Symbolic Power is an idea that a French sociologist named Pierre Bourdieu came up with. He observed that those in power acquire and maintain their status through something he called the “habitus”—which is a fancy word “the rules of game.” Those “rules” are all the learned social behaviors you have in your tool bag, and they include both your bodily skills and your knowledge about “how to act” in a particular context.

Something very interesting about Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus is that the skills and knowledge that make up the habitus usually become invisible or unconscious to the people employing them after some period of time.

In other words, when you feel comfortable around someone or something, you usually forget that you’re comfortable. Bourdieu says that if you’re comfortable around certain people, it’s because they have a similar amount of power or status as you do.

If you feel less comfortable, or become more aware of a situation you’re in, Bourdieu would argue that that’s because your status is different from the person you’re interacting with.

Here’s a more concrete way of looking at that.

Have you ever felt a little shy when skating with a big name pro or company owner—or even somebody who was neither of those things but was a lot better at skating than you? My guess is “probably so.” It’s happened, at one time or another, to most of us.

Bourdieu suggests that shyness or awkwardness you feel is a result of interacting “symbolically” with that big name pro, acting in a way that corresponds to the meaning you hold for that person.

Remember the example a minute ago about the Sidewalk Guy? You knew immediately and intrinsically that his status was different from yours, and you acted accordingly.

Likewise, if you went skating with a Haffey, a Broskow, or a Yasutoko, you’d probably act a bit differently.

The tricky thing is that all rollerbladers are going around, doing their thing, but at the same time they’re acting symbolically toward everyone and everything else they encounter.

I’m being very careful NOT to say that what everyone is doing is “judging.” But I would say that everyone is constantly “assessing.” People know in an instant where everyone stands, and that whole complex process is both ongoing and inescapable.

Here’s a more direct way putting it: Everything you know and do in rollerblading, from how good you are at skating to who you know “inside the industry,” to how you act is all out on display for everyone to observe. Whether you want to be or not, you’re out there. And so is everybody else.

If you want something in rollerblading to be a certain way, and particularly if you want things to be your way, you have to have the ability to manufacture “what’s cool.”

You have to be in a position to control the symbolic interaction between people and things, so that everyone, no matter who they are or where they are, looks at things the way you do.

Very few people have this power. Frankly, most rollerbladers simply go along with the trends that become pervasive across rollerblading. From Pro-Designed kneepads to skinny jeans to Powerblading, there is always someone who made it happen.

Here’s the catch though.

According to Bourdieu, most people are unaware of the things they’re doing that maintain their status. In other words, few things happen in life because of some great conspiracy or huge power grab. Things happen because of a very subtle but complicated process of people interacting symbolically with other people and things.

So the way you act towards things plays a very important role in what’s cool, both now, and in the future.

If we go back, briefly, and look at the 4th of July example, you might now have a better sense, not only of how powerful the founding fathers were, but also in how subtle they were.

If you’re powerful, and if you know it, and if you know how to use your power, you can make things happen in such a way that nobody even noticed that you rewrote the history books.

Change almost always comes slowly, but if you possess a great deal of symbolic power, you can change things very dramatically and no one will even notice.

Thanks for reading.

-fs