Power Analysis

When someone with power over you calls the disagreement a difference of opinion, the framing is doing work. Your landlord controls whether you have shelter. That is the arrangement. Describing it as a philosophical dispute about property removes the arrangement from the conversation while leaving it fully in place.

The same move is available wherever one party holds what the other needs: food, housing, medical care, a wage. Arguments about power tend to arrive already framed, and the framing is usually chosen by whoever the arrangement favors.

What you can trace

The graph holds 66 arguments across 7 domains, connected by typed edges. An argument about power enters it the same way any other argument does: find the node that matches the claim, then follow the edges out of it. Three things fall out of the walk.

Who the arrangement favors. A defense of an existing hierarchy rests on other claims. Follow the premise edges back and you reach them, along with the position they protect. The mechanisms are ordinary and on paper: statutes, contracts, titles, enforcement.

How it maintains itself. Defenses of concentrated power hold each other up. When one is answered, the argument tends to move to the next rather than stop, and the edges record which move goes where. Walking that circuit is how you find out whether it closes.

What the case for it leaves unsaid. The case against each argument is in the graph too, with its own nodes. A defense that only works while a particular objection stays unnamed will show that dependency once the objection is on the map next to it. Claims in the framework are typed as fact, frame, or contested, so you can see which part of a disagreement is about the world and which part is about how it is being described.

You can walk this in the node browser or see the whole structure at once in the visualizer.

Framings that do not look like framings

The reframings that work best are the ones that pass as description. Exploitation described as opportunity. Control described as freedom. A structural outcome described as a personal failure. Each of those has a node in the graph, an argument for it stated at its strongest, and edges out to what answers it.

Most political commentary treats a billionaire's tax preference and a worker's need for care as two positions of the same kind. Map a narrative onto the graph and you can see which nodes it activates, which it stays clear of, and who the avoidance serves.

Using it

Start with a claim about power you want to examine. Find the node it maps to. Follow the edges. The framework will give you the argument at its strongest, the response to it, and where the argument goes next. You do not have to accept its conclusions to use it. The only thing being asked is whether each step holds.

The install guide covers loading the framework into any LLM, which lets you work an argument through in conversation instead of by hand. The organizing and research pages cover the same graph put to different work.

Sometimes the walk ends the other way and the defense holds. The framework concedes facts and refuses frames, and when it loses on the merits the correction goes into the public record.