powerlessness

powerless | American Dictionary

powerless
adjective
us/ˈpɑʊ·ər·ləs/

powerlessadjective (CONTROL)

without the power to do something or to prevent something from happening:
[ + to infinitive ]The government seems powerless to do anything about the rising price of oil.

Examples of powerless

powerless
The powers that previous mayors enjoyed were seriously impeded, and they became powerless to solve citizens' economic and social problems.
Disruption of these connections leads to despair, perception of life as meaningless, and the self as powerless.
But its elements of stability may be powerless to prevent the conversion of an institution to a service for which it was never intended.
All nineteenth-century melodramas suggest a need for radical change in the lives of the powerless and the oppressed, and in this they are inherently radical.
The attention to the practices of performances, therefore, makes clear the policies are not simply acting on passive, powerless performers and audiences.
For most royalists such a settlement promised only a limp, powerless church and a disorienting religious pluralism.
He is somewhat cognizant of this, especially as he parts with his savings, yet remains powerless to stop himself.
Throughout the ages, political entrepreneurs have sought, often with considerable success, to deflect blame for their country's woes to powerless groups.
Cities were not entirely powerless to pursue some forms of aesthetic enhancement, even when those efforts interfered with private property rights.
Statistics, preeminent among the quantitative tools for investigating society, is powerless unless it can make new entities.
American characters are a problematic locus for identification because they are powerless in this novel.
These developments seem explicable only in terms of powerful factional interests which the primate was powerless to resist.
They will be considered not to have knowledge and therefore will be powerless.
Our country has become poor and powerless, like a broken thread.
But these portrayals were also double-edged in that they contributed to the passive and powerless image of women.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.