C. Wright Mills on the facts of power and the ways of powerful

"The view that all is blind drift is largely a fatalist projection of one's own feeling of impotence…The view that all of history is due to the conspiracy of an easily located set of villains, or of heroes, is also a hurried projection from the difficult effort to understand how shifts in the structure of society open opportunities to various elites and how various elites take advantage or fail to take advantage of them. To accept either view--of all history as conspiracy or of all history as drift--is to relax the effort to understand the facts of power and the ways of the powerful“ C. Wright Mills