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Writer's pictureAlexander Manasyan

Property, knowledge and faith. As sources of power and domination.

Aleksandr Manasyan Doctor of Philosophies Sciences, Corresponding Member of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia




The article substantiates the idea of force as a universal phenomenon in inanimate, in animate nature, as well as in a society in which it acts as a factor in the regulation of social relations.


The key concept of the general idea is the concept of social power, the main sources of which are property, faith and knowledge. Social power is the ability of one subject to influence another, to impose his point of view (will) on him.


Social strength is an innate feature of any human society, just as the force of gravity of any body. If there is a community of people connected with each other, then it is endowed with social power by the fact of its existence. The immediate observable source of all forms of coercion, power, domination is social power.


Social power is the engine of any political and economic process and its guiding companion. The society of people that enters the struggle for power acts as a political force. Property, faith, and knowledge differ from other factors in shaping society in that they have functioned steadily throughout human history, forming power-oriented societies. It is obvious that the emergence of property is associated with a natural necessary need of man. In order to live, a person must acquire, create, have at his disposal goods that meet those needs: food, clothing, shelter.


The phenomenon of property is related to the natural need to have the goods that meet the vital needs of man. In the course of the reproduction of social life, the energy invested in the instruments of production is repeatedly reproduced during their use, it turns from a material force into a social force, ensuring the power of the ruling minority over the disadvantaged majority.


As a source of power, private property began millennia ago and still engenders a relationship of domination. Already at the stage of slavery, the social power of the slave owner flowed from the lands, the instruments of production and the slaves used as labor, which he owned. Often these days, the owner’s power over the means of production is not direct control over them. They are mediated by financial capacity, securities, key management positions and the right to control information flows. The person or group of people for whom property is a source of social power is commonly referred to by the common name as economic person. Faith also had and has tremendous community building potential.


The principle underlying it knows no boundaries of nationality or class. He has been and remains a counterbalance to the material beginnings of power. The motto of Christianity “not only bread” in a condensed form expresses the transcendent role of spiritual values outside the material realm for the meaning of life. The ideas of the ancient peoples about the inner connection between power and knowledge are fixed in the Latin saying “Scientia potentia est” (“Knowledge is power”).


The principled role of knowledge in the beginning of industrial civilization, thanks to Francis Bacon, found its general reflection in the formula “knowledge is power”, which this time, in contrast to its use in previous periods, marked a new trajectory of social development. The role of the natural and social sciences varies considerably in political processes. If the inclusion of natural knowledge in property relations becomes a source of social power, then social knowledge becomes such, bypassing property relations. The investor of natural and technical knowledge is an economic person who pursues victory in economic competition. The investor of social knowledge in the public consciousness is a political person who aspires to political power.


The struggle for power in its purest form is a struggle of socio-political concepts, social projects that competing parties are trying to introduce into public consciousness. The implementation of any large-scale scientific project related to the country is a matter of state competence, which today embodies the politics of a person who came to power in a “party costume”. He should be the main customer of social knowledge.


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