Like many postmodern thinkers, Foucault is onto something really good, but then makes it absolute. In the following section he makes some observations about power that I think we should listen to.
How often do you hear of people blaming a particular pastor or Bible College or or community or organization for their problems? It's never that simple. The winds of power are not centralized nor are they controlled by individuals. Moreover, the 'victims' often buy into power and so share the blame too. It's only because you believed the ideal that you were so hurt by the reality.
Anyways, here's Foucault:
[Power does not result] from the choice or decision of an individual subject; let us not look for the headquarters that presides over its rationality; neither the caste which governs, nor the groups which control the state apparatus, nor those who make the most important economic decisions direct the entire network or power that functions in a society (and makes it function): the rationality of power is characterized by tactics that are often quite explicit at the restricted level where they are inscribed (the local cynicism of power), tactics which, becoming connected to one another, but finding their basis of support and their condition everywhere, end by forming comprehensive systems: the logic is perfectly clear, the aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one is there to have invented them, and few who can be said to have formulated them: an implicity characteristic of the great anonymous, almost unspoken strategies which coordinate the loquacious tactics whose 'inventors' or decision makers are often without hypocrisy.
History of Sexuality I, p. 95
