Power is commonly understood as a matter of persuasion: shaping beliefs, influencing opinions, winning consent. Whether framed as ideology, discourse, narrative, or rhetoric, power is assumed to operate by making people think differently.
This assumption is deeply misleading.
Most power does not persuade at all. It does not need to. Instead, it prepares.
Power operates by arranging conditions under which action becomes likely, expected, or unavoidable — without requiring agreement, understanding, or belief. It governs not meaning, but readiness.
Persuasion and Preparation
Persuasion is semiotic. It works by construing experience, offering interpretations, and inviting assent or dissent. One can argue with it, misunderstand it, reject it.
Preparation is pre-semantic. It works by structuring thresholds, pacing time, managing escalation, and organising release. One does not argue with a timetable, a deadline, a queue, or a checkpoint. One responds.
This distinction matters because much of what we call “power” today functions without ever entering the domain of meaning. Compliance is achieved without conviction; coordination without consensus; obedience without belief.
People arrive on time, fill in forms, wait, rush, submit, update, comply — not because they have been persuaded, but because they have been prepared.
Readiness as the Medium of Power
Readiness names the condition of being poised for action without yet acting. It is not intention, not belief, not motivation. It is a structured potential, distributed across bodies, artefacts, schedules, and environments.
Power works by governing this potential.
Institutions do not primarily tell us what to think; they organise when we must be ready, for what, and at what cost. Workplaces calibrate attentional readiness; schools manage readiness for assessment and progression; bureaucracies orchestrate readiness for compliance and delay.
None of this requires ideological success. The system functions even when it is distrusted, mocked, or resented — because readiness has already been aligned.
Compliance Without Conviction
This explains a familiar but under-theorised phenomenon: the ease with which people participate in systems they explicitly criticise.
The gap between belief and behaviour is not hypocrisy; it is structural. Behaviour is governed not by belief, but by thresholds and timing. When deadlines approach, when access is conditional, when escalation accumulates, readiness tips into action regardless of what one thinks.
Power succeeds not when people are convinced, but when non-participation becomes costly, exhausting, or impractical.
A Non-Moral Claim
To describe power as readiness governance is not yet to condemn it. Preparation is not inherently coercive. Music prepares bodies for movement; dance coordinates readiness into collective action; rituals align participants without argument.
The point is not that readiness governance is bad, but that it is primary.
Only once we see this can we begin to distinguish:
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benign coordination from domination,
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shared readiness from imposed readiness,
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collective attunement from structural asymmetry.
What Follows
If power prepares rather than persuades, then its mechanisms must be sought elsewhere than ideology or discourse. We must look instead to:
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who sets thresholds,
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who controls time,
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who manages escalation,
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who authorises release,
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and who must remain perpetually ready.
This series will pursue that shift systematically.
In the next post, we turn to the most basic mechanism of all: threshold-setting, and how power operates by deciding when readiness must become action — and for whom.
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