Power operates by attaching avoidance alternatives that restructure what a person wants

Evidence

In a very elementary or interactional sense power is always a code – that is in so far as it attaches at every stage avoidance alternatives to the action-selections whose transmission is being sought, thereby immediately doubling the possibilities under consideration. As has been shown, this duplication, typical for a code, makes it possible to attach an unwanted outcome of the power-subject to a wanted outcome of the power-holder. A person who wanted to study as a student becomes someone who did not want to be called up for military service, because of, and just because of, conscription, and thus the issue is brought around to the complemental nature of wanted and unwanted outcomes, capable of being decided in the context of power. Through power, what started out as diffuse impulsiveness and the spontaneous striving for social goals become an ‘unnatural’ distribution of the wanted and unwanted as a precondition for specific actions. This is the starting point, a necessary prerequisite for every increase of power. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 642

Categorization

• XREF: The conscription example is a perfect miniature of Stevens’s substitution: the butler who ‘wanted to serve’ becomes someone whose wants are entirely restructured by the power code of his master’s household. — connects to: Efficient power governs by pleasing and making people dependent, not by forbidding — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 45
• STORYSTEM: The mechanism — power recodes genuinely sought goals into merely-avoided alternatives — is a compelling engine for a character whose desires are quietly overwritten without them noticing.