Quotes from the original article: ”How we stay blind to the story of power”, by Jonathan Cook [link].

1. The author emphasizes the ”urgent need for us to start understanding power. Power is the force that shapes almost everything about our lives and our deaths.”
This understanding is ”the only path to liberation we can take as individuals, as societies, and as a species.”

□ comment: Almost quite right, it shapes everything and Power is ultimately unlimited, existence-giving every moment, and bringing back to non-existence – what can be experienced in our lives is only an infinitesimal fraction of it.

2. Power is a loan, it is given for a certain period and will be taken back, or returned, just as life itself.
□ comment: Understanding power in this world is beneficial, as long as this understanding is not divorced from accepting the overall power of the All-Powerful, the power of the Real. Power is lent to mankind in different, well-proportioned measures, to the rich and the poor, to the young and old, to men and women.

Then there is everyone’s responsibility on how this little provision of power is used, and to what end, and not misused. (And what is misusage should be obvious by now).
Is it to increase our comfort of illusion in this life (for our egotism) or is it used as a good investment for what is better for mankind?

Is it difficult to agree on what is good and better for mankind? Are bridges, clean water, decent schools, clean hospitals better? Are places of worship better, are libraries better or worth it? Are super-sonic jets, laser-guns and drones worth it?

We don’t need a revolution, but a conscious, ongoing, urgent evolution to the high road, to what is better for us, our families and society in everything, when and if it is done solely to gain Allah’s good pleasure (riḍwān ).

Also to remind ourselves, that we cannot change anything, as long as we don’t change what is in ourselves, which necessitates that we, first of all, learn to know ourselves.

3. No interest by the media, and not by the careless
This is ”not surprising at all because the corporate media is the key tool – or seen another way, the central expression – of power.”

4. The main concern of (wordly) power, is the ”ability to conceal itself,” in order to control the populace.
– To disguise itself and its aims, ”power conceals itself is through stories, narratives,… (especially) ideologies.” ”Ideologies … prevent us from questioning:
– why some people were apparently born to rule, or
– have been allowed to enclose vast estates of what was once everyone’s land, or
– hoard masses of inherited wealth, or
– are celebrated for exploiting large numbers of workers, or
– get away with choking the planet to the point at which life itself asphyxiates.”

NB: Divine Power, does not conceal Itself (except for the unprepared or the disbeliever), but discloses Itself in the ongoing Selfdisclosure of God.

□ comment: and while doing so, proponents of the ruling class (and those who want to grab it) also smear everyone who proposes divergent perspectives such as the Islamic worldview which presents an alternative to the mess we are in, to the injustices, persecutions and wars of terror, which are continuously haunting the world and the environmental destruction which is part of the late capitalistic process.
All those practices ”look pathologically insane, an irrefutable proof of our self-destructiveness as a species.”

– More: How we stay blind to the story of power, by Jonathan Cook
NB: Comments and images were not part of the original article.