The Role of Economic and Political Power in Preservation of Status-Quo and Markets Integration: A Review

Introduction

Currently, mankind is going trough one of the strangest historical experiences, which may represent a new threshold of its own growing up. A certain succession and superposition of deep crises, affecting humanity as a whole and globally, almost crushing the inner and outer architecture of the human edifice, be it social psychology, local, national and global relation structures, as well as the political structures, which tend to dissolve or redefine, up to the project of the building of a new world, never met before on the planet Earth; that is, a world consisting of trans-human beings, beyond the biological definition acknowledged as a result of the life evolution. No part of these change and projects would be possible without a clear awareness of the existence of a special energy, available to the mankind under the pressure of some imperatives minding the awareness of the most advanced minds and ideologies of these times; the name of this energy is power.

Considering the various definitions within the dictionaries the power refers to the capacity to issue of an effect; consistent to the meaning attributed to the relevant space of our world, the manifestation of power represents the capacity to control and influence of other persons.

Thereby, Boulding (1989, p. 163) defines the power as a social structure with three conceptual levels, depending on the consequences of the management of the power, as follows:

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  The destructive power represents the power to destroy things. Threatening represents a typical exercise of the destructive power, while the military power is an example of an organized form of the destructive power;

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  The productive power is the power of doing and creating. The exchange of goods and the commerce represent typical constructive behaviors, while economy is in fact an organized form of the constructive power;

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  The integrative power is one able to structure relations, and thereby, bringing people together. On the one side, being also an organizational power, the economic power is a major aspect of all kinds of organizations. On the other side, as the abovementioned author ascertains, “the organizational economic power is incredibly fragile, unpredictable, and it is highly responsible for certain processes defining the collective subconscious of which nobody has a defined control or a real power on”.

The Economic Power – An Integrative Approach

Regardless their aims and objectives, all the organizations embed a certain economic component. Consequently, in the literature is considered that the primary aim of the integrative organizations is not the profit, but to bring the people together, and to build relations between them: “The most important source of the integrative power of a community or organization is defined by the measure the personal identity of its members is linked to the perception people have regarding the organization community identity as a whole”. In fact, the social life couldn’t have been functioning, at least before the beginnings of Great Reset, otherwise than within the organizational frames, considering the human social nature. In the context, there has to be pointed out that the social behaviors of humanity seems to change, so that, the trans-humanistic vision about the future of the mankind, promoted by the globalism, which has a notable advancement, as to the traditional conception of the global structuring of life processes, the human persons are expected to be subject of a complete change in their mentality, thus becoming closer to the integral reasonability than to their intuitive nature, defined by a chaotic emotional life. Although currently, these are merely projects, in the future ten, twenty years or more, remain to prove the realism of such ideas. For the moment, a powerful identification of the individuals with the group or community might end in hard conflicts. These conflicts might be solved only by intervention of the destructive power, by threat and fear, which are considered to consolidate the identity between the individual and the group. Threatening might take different forms, and this mixture between the destructive forms of power and its integrative forms might conduct finally to the consolidation of a nation, rather than in the case of a religion.