The Power of Powerlessness

At the climax of the first Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, young Harry meets his nemesis, the evil Lord Voldemort, who was functioning like a parasite being hosted in the body of one of Harry’s professors at Hogwarts. Voldemort makes the following declaration of his philosophy of life:

There is no good and evil, there is only power and those too weak to seek it.

Harry rejects this philosophy — and so should we all. It’s only the beginning of a seven-year-long...