When people think of power, they ususally think of the more obvious 'dark' variety - I think star wars puts it well, the dark side of the force is quicker to learn and more obvious, but it is not more powerful - or at least it certainly doesn't have absolute power, because otherwise there would be no resistance in anybody's mind - infact the opposing power of commradery and disdain for oppression is powerful enough that the whole planets of jedi fight for it, and even if they were enslaved, they would in mind not be convinced.
Whenever in history there has been rebellion against tryanny, whenever things have gone differently because of the mutual support and friendship people have, whenever people fight in wars to protect their families, that is all driven by a powerful force of care for each other. Even if people don't feel able to physically act on how they feel, the commradery and friendship can be strong. It also doesn't have total power yet, but people are moving towards it all the time when they grow disgust towards oppressive techniques and look for another way, sometimes they just have to know that there is another way...
Commradery/friendship has no leaders and no heirachy, everyone is an equal and ally, at most there is an honour system which people choose themselves. On the other hand, the oppression system works on hierarchy and is maintained by fear, it all unravels if you can take that away and convince them.
Part of this came up because one of the sales people at work described one of my managers (candice) as power hungry (which she seems to be because she excersises that muscle beyond necessary, but has a good heart in other ways - but most of the sales people don't see that). Candy did change her tactics at one point and improved a bit, but the overall motivation appears to be to win people over to get done what she needed - the key thing though was that she started trying to use incentive a little more and win over the mind, that means she must be starting to use the good side rather than suppress it. She will resort to suppressing if she runs out of ideas though, she cares too much for the company for how it treats all of us, but obviously I can't say that because it'll seem hostile, I'll let her grow tired of it herself, and silently we'll all lead by example and maybe inspire through words :)
An interesting article:
control power vs persuasive power in business
star wars
