People Have the Power to Wrestle the World From Fools
Patti Smith, inner revolution, and the clarity that makes real change possible.
We’re living through a moment when every institution feels brittle. Trust is evaporating, governments are wobbling, and whole populations are sliding into fear, distraction, or outright numbness. Everywhere you look, people are asking who holds the power now—parties, courts, billionaires, algorithms, states.
But political power has never lived only in institutions. It has always depended on the clarity of the people, and on their capacity to align around a shared truth.
There’s a line from V for Vendetta that resurfaces whenever the world feels unstable: “People shouldn’t be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people.” The sentiment is familiar, but the part we forget is the mechanism. It isn’t rage that makes governments tremble. It isn’t protest alone.
It’s something far deeper:
a population that remembers how to think together.
Power becomes real only when the inner revolution happens first—when minds stop collapsing into fear or distraction and begin regaining coherence. When individuals stop outsourcing judgment and trust the clarity they can generate on their own. And when enough people do that at once, clarity stops being personal and becomes shared.
It was a song that recently reminded me what that looks like.
Patti Smith: People Have the Power
A Dream You Can Feel Before You Understand
Patti begins with a dream—not fantasy, but a dispatch from a deeper layer of mind.
I was dreaming in my dreaming…
Dreams are rehearsal spaces, where the psyche tries on possibilities it hasn’t yet managed in daylight—moments of courage or insight that haven’t solidified into action. They show us what the mind is working on when we’re no longer steering it: the tensions we avoid, the desires we hide, the patterns we repeat.
Most importantly, dreams let us experience ourselves without our usual constraints—identity, fear, habit. They give us access to a version of mind that remembers something the waking world interrupts: we are capable of more imagination and more power than our routines allow.
And sometimes a dream feels larger than the individual, as if many minds were brushing against the same truth.
That’s the territory Patti opens.
When the “I” Wakes Up Into a “We”
Then she shifts from the dream to the awakening:
I awakened to the cry that the people have the power
to redeem the work of fools.
This is recognition—a moment when something private becomes shared, when an “I” wakes up into a “we.” A sense that many minds are oriented toward the same truth at the same time.
The insight goes deeper than “people can act.” Patti is pointing to something more fundamental: people have the power to govern themselves. To provide direction rather than wait for it. She’s naming the dormant capacity of a population to think together—to reclaim authorship over the world they inhabit.
This is the earliest outline of what Rousseau called the general will—not majority rule, but the harmony that appears when enough minds become clear enough to resonate. Not the power to obey better, but the power to steer.
A Cure for Social Learned Helplessness
We live inside a civilization that has mastered the production of paralysis. Endless crisis without traction. A culture that oscillates just enough to exhaust us, never enough to change state.
But paralysis is only the surface. Beneath it lies maladaptive stability—a system clinging to its current state not because it works, but because change feels dangerous. Stability becomes pathology. Under chronic stress, the mind will often prefer predictable misery over unpredictable possibility.
This is the real architecture of learned helplessness: not passivity, but fear.
This is the climate Patti’s song enters. And it doesn’t whisper. It cuts through. Something unfree loosens. The line between “this is how things are” and “this is how things became” cracks open just enough for agency to return.
Reclaiming Power as a Cognitive Act
What this song calls “power” isn’t political force. It’s cognitive clarity.
Power is not might; it’s lucidity.
A coherent mind isn’t easily manipulated. It doesn’t confuse spectacle for leadership or despair for realism. It can tell the difference between what it believes and what it has absorbed. Coherence is simply what it feels like when your thoughts stop working against each other—when emotion, intuition, and judgment line up enough for you to act from the truth you already recognize.
Some works don’t soothe; they clarify. They bring the mind back into alignment and remind it of its own direction.
Patti’s song does exactly that. It’s less a message than a mirror: a reminder of the power that returns the moment thought regains coherence.
It’s Decreed the People Rule
The power to dream, to rule to wrestle the world from fools it’s decreed the people rule it’s decreed the people rule.
This is the pivot where power stops being abstract and becomes personal. Not domination. Not overthrow. Not a new hierarchy waiting to harden into the old one.
Self-governance.
What Patti names here isn’t the power of force, but the power of orientation—the ability to steer ourselves once we’re no longer driven by fear, distraction, or inherited loops. The “rule” in her voice isn’t about taking control of institutions. It’s about first learning to regulate the one domain we actually inhabit: our own minds. A people who can’t govern themselves internally will never govern themselves collectively.
Self-governance begins in the inner world long before it shapes the outer one. A population that can no longer imagine anything different cannot rule itself. But a population that can imagine clearly—and imagine together—is already forming the seeds of a self-governing society.
Wrestling “the world from fools” isn’t vilification. It’s correction—outdated systems losing their grip as clarity rises within the people they once managed.
The First Moment of an Emerging General Will
You can hear this pattern across the conscience songs of the last few decades—each one marking a shift:
Beds Are Burning — conscience ignites
Sunday Bloody Sunday — conscience collapses
Thunderstruck — power reanimates
Uprising — resistance reorganizes into clarity
People Have the Power — recognition of collective mind
By the time Patti arrives, the groundwork is there: the individual has awakened, faltered, remembered its voltage, and begun to reorient its defiance toward structure. Her song adds the missing piece—the shift from “I” to “we.”
This is the moment the “we” arrives—not as audience, not as demographic, but as signal. The chorus becomes shared rhythm. Something long scattered begins to align.
The “people” becomes a singular noun again—a mind waking inside a body made of millions.
Lyric excerpts from “People Have the Power” written by Patti Smith and Fred “Sonic” Smith (1988). Used here for purposes of commentary and analysis.