A Few Rules on Power.

By: Christine E. Ohenewah, J.D. | September 28, 2025

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Christine E. Ohenewah is a Lawyer, Humanist, and Professor building a university that transforms how people understand and claim power. She is the Founder of The Elizabeth Tweneboah Foundation, where she is creating a new model of higher learning that builds creators over consumers and empowers individuals to construct lives aligned with their potential. Her flagship initiative, Men's Rea™, uses legal reasoning to help men build self-governance systems that drive them toward purpose. A graduate of Cornell Law School, Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and Macalester College, and former White Collar Investigations lawyer, her interdisciplinary work in legal and humanistic thought, power, and gender has been featured in Business Insider, USA Wire, and New York Weekly. She writes and speaks on masculinity, legal thinking, and the future of education, and serves as faculty at three universities in Criminology, Sociology, and Law and Ethics.

Here are a few rules on power.

Rule Number One:

Power respects power.

Rule Number Two:

Power is never given. It is taken.

Rule Number Three:

Power is just that: power. It need not be evil. It need not be just. It simply is.

I should preface this by saying that I am not enamored by Machiavellian principles, nor do I particularly care for them for deeper reasons. However, certain observations about power transcend my own philosophical allegiances.

On Rule Number One

Power respects power. Weakness respects power too.

Power need not be liked to be respected. Those who embody power recognize it in others. The same holds for those who do not. This recognition emerges from the primal instinct that there is an equal and opposite force which must be reckoned with.

Power respects power not necessarily out of admiration but of necessity at best––threat at worst. And those without power respect this too, although this respect is birthed from fear, resentment, and even the vicarious yearning to wield the same level of power uninhibited. The more devastating truth, however, is that the powerless respect the powerful because they have no choice.

On Rule Number Two

Power is never given. It is taken. If you must ask for it, you do not have it.

This rule is not meant to disquiet you, dear reader. It is meant to awaken. When one has been raised on narratives of empowerment that center permission-based advocacy it engenders one’s own suppression of power and questioning whether their own embrace of power is even permissible. I speak particularly as a woman who has unsuccessfully tried all my life to contort myself into uneven boxes as a means to mute my own power. I gave up.

If you must rely on others for your power, then you must naturally question where your freedom begins and ends and whether it exists at all. True power need not seek permission. True power need not declare itself. True power is omnipresent and felt even in silence.

One need only ask if any revolution in human history began by requesting permission. If any efforts toward conquest originated by asking “politely” to take over. If the day one stopped ceding their value to exploitative individuals and institutions was the day they first asked, “Is it okay if I do this?”

Understand that the moment you wait to be christened with power is the moment you surrender your power entirely.

On Rule Number Three

Power is just that: power. It need not be evil. It need not be just. It simply is.

Power is molded after the vision of its beholder. People often presume that power honors fairness. They believe that power necessitates deference to egalitarianism and utilitarian ideals––the greatest good for the greatest number. This is a mistaken belief. If you genuinely ponder it, power answers to no one. And it is readily available to those brave enough to possess it.

Indeed, the following fundamental truth about power exists: power is inherently neutral on its face.

Yes, power can heal, and it can destroy. Yes, power can liberate the oppressed and terrorize the oppressor in one sunset. It can inspire generations into greater enlightenment or devise propaganda to sedate millions into complacency. However, the moral quality of power emerges not from power itself but from the intentions, actions, and consequences of those who wield it.

Ultimately, power is a commodity desired by many, yet only few are willing to pay its full price.

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