I have been thinking about dominance since I heard Trump call to ‘dominate’ protestors.
I have a physical response to the word dominate. I can feel myself pull back a little, shrink down. The word is loaded with threat.
I think of the dominance of one dog over another. The dominant dog assumes behaviour that escalates until the other dog submits often by making itself entirely vulnerable. To the death if necessary. Dogs will pee on each other to assert dominance, attack each other and make life a living hell for the other. The drive to dominance is a very primal, survival linked pattern of behaviours and actions.
Dominance escalates until it is the only presence. Dominance requires force. Dominance requires power and might. Dominance is about power over and in human culture, it is the calling card of patriarchy and white supremacy.
Dominance will have you disregard a human response in order to shoot someone down, literally or figuratively. Dominance will have you pick up a perceived “weakness” and pile on. Dominance had one man sneer while another man called for his mother as he realised the presence of his own death. Dominance is undoing the human connection and replacing it with animal hierarchy that has nothing to do with values or moral compass or furthering humanity.
We are in a cultural liminal space where the choices we make matter. Do we want to be engaged in a battle for dominance? Do we want to piss on each other or do we want to stand with our shared humanity in between us and start from there?
Naïve? Maybe. But I wonder if we have been so socialised to think that the only way we can work as a species is via dominance and hierarchy.
What if it’s not naïve but rather offering a way that humans can live into their more evolved parts of their brain. Live creatively, live in a way that challenges the status quo. Live in a way that is mutually respectful.
Who loses? Do Indigenous people lose when they are no longer stolen from? Do Black people lose if white people say black people’s lives actually do matter? Do people with disabilities lose if we build cities and learning and social lives where access is baked in? Do people who are disengaging from the gender binary somehow lose when we put male/ female in the rubbish and leave it there? Do LGBTQ folks lose when we say, “love is love” and mean it? No.
Do able bodied cis gendered straight well white people lose if these changes are made. Also, and more emphatically, NO. We get to live in a world where we have strength through diversity, where we are more humane; where our humanity is not contingent on a tiny number of the possibilities of what it is to be human lining up like the fruit on slot machine. It’s a world where we all get to win.
The only ones feel like they lose when we disengage from Dominance are the white people. The white people who through our own trauma carried the need to dominate with us when we spread across the planet. We have, each of us, in our own background been either (to quote Dr Estés) been “vanquished or vanquishers”. Each of us have that lineage of trauma. That epigenetic urge to get on top this time round, this urge to dominate. Those drives, those unexamined parts of our culture, those make us feel like we are losing, but there is another way to look at that.
If we deal with our personal and our collective trauma, tend to our shadow in both those realms, we might have a chance to have a leadership, build a community that doesn’t require a pissing contest.
But the thing is this work requires us to look at some ugly shit. It pushes us into our own suffering and it makes us see things we really don’t want to see. What have we been trained to do with the ugly stuff? Surprise! We dominate it. We think “This stuff sucks. There’s my weakness. I will dominate this. I will push it away. I’m better than that.” We have an internal dominating pattern that shuts us up and keeps us apart from the very things that will help us create lasting change.
The internal drive to dominate perceived weakness is strong. Self-compassion is the soft hand on our own shoulder that stops us turning away. We have to learn to engage another more constructive way with our perceived weakness and failings. For me it’s self-compassion and engagement with shadow. For me it’s using creativity as a force for healing. For me it’s getting connected with other humans (and some animals!) who are willing to be vulnerable, who are willing to lay dominance at the door. It might be something different for you but my take is that if there’s dominance in our approach, there’s much to be undone.
Dominance is best left to dogs.
If we can somehow manage to ditch dominance as our default, we might have a chance to stand and work together. Have a chance to use our creative minds, our generous hearts, our wise bodies and our souls that are so longing for a different way. It’s time.