren. Responsibility is not heroic. It is relational. It lives in ritual, stewardship, kinship, and story. Time is not a line but a cycle. Consequence is not isolated to individuals; it moves through communities, watersheds, ecosystems, and generations. These are not abstractions. They are living systems of accountability that challenge the extractive worldview and offer an alternative rooted in endurance rather than domination.

Remember this: we are all powerful, not in theory but in action. Our voices and relationships matter. When we remember this, we reclaim the future from the logic of inevitability and become ancestors worth remembering.

Suggested Readings

Cook, Scott. Understanding Commodity Economies: Everyday Resistance, Local Markets, and Global Capitalism. Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.

Ghosh, Amitav. The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. University of Chicago Press, 2021.

Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.

Heyman, Josiah McC. “States and Illegal Practices.” In States and Illegal Practices, edited by Josiah McC. Heyman, 1–24. Berg, 1999.

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011.

Shiva, Vandana. Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace. South End Press, 2005.

Tsing, Anna. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press, 2015.

a caretaker grieving whumpee, while they missing. they don’t know whether they are supposed to grieve a disappearance, a death or something worse.

caretaker grieving a rescued whumpee. their beloved is visibly not doing well but they already have done everything in their power to help. and it’s not enough. perhaps the recovery will take time (if whumpee makes it that far) but the uncertainty kills them

whumpee is slowly slipping from caretaker‘s grasp and it feels like they are pre-grieving their beloved. perhaps they look at old memories and ponder what might be their closest after whumpee‘s passing. perhaps they already pick out a tattoo design to remember them by. it feels wrong but they feel so helpless, they don’t know what to do

The Lion's Roar

Song by First Aid Kit

Now the pale morning sings of forgotten things She plays a tune for those who wish to overlook The fact that they've been blindly deceived By those who preach and pray and teach But she falls short and the night explodes in laughter

But don't you come here and say I didn't warn you About the way your world can alter And oh how you try to command it all still Every single time it all shifts one way or the other

And I'm a goddamn coward, but then again so are you And the lion's roar, the lion's roar Has me evading and hollering for you And I never really knew what to do

Now I guess sometimes I wish you were a little more predictable That I could read you just like a book For now I can only guess what's coming next By examining your timid smile And the ways of the old, old winds blowing you back 'round

And I'm a goddamn fool, but then again so are you And the lion's roar, the lion's roar Has me seeking out and searching for you And I never really knew what to do

Sometimes I wish I could find my Rosemary Hill I'd sit there and look at the deserted lakes and I'd sing And every once in a while I'd sing a song for you That would rise above the mountains and the stars and the sea And if I wanted it to it would lead you back to me