Hello Michel Foucault

Next week, our reflections turn to Michel Foucault. He was a thinker who spent his life tracing how power operates not through kings or laws, but through the quiet systems that shape us every day.

Foucault’s philosophy begins with a simple but disturbing insight: control in the modern world rarely looks like control. It isn’t the whip or the prison wall that disciplines us, but the rules, institutions, and categories that define what is normal, acceptable, or true. Schools, hospitals, prisons, and even our social media feeds do not just manage people, they direct them.

He invites us to look at the world differently. Instead of asking “Who holds power?”, Foucault asks “How does power move?” He shows that power isn’t a possession but a relationship; something that flows through language, policy, education, medicine, and surveillance. It rewards compliance, shapes behaviour, and convinces us that we are freely choosing what we have already been trained to desire.

For Foucault, knowledge itself is never neutral. What we call truth is built within systems of authority. Experts, institutions, and the disciplines that decide what counts as fact or fiction, control us all. To question those systems is not to reject truth, but to see how it is made, maintained, and defended.

Assuming the relentless news cycle provides the opportunity, I will explore how his thinking illuminates the headlines: the management of justice, the politics of education, the rhetoric of work, and the hidden logic of bureaucracy. Foucault does not offer comfort; he offers clarity.

He reminds us that freedom begins with the ability to see how we are being shaped, and to resist when necessary.

In a stark warning to the modern world, Foucault may have an insight into the danger of allowing systems to dictate policy without oversight and without actual reason. Organisations, businesses, communities and government may be sleepwalking humanity in to slavery to the system (whatever that is). With artificial intelligence permeating every aspect of modern life, we may be allowing another instrument of the economy to shape what we are.

Is there hope? In Foucaults words , “Where there is power, there is resistance.” The task is to recognise both.