The term Dichotomy is defined as " a division or the process of dividing into two mutually exclusive or contradictory groups or catagories."

If human power per se is divided into two general catagories as societal power and individual power, then they will naturally be seen s contradictory - and a power dichotomy will quickly form.

There are a number of obvious and subtle reasons for this. One of them is that the management of societal power systems requires the control and containment of individual power within them.

A close examination of even benevolent societal power systems shows that power potentials of individuals must be shaped (or programmed) so as to fit thus and so within the societal contours.

This means that individual power, which is INTERNAL and indwelling, usually cannot activate and unfold of, and as itself.

Rather, the activation and unfolding (if any) is shaped and limited by societal forces EXTERNAL to the individual.

The existence of the conflict between individual and societal power is amply recorded in history.

What is not pointed up is that the conflict itself arises largely because human power is seen only within the scope of the two viewpoints, and which form a dichotomy.

Thus, power is typically seen in an either/or kind of way - either as individual or as societal - and cognitive intelligence is therby forced to pop back and forth between the limits of those two opposing and often contradicting options.

In the larger overveiw of all human activities, the on-going conflicts within dichotomies remain in place until it is realized that the dichotomy itself is nothing more than two rather artificial parts of one larger thing that has made the two parts possible.

In the case of the power dichotomy, the larger thing consist of human power per se, and from which both individual and societal power download.

In this context, it would be quite obvious that if human power per se did not exist, then neither would the power dichotomy that has formed within it.

So, a more fundamental way to think of power is not via the two-part dichotomy, but as a three-part triad.

As a resource, even the so-called powerless are power sources in terms of laboring, tax-paying, "wage-slaves". The tiny power elite and the large reservoirs of the powerless form two mutually exclusive and contradictory groups. However, both are irrevocably bound and held in disproportionate balance by the accepted levels of ignorance, social conditioning, and stupidity.

-- 8ball (side@pocket.com), April 11, 2001