Word: assent
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...hold power is to have at your disposal blunt instruments. But without influence, power dies out at the end of its own channels of command. To have influence is to gain assent, not just obedience; to attract a following, not just an entourage; to have imitators, not just subordinates. Power gets its way (when it gets it). Influence makes its way. And in free societies it makes its way further...
...unfair advantages of influence is that it's generally more popular than power. When influence is in the right hands, its effects can seem agreeable in a subtle sense of the word, as something we assent to, even when any such agreement may be partly a matter of being stupefied into submission. (This is what we mean by the influence of pop culture.) "When I exercise power, I immediately generate resentment and opposition," says Amitai Etzioni, chief promoter of the sometimes influential idea of communitarianism. "When I influence you, you love what...
...Five Gospels said it loud and proud. An introduction announced that "the Christ of creed and dogma, who had been firmly in place in the Middle Ages, can no longer command the assent of those who have seen the heavens through Galileo's telescope." The Seminarians circulated papers among themselves and met twice a year to vote on more than 2,000 separate pieces of scripture. They conceived a mediagenic means of voting: for each Gospel verse, each voter dropped a plastic bead in a bucket. The bead's color signified the scholar's opinion. The book quoted one participant...
Well, we're sorry. And to make it up to you, we are finally doing some serious fashion. Going professional, where everyone's thin bodies wear identical clothing and everyone' pretty heads assent in unison to a mindless beat. And we thought we were cool...
...those who do not agree? John Paul's most recent encyclical, Veritatis splendor -- The Splendor of Truth -- makes it clear that clerics and theologians are bound to a "loyal assent." He has imposed the equivalent of ecclesiastical gag orders on those who, he feels, have challenged church teaching, including Kung, American moral theologian Charles Curran and Brazil's Leonardo Boff, an exponent of Liberation Theology...