There are two forms or components of power, says Curtis Yarvin:
- Punishing those who do things you don’t want.
- Rewarding those who do the things you want. Very often the result is that they change their minds and do things they were doing just for the reward, and they start to want it themselves.
This is how power works in any marriage or group of friends, but it’s also how political power works. It also follows that the real holders of political power may not be governments and courts directly, but other institutions altogether. For example, Czech public television, which targets someone and causes them to be fired from their job (the specific case of one of our teachers). The government actually has no such power, or it would be very difficult for them to use it. Czech public television has this power.
Or the various political NGOs, which can create such an atmosphere of fear around you that few dare to publicly admit to contacts with you, and no newspaper dares to put you on the page. Even the police do not have such power.
This is important for understanding that formal power is only a small part of political power and that, for example, the editors of Czech Television have more power within the governing coalition than all the members of currently ruling party.
But it also means that the opposition has this undefined but important political power. Andrej Babiš was Czech prime minister and yet for some people it was devastating to work with him. Even today there are workplaces where you can’t fly the Ukrainian flag without becoming disabled and having to find another job.
The difference is not just that the pro-government structures have more resources. The difference is that they are much more rational in their use of power than the opposition. For example, they know what to enforce and what not to enforce. Opposition to the war is punished among the supporters of the five-party coalition, but a different view on covid or the number of sexes is not (and in the last two years, a different view on Muslim migration is no longer punished). This is how political movements work. Religious movements, on the other hand, cannot admit that some heresies are actually acceptable