On disempowerment and oppression

Like many a new employee I started out with great enthusiasm and drive.

Like many an employee within this particular organisation I became crippled by inaction and the inability to effect change. As a result, like many an employee within the organisation I unfortunately became cynical.

This is how it happened.

I tried to do my work in the best way I knew how - by getting stuck in and going for it. It had worked in my previous jobs, so I assumed it would work in this one. When barriers were put in my way I tried to find ways through them or around them. That seemed to work for a while until I started trying to address the fact that there were barriers in the way in the first place. So I began trying to tackle the internal hurdles to action. When this was met with resistance I began to question my colleagues: Why didn't they want to make things better? After some time I realised that most of them had followed a similar path to me and had ended up feeling hopeless and helpless.

This story seems to me a classic one of disempowerment.

Disempowerment (v): to deprive of power, authority or influence.

So what happens when someone is disempowered?

Well, from my experience at work, they either get angry and fight, or get angry and leave, or, worst of all, they get cynical and stay. This last outcome perpetuates the system that creates the cynicism in the first place. Dealing with people that have given up is painful, disempowering and toxic to an organisation's internal culture and ability to get things done.

In the grand scheme of things my experience of being disempowered is really not that bad. I have the option of leaving my job (and thus the source of my disempowerment), a luxury that many disempowered people around the world do not have.

This experience has got me thinking more about how disempowerment affects those people with little or no options to change the situation in which they are living. I don't for a moment want to imply that my experience of feeling disempowered in my workplace is comparable to that endured by people living lives in which they are completely disempowered - I'm thinking here of people that live in poverty or who live under oppressive regimes. What I do think, however, is that the nature of the experience of disempowerment is similar, it is just on a scale of magnitude that is completely different.

It seems to me that there is a spectrum of disempowerment that goes from the trivial through to the oppressive. My experience is certainly closer to the trivial than the oppressive, however, I think that the options for action remain the same regardless of where one's experience of disempowerment falls on the spectrum:
- to fight;
- to leave (flight);
- or to become cynical and essentially give up and accept disempowerment as a given.

If this is the case, then my question is as follows:
Is terrorism a justifiable action by those living within an oppressive regime and for which leaving is not an option?

I don't feel adequately informed to reasonably and/or responsibly answer this question, but what I can say is that from my experience, giving up is not a desirable course of action but rather a position one is likely forced into taking if the other options are not possible, plausible or palatable.