Avmakt.
I think I discovered an untranslatable but very useful word today. I don’t know how I was reminded of it, but it’s great. (I’ll show you, later on.) The word is avmakt, which is Norwegian for “the opposite of power”. I went through a thesaurus and none of the antonyms of “power” captured the precise meaning of this word.
It’s being powerless, but not any old powerlessness. One newspaper ran a feature earlier this year listing the top ten avmektig people in Norway. If the word was just about being powerless, you’d expect to find beggars, drug addicts, the terminally ill, those kinds of people. People who are stuck in an impossible situation, completely lacking the tools necessary to get out of it. Those people are powerless. But instead, you get journalists, politicians, priests, a spokesman for the right to privacy in information technology, smokers, the pro-Europe movement. Hardly helpless people living on the street. What gives?
Avmakt is more the peculiar feeling of being part of a system you are powerless to direct or change, and knowing it. It’s not about being on the fringes of society or lacking in basic liberties or facilities, it’s rather about being stuck squarely inside the system, with various symbols and signs of wealth and nominal power, forced to watch how money, position and “democratic rights” still leave you powerless to change or direct the system. The feeling of being a cog in the machinery, of powerlessness in the face of the Man, of being unsure what exactly you want or how to achieve it or even if it can be achieved, but knowing that whatever it is you want it’s not the status quo. The feeling that the system humiliates you: it swallows you whole, it gives you a host of privileges and then forces you to watch as each of them prove to be worthless when it comes to effecting actual change. On top of that, you get to feel guilt ‘cause you’re part of the system after all and so infinitely better off than billions of other people in the world.
Isn’t that close to what people felt when the Obama wave died down and reality turned out to be close to what came before? When you get caught up in economic downturns you didn’t cause, fucked over by a gigantic chaos-theoretic monster of a system that nobody can predict and that lulls you into the false security of wealth and then implodes at random intervals, showing you that a stack of papers representing “power” in the system can represent the value of heating your house with cellulose the next day? When half the world is sounding the Doomsday bells over global warming, the other half is busy denying it, and no one is in a position to make anyone take action to prevent it? When society sucks and the only rebellion there is, is ambivalent about itself and the whole idea of rebellion? You’re not powerless, not on the bottom rung of society, you’re simply powerless to change what really matters.
Well, that’s avmakt. Those are some connotations of the word. Those are some good ways to describe 2009. Some reasons I wish that word was in the English language. It’s like it was invented to describe modern life. You’re bored, you’re dissatisfied, you don’t know what you want except it’s not this, you see societal injustices you hate every day, but you can’t muster the energy to really hate them or do anything about them, because the system has installed you on a pedestal of privilege from which there’s a perfect view of all the things that being an entitled white twentysomething in 2009 — be thankful for what you’ve got, ungrateful fucker! — cannot change.
The word was imported from Low German, so I assume it has some kind of cognate in Dutch and German, but I don’t think there’s a widely-used word with such convenient connotations in English.
