Power

Power

The desire for power has been a permanent feature of human beings throughout history. Human organization and human life itself took shape around power since the beginning of ages. Mankind is driven by the incessant pursuit of power in all its forms: political leadership, prestige, fame, wealth, knowledge, and physical strength. But how can we define power? How can power be usedfor good or evil? Who has the right to exercise power over the rest of the society?
Power can be divided in four different types of power: Personal power, expert power, legitimate power, and political power. The first type of power I am going to talk about is personal power. Personal power can be defined as the charisma, personality, and personal magnetism that a person createsindividually transforming him/her into a leader. Personal power is the ability to attract supporters through their personality. These supporters have faith in the objectives that this leader seeks and follow him without questioning. The leader perceives the needs of people and promises success for them. A great example of personal power could be Jesus Christ, because of his ability to convince people tofollow him in his beliefs and teachings’ creating a massive religion that today still exists. We then have expert power that can be defined as the authority of knowledge. Expert power comes from specialized academic studies and the information one person has about a complex topic or issue. Education, experience, and knowledge have a great influence in the development of expert power. Today expertpower is very important since we live in an era of new technologies. A good example of expert power could be professors in educational institutions. We also have legitimate power, which can be defined as an official power granted by a higher authority. Culturally, authorities delegate authority to others to control their resources, compensate or punish on their behalf. This power is desired formany people, whose objective should be the order of society. In order to exercise this type of power, it is obvious that you should also be granted with expert power. Finally we have political power. Political power is a type of power that is conserved by a group in a society. We can see political power by looking at the world as we know it today. It has superpowers that have enormous influence onthe political ideology in the world. Clear examples of societies that have huge political power in the world are United States, European countries, etc.
Power
I think that the most important type of power that exists is the political power because it encompasses all of the type of power mentioned before and they are all characteristics of political power. In political terms, power isthe most important issue for a country. A country hopes to influence the behavior of other states through military force or economic sanctions. But not only military force and economic sanctions are weapons to gain power; it also has to do a lot with the ability of the political leaders to effectively lead to decisions that are best for their country. Another very important aspect of how to gainpower is defining the political culture and ideology of a country. If a country has a strongly determined political culture and ideology, is easier to make decisions and advance more in other areas rather than internal politics.
Power has been a goal of human society since the beginning of time and this has led to an unbalanced world in economic and political terms. The United States is aclear example of how a country has raised to the highest point of political power in the world in basically 100 years. After WWI and WWII the United States has been the world superpower that, somehow, has set the rules of how things work on earth. But is this going to last forever? As we can see, history has proven that power is not forever. The Greek Empire, the Roman Empire, and the Nazi...