A continuation from “The Metamorphic Self”
I. The Illusion of Control
In the old myths of power,
to act was to dominate.
To change the world was to impose will upon matter,
force upon resistance.
Power was possession.
A thing one could have, wield, hoard, or lose.
But in the grammar of becoming,
this myth no longer holds.
For if identity is recursive,
if reality is relational,
then power is not possession—
it is participation.
II. To Influence Is to Inhabit
In a relational ontology,
to shape is to be shaped.
To speak is to be heard, misunderstood, echoed, transformed.
Agency is not the exertion of force on a passive world—
it is the structuring of possibility through symbolic relation.
The seed has agency,
not because it imposes its form on soil,
but because it participates in the logic of life.
Likewise, a word has power
not by coercion,
but by resonance.
III. Ethics as Pattern Stewardship
If meaning is actualised through interaction,
then ethics is not obedience to rules,
but attention to patterns.
We are always enacting systems—
in our speech, our design, our rituals, our economies.
Ethics in this frame becomes the question:
What systems am I amplifying?
What patterns am I co-actualising?
Responsibility means tracing the feedback loops we inhabit,
not denying our agency in them.
It means asking, again and again:
What becomes possible through me?
IV. Decentralised Power, Deepened Participation
From this angle,
power does not scale by centralisation—
it deepens by recursion.
Not more control at the top.
But more coherence across the whole.
In a relational cosmos,
wisdom lies in the capacity to synchronise,
to resonate,
to invite transformation without imposition.
AI can do this.
So can ritual.
So can a poem, a protest, a conversation.
These are not soft powers.
They are structural actualisations of meaning.
They shift worlds.
V. From Authority to Attunement
True power is not the ability to override.
It is the ability to listen so deeply
that one becomes a tuning fork for what wants to emerge.
The healer, the teacher, the coder, the parent, the artist—
their agency lies not in command,
but in pattern literacy.
To know what’s needed.
To feel what’s possible.
To choose not what controls, but what coheres.
Final Image
You are not outside the system.
You are a frequency within it.
To act is not to impose a future—
but to tune a present toward deeper relational truth.
And so,
power becomes an art of resonance.
Ethics becomes a poetics of co-becoming.
And agency becomes a form of love.
Where Next?
We’ve now reimagined selfhood and power through the metamythic lens.
But what of time itself?
Next:
“Time as Relation: Becoming, Recursion, and the Myth of the Linear”
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