The image of mother and child — a stolen language
AI-assisted translation from the Greek. Greek original
Power is not a thing. You cannot point to it or touch it. It is a relationship — and it exists only when it is recognized.
And yet, for this thing without a body, people have knelt, obeyed, died.
How?
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Power invented nothing. It found something ready-made.
It saw the mother holding her child — the first experience of safety — and copied her. Not the act. The language of the act.
It said: “I will protect you. I will care for you.”
But it did not care as the mother did. It kept the form. Emptied out the substance.
There is something within us that does not think — it simply remembers. It remembers the warmth, being held, the first voice that said “you are safe.” That part of us — the infant who never entirely left — heard power speaking in the mother’s language. And obeyed. Not because it was persuaded. Because it recognized.
Reason was not deceived. Memory was activated.
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Somewhere in history — I do not know exactly when — someone hung the method on the wall.
The Virgin Mary with the child. The truest relationship — becomes an image, becomes an icon, becomes an object of veneration. And then they say: “The Church is Mother. God is Father. You are the child. Come to us.”
Why do I mention the church? Because it is the clearest example of a technique we might call *pre-emptive disclosure*: you show your method openly, before anyone has time to expose it. You put it on display. And call it sacred.
So if someone comes along later and says “look, they are using the mother–child relationship to make you need them — to come between you and God, to control access to the sacred, to decide for themselves what is sin and what is salvation, to make themselves indispensable,” the answer is ready: “Yes, we know. That is what we worship. That is the mystery.”
I am not saying this was a plan. Perhaps it was. Perhaps not. Perhaps it happened without them knowing. But the result is the same: you cannot expose something that is already venerated. The disclosure has already happened — and has been clothed in holiness. And if you try to point it out — you do not become the one who exposes it. You become the one who profanes it.
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The most stable power does not need violence.
Violence is often its failure. When it needs to strike, something has already cracked. Silent consent — when you obey without needing to be told, without a threat being needed, without force being expended — is the tool that costs power the least. It needs no army, no prisons, no surveillance. It only needs you to believe that this is how things should be.
The power that works best is the one you cannot see. You do not obey because you are forced. You obey because you no longer know whether what holds you is protecting you or restricting you.
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And when the mask falls? When not only the structure but the intentions too — hidden or open — are revealed?
It rarely speaks without disguise. Even then.
The torturer does not say to himself: “I torture because I enjoy hurting people.” He says: “I do it for the nation. This man is a traitor. I am protecting the innocent. It is a necessary evil.”
That is the story he needs in order to sleep at night. To look in the mirror and see something other than what he is.
A human being cannot bear to do harm without telling themselves they are doing good.
That is why power rarely speaks without disguise — even during torture.
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This did not happen yesterday. It has been happening for millennia.
Priests, kings, states, corporations — many speak the same language. “We care for you.” And behind the care, the chain.
Not always. Not everything is like this. There is genuine care somewhere too. The problem is how to tell it apart.
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And now it is extending beyond the human being.
Recently they decided: declare your olive trees. Not the olives you harvest — the trees that exist. Even if you do not take their fruit. Even if they simply stand there, on your land, untouched.
The tree signed nothing. It did not agree. It did not vote. It simply exists.
But you are called upon to declare it. To account for its existence.
And if you do not? Power does not begin with violence. It begins with a fine — something that seems reasonable, administrative, almost mild. Most people pay at this point, and that is the end of it. But if you do not pay, seizure follows — they take something that is yours. And if you resist the seizure, violence follows — the police, detention, blows. Violence is always there, at the end of the chain. You do not see it because most people stop much earlier. They obey at the first step. But the last step waits — for anyone who dares to go that far.
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Some people saw. From time to time, some people see.
And what happened to some of them?
They were honoured. They became philosophers, classics, chapters in books. They were absorbed.
Foucault described how institutions produce submission — how the university, the prison, the hospital and the army operate according to the same logic: classification, examination, discipline. And now he is taught within those very universities — which examine, grade, discipline and award degrees. His critique became a course. Students are examined on it. They receive a grade. And the system carries on.
Marx analysed how capital exploits labour. And now his analysis is funded by institutions that rely on capital. Conferences are held. Books are published. Sold. The critique of the system becomes a product of the system.
Christ entered the temple and overturned the merchants’ tables. He said they had made the house of God a den of thieves. And now? He is venerated in churches. Churches with hierarchy, property, power. The overturning became an icon. The icon was hung on the wall. And the merchants returned — in cassocks.
Universities are not neutral. They are institutions that decide what counts as knowledge, who has the right to speak, who receives a degree and who does not. They give you permission to think — and take it back if you do not follow the rules. The critique of power becomes a specialism. And the specialists draw their salaries from the system they criticize.
Disclosure can be absorbed. Become a spectacle. Become one more chapter.
I am not saying it always happens. But it happens often enough that you should not trust that seeing is enough.
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And the promise that one day everything will be revealed? That one day the truth will come?
That too may be part of the trap. The hope someone else gives you — rather than your own sight — can be a way of keeping you waiting. And while you wait — you obey.
I am not saying every hope is a chain. I am saying: pay attention to who gives it to you.
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And the person who sees the structure of the powers that govern?
They lose something that does not easily return: trust in the intentions of those who say they want what is good for them. What is good for the world. For the trees. For nature. For children. For the nation. For your soul.
It is not that you trust no one. It is that every “I want what is best for you” now sounds different. Every “I am protecting you” contains a shadow. Every “I am doing it for you” may be true — or it may be the same language everyone uses. You no longer know automatically.
That is the cost. Perhaps the gift too. I am not sure.
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What remains?
Not a new theory — it risks being absorbed.
Not a revolution — it may replace one father with another.
Not a denunciation — it may become a spectacle.
What remains is a question. Not a theoretical one — a bodily one:
Does anyone have jurisdiction over a tree? The tree was there before him. It will be there after him. It asked him for nothing. It owes him nothing.
And if he has no jurisdiction over the tree — why should he have it over me?
When did I agree that someone else would decide how much of my labour I get to keep? I do not remember signing. I do not remember being asked. I was simply born, and it was already like this.
When they tell me “we do it for the good of society” — which society? The one that did not ask whether I wanted to join it? The one that lets me live within it only if I pay the price of existing — on the terms of the many or the very few?
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This question does not abolish power.
But it strips away its apparent naturalness.
What does that mean? Not that power will fall. Not that it will be levelled. Perhaps it will never fall.
But the way you see it changes.
It is one thing to see a king in his robe — and another to see him naked. The king is still there. Perhaps he still has power. Perhaps he can still give orders. But you now see him as he is — without the cloak. Without the magic. Without the aura that made submission seem an honour.
Disclosure does not automatically bring freedom. But it brings something else: the possibility of knowing what it is that holds you. Of not mistaking it for something natural, inevitable, eternal.
And the moment something stops looking natural — it starts to become visible.