The Fishbowl of the Powerful

Every exercise of power produces a specific form of blindness in the person who exercises it. This is not a moral claim about the character of powerful people. It is a structural observation about the epistemological conditions that power creates. The factory owner of 1812 did not see the suffering of the displaced weavers not because he was a bad person but because nothing in his institutional environment required him to see it. His information came from other factory owners, from investors, from the market reports that measured productivity and profit. The weavers existed in his peripheral vision, if they existed at all, as a labor cost to be minimized rather than as persons whose suffering generated political obligations.