To answer that question, we can look to the sorts of formal, scholarly definitions crafted by well-credentialed academics. One such academic was the late Joseph S. Nye, who originally developed soft power as a formal concept. (See Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, Chapter 4, 04/05/2004.) Another academic, Rebecca Kivak, summarized Nye's conclusions as follows: "Soft power refers to a nation's ability to attract and persuade others through culture, political values, and foreign policies, fostering a sense of admiration and shared objectives...Soft power is the capacity of a country to get what it wants by endearing itself to others through attraction...Countries who use soft power rely on earning admiration." - "Soft and Hard Power," Kivak, EBSCO, 2025. Kivak also stated that "Soft power operates through the resources of culture, political ideals, and foreign policies...Culture consists of a country's values, ideals, and social practices, including its popular culture."
These formal definitions of soft power may be a mouthful to digest, but I'd like to focus on a few key words: namely, admiration, attraction, and persuasion. It seems reasonable that admiration would lead to attraction, and attraction would lead to persuasion. Admiration is the first step, the prerequisite to every other step in the process. How then does a person or a collective of people (up to and including a nation) go about earning admiration?
It is interesting (and bitingly funny in a dark sort of way) that the nations of the Global North sought to use propaganda as a tool to foster admiration in the people at whom the propaganda was aimed. Nye's book talks about how in the 20th century, the U.S., Britain, and Germany tried to use propaganda to earn points with audiences in Latin America and other nations of the Global South, and how even when Britain, the U.S., and Germany were at war, each tried to use its organs of propaganda to influence the citizens of the nation which it was fighting. Thus did propaganda and national mass media (including visual art, movies, novels, music, and TV shows) come to be counted as tools of soft power. This assessment of soft power was only partially accurate. To quote one former CCM musician who was defrocked after cheating on his wife in the first decade of the 21st century, "the lie is always cheaper than the truth." Propagandists who sell things that don't live up to their hype eventually get found out.
So then, what steps are required to build a durable foundation for admiration? Let's look at how a single individual might truthfully craft a persona worthy of admiration. It seems that the first thing such a person needs to do is to manage his own affairs well. In other words, what's needed is a person who provides for himself by means of honest work, a person who takes care of himself, a person who is not enslaved to addictions, a person who lives within his means, a person who to the utmost of his own personal ability tries to live an orderly, wise, and self-controlled life. The challenges to such a life are increasing in these days of rampant inequality, yet this ideal is what we should all be aiming for, as encapsulated in the quote: "...make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and attend to your own business and work with your hands, just as we commanded you; so that you may walk properly toward outsiders and have need of nothing." - 1 Thessalonians 4:11-12.
The second thing our admirable person needs is to cultivate and possess a useful skill, a skill or craft or competency that meets needs in the world at large, even as it says "And let our people also learn to engage in beautifully good work to meet necessary needs, that they may not be unfruitful." - Titus 3:14. The kinds of skills that meet the emerging needs of the 21st century will require setting aside regular daily and weekly time for self-cultivation and self-education. Acquiring these skills may also require enrolling as a working adult in continuing education classes and seminars taught by reputable teachers. I would also like to suggest that the ultimate goal of this self-cultivation should be to achieve full self-employment. But self-employment is just my own personal bias. YMMV.
The third thing our admirable person needs is to actively practice hospitality. This hospitality should consist of deeds of active charity toward others, and especially toward those who can't repay the favors shown to them by the person practicing hospitality. In the New Testament, this is seen in the hospitality shown by the Good Samaritan toward the man who was almost killed by robbers (Luke 10:25-37. Note that this hospitality was cross-cultural, inter-ethnic, and inter-religion!), and in passages like Luke 14:12-14 and James 1:27 and 2:15-16, and 1 John 3:17.
To sum up, a person who manages himself well, possesses and continues to cultivate an occupational skill useful in the larger world, and shows practical, material kindness and charity to those around him (especially those who are poor or marginalized or who can't pay him back) will be regarded by many as an admirable person. Such a person will then be an attractive person as well. That admirable character and attractiveness will make him a persuasive person. And his persuasiveness will not depend on expensive PR/marketing campaigns, propagandists or spin doctors, but on the genuine evidence of the person's genuine beneficial character. Now when we have not just one such person but entire collectives of such people, they can wield a tremendous amount of soft power. And the reputation, benevolence, and values of such collectives can serve as a powerful contrast to the societies in which these collectives are embedded when those larger societies have been taken over by autocrats, tyrants, dictators, fascists and others who want to create a world in which a select few get to Make Themselves Great by trashing everyone else.
Thus a key goal of the people who build parallel institutions in order to resist the society of the tyrant should be to cultivate this kind of genuine soft power. Those who are part of such parallel institutions should aim to earn the reputation of providing needed works or services which the society of the oppressor is unwilling to provide. To quote from "How to Undermine Authoritarian Control: On Empowering Parallel Institutions" (Goldman and Levin, Z Magazine, 2 April 2026),
As authoritarianism attempts to take root in America, there are several time-tested strategies from other countries and contexts on how to fight back most effectively when the ruling regime controls most branches of government. One strategy that has been especially effective across diverse geographic, cultural, and political contexts is building parallel institutions: filling the voids of government functions, services, and resources created by authoritarian regimes and their abandonment of obligations to the people. By showing government shortcomings instead of just talking about them, then organizing regular people to help fill those gaps, parallel institutions build alternative power and influence.
From Brazil to Ukraine and India to Sudan, parallel institutions have been effective at safely and peacefully undermining authoritarian control by taking care of people where the government won’t. [Emphasis added.]
When such parallel institutions cultivate themselves to such an extent that their soft power exceeds the cultural power of the autocratic society in which they are embedded, the collapse of the autocratic regime is only a short step away. This power reversal should be simple to achieve in autocratic or dictatorial societies, since the whole goal of the dictator or fascist is to create a society in which one small privileged group of people gets all the goodies of the society while everyone else is starved to death. I am thinking particularly of Russia just now as a nation that has been so thoroughly cannibalized by rich parasites that it is on the verge of economic collapse. As Russia's collapse is being aided and abetted by rampant elite corruption, the United States under Trump and the Rethuglicans has begun to head down the same path. In these days, let us who count ourselves among the resistance cultivate our individual and collective soft power!
