Theories matter because they shape what we notice. They influence what questions we ask, what kinds of causes we look for, and what kinds of solutions seem reasonable. A theory is not just a way of talking about the world. It is also a way of organizing attention. It tells us where to look and what to treat as important.
This is one reason why social theories matter so much. They do not remain in books and classrooms. They often shape research, journalism, activism, institutional language, and everyday conversation. They affect how people interpret inequality, conflict, responsibility, and change. When a certain way of seeing becomes common enough, it starts to function not just as one theory among others, but as a broader paradigm (as described by Kuhn): a background model of how social reality works.
In many contemporary discussions about social problems, one such paradigm has become especially influential. It is not always stated directly, and it does not look exactly the same in every context. But it often relies on a familiar binary: the powerful and the powerless, the oppressors and the oppressed. According to this model, society is understood mainly through divisions between those who dominate and those who are dominated. Social problems are then explained by identifying which group has power, which group lacks it, and how the first group harms or limits the second.
This paradigm did not become influential for no reason. It helped many scholars, activists, and institutions notice patterns of domination that had long been ignored or normalized. It helped name real injustices. It helped draw attention to institutions, representations, and habits that systematically advantage some while disadvantaging others. In that sense, it has been important. It would be wrong to dismiss it entirely or pretend it has revealed nothing of value.
At the same time, the fact that a paradigm has been useful does not mean it is always adequate. A way of seeing can illuminate some things while obscuring others. It can solve one problem and create another. It can become so familiar that its assumptions begin to feel natural, even in cases where they simplify more than they explain.
That, I think, is what has happened with the binary paradigm of power. Its main weakness is not that it is completely false. Its weakness is that it often becomes too narrow to describe the complexity of social life. It trains us to look for one-directional power, clear moral roles, and identifiable sources of harm. It encourages the idea that if we can find the powerful side and the powerless side, we have already explained the situation. But social reality is often more tangled than that.
Power is not something that one side simply has while the other side simply lacks it. People can be constrained and influential at the same time. They can benefit from one structure while suffering under another. They can participate in reproducing patterns that also limit them. They can make choices, but only within conditions they did not choose. They can be responsible in some ways without being fully in control of the larger systems in which they act.
When we begin from a binary model, these more complicated dynamics are easy to miss. We may focus so strongly on domination that we stop asking how harmful patterns are reproduced through habit, fear, desire, loyalty, aspiration, confusion, institutional incentives, inherited meanings, and ordinary forms of participation. We may become so used to sorting people into moral positions that explanation starts to collapse into blame. We may speak as though the main task is always to expose the bad actors, when in fact many social problems persist not because one group consciously designs every outcome, but because large numbers of people keep participating in patterns they do not fully understand and do not fully control.
This is where a different paradigm becomes necessary. If the older model begins from a division between oppressors and oppressed, a complexity-based model begins from a different assumption: power and powerlessness are intertwined. Social life is shaped by relationships, structures, meanings, constraints, and uneven forms of agency. People affect one another, but they also act within systems that affect all of them. Power does not disappear in this model. Inequality does not disappear. Domination does not disappear. But none of these are treated as simple or one-dimensional.
A new paradigm, however, cannot justify itself by critique alone. It is not enough to say that older approaches are too binary or too moralizing. A theory proves its value by helping us understand something better. It must make something visible that remained poorly explained before. It must help us ask better questions and arrive at fuller accounts of how social problems actually work.
That is why the real test of a complexity-based paradigm is practical as well as theoretical. Does it help us interpret social reality more adequately? Does it reveal dynamics that the binary model tends to overlook? Does it lead to more thoughtful responses?
Consider, for example, a familiar topic such as media representations of gender. Some binary or strongly asymmetrical frameworks might describe the issue in the following way: media often reflect and reinforce male power by centering men as active subjects and women as passive objects, by normalizing unequal expectations, and by limiting what women are allowed to be. This kind of analysis can reveal something important. It can show how representations are connected to wider patterns of inequality. It can help explain why certain stereotypes are not harmless.
But it does not explain everything. It may tell us too little about why women also participate in reproducing these norms, why many men are rewarded by gender expectations in some ways but constrained by them in others, why audiences often desire representations that also harm them, or why harmful images persist even when no single actor can easily be identified as the source. It may not be able to say enough about the interaction between market forces, emotional needs, cultural fantasies, insecurity, status competition, family expectations, and learned habits of self-perception. It may identify domination, but it may not fully explain how such patterns are reproduced.
A complexity-based approach would not deny that power is unevenly distributed. It would not deny that some gender norms privilege men more than women. But it would ask a wider set of questions. It would ask how various actors participate in sustaining the system, how meanings become internalized, how vulnerability and advantage can coexist, how institutions and desires reinforce each other, and why people often help reproduce patterns that they themselves find painful. Such an approach does not make the problem disappear. It makes the explanation fuller.
This matters because explanation affects response. If a problem is understood mainly as the result of domination by a clearly identifiable group, then the implied solution often becomes equally binary: expose the powerful, condemn them, remove them, reverse the hierarchy, or redistribute the advantages. Sometimes such responses may be necessary. But they are often not sufficient. A more complex understanding may suggest that change also requires rethinking institutions, transforming habits, questioning inherited meanings, redesigning incentives, and developing ways of speaking about responsibility that do not depend on treating one side as fully free and the other as merely acted upon.
The goal here is not to replace one oversimplification with another. It is not to deny that oppression exists, or that some people have more room to act than others, or that structures can be deeply unjust. It is to resist the temptation to make those truths do all the explanatory work. Social reality is not divided neatly into those who act and those who are acted upon. The same person may experience both. The same system may empower and constrain. The same pattern may be maintained by coercion in one place, aspiration in another, and unconscious imitation somewhere else.
This is why I think a move from binary power to social complexity is necessary. Not because complexity is more fashionable, and not because it makes moral judgment impossible, but because it gives us a better chance of understanding what is actually happening. A theory should help us see more, not less. It should help us hold on to inequality without reducing everything to inequality, hold on to responsibility without imagining total freedom, and hold on to power without treating it as a possession that simply belongs to one side.
If the older paradigm helped reveal some dimensions of social life, that should be acknowledged. But if it now limits what some people and institutions are prepared to see, then it is not enough. We need an approach that can account for domination without reducing all relationships to domination, and that can take suffering seriously without assuming that suffering automatically produces clear knowledge or moral purity. Most of all, we need a paradigm that can describe social problems in a way that is closer to how human beings actually live: within overlapping structures, partial agency, unequal power, real vulnerability, and meanings they inherit, resist, reproduce, and change.
That is the promise of a complexity-based theory of power. It does not offer the comfort of simple villains or simple solutions. What it offers instead is a more demanding but more useful way of seeing. And if a theory is meant to help us understand the world so that we can act within it more wisely, that may be exactly what we need.