Guest post: Dominator structures
Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Feminism requires saying “This is not for you.”
I think the problem there, Bjarte, is that Capitalism and Socialism are both “dominator” structures. According to Riane Eisler, the ideal to strive for is the “partnership” model. So the struggle is framed as Left v Right, when it really should be framed as trust v demand, or order v mutual respect. I realize that what Eisler is referring to is an ideal form of society, and I’m not sure that we are capable of reaching for it as we are presently driven towards power.
When we talk about politics, we tend to fight each other based on the notion that either “right” is good and virtuous, or “Left” is the virtuous side, when neither is good nor virtuous. So, until we can rid ourselves of the dominator hunger for power, we will continue to struggle to find any sort of achieving equality for the minorities whehter they are sex, race or cultural. Authoritarians need to have someone to blame for their struggles in order to get more authority, and authoritarians populate nearly all of the ideologies on the left-right continuum.
When left-wingers talk about how evil capitalism and colonialism are, they conveniently ignore the coercion that it takes to convert a society from monarchy to a socialist society, as in China and Russia. And with XI’s moves to retain power over the weekend by purging those who were not his allies, we can see that even a capitalist-communist hybrid is not immune from being a dominator society. The Soviets made this clear when they told people that their usage of force was necessary in order to evolve into the New Soviet Man.
Pressing for diversity makes people feel good, but in the end, there is an aspect of coercion that is required. Whether it’s justified, as in bringing racial and sexual minorities into the power structure, or not justified in the examples of pressing for fake pronoun usage and male access to women’s private spaces, there is still a power exchange.
Eisler, being a futurist, is certainly aware that we can’t force a partnership culture (that would certainly be antithetical, that we perhaps have to evolve into it. I think that once we stop thinking of our possibilies as being limited to a left-right scalar, we will nudge towards that, but it’s so hard to talk about politics as they are without devolving into it. The reason that I remain a Democrat despite their capture by the TA’s, is that most of their social programs align with my perceptions of my needs and the needs of people I know about. But I recognize their limitations and am active so that I can try to influence them from a local standpoint.
Transactivism is a function of male domination, which is why it’s accepted and pushed by left-leaning men. It’s a socially acceptable aspect of male domination, and if conservative men figure that out, they’ll support it, too. We know that if affirms the gender structure, they haven’t figured it out yet.
Feminism at its ideal is in tune with the partnership model, which is why it struggles so hard to gain traction even among women. I see so many women who are mistaken in thinking the purpose of feminism is in using oppression to seek special favors in society, It’s hard to get through, because the dominator model is the medium we swim in and depend on, much as fish depend on water.
We can’t fix all this in ours or the next or the next generation, since we currently see through the lens of a balance of power. Once we get past that, in however many centuries from now, then we can advance as a society. In High School, the Catholics taught us that we need a “second Copernican revolution,” but instead of in technology, we need it in terms of a societal change in how we see each other. I had hope for the Church as a Catholic teen, but then realized in a confession one day, just how authoritarian it will always be and must be, because they are nothing without power and will never give it up willingly.
I don’t think a revolution could move our world into a partnership model, I think only evolution could do that. Revolutions are coercive, and you end up being in a battle against counterrevolutionaries to maintain what you achieved. But partnership is an ideal we can strive for now, if people can discard their reliance on a left-right model where all your political opponents are “extremists” on one end or the other. It’s still a hunger for power either way.
Thanks for fronting this, Ophelia, but I realize how much my writing needs to improve.
I cannot agree.
@#1: Me neither.
In the 1960s, the major political battles were largely in reaction by the youth of the day to conscription for the war in Vietnam. That in turn was a colonial war, in which the moral issues were pretty stark.
In turn, those engaged in the youth rebellion were on constant alert for ‘control freaks’ – a wonderful descriptor. One such I knew then was described by many of his fellow rebels as ‘a Stalin out of power.’
Authoritarians such as Stalin and Hitler are nothing without their military machines to back them up; in turn supervised by a KGB or an SS.
Unfortunately, the overthrow of an oppressive and/or colonialist regime requires a military force, and the overthrow process creates plenty of people who lose their privileges and social status in the process, and thus look for allies bent upon revenge and restoration.
Authoritarians (eg as in feudal Europe) have traditionally found their power through control of armed force (mediaeval lords spent a lot of their time in military training and in learning such skills as swordsmanship.) Women who wished to avoid subjection had to in the main learn other skills, though there were some spectacular exceptions, such as Joan of Arc.
The Iberian Peninsula was slow to get rid of feudalism, and before it did so had exported its social arrangements to its American colonies, which became plagued long after with police states and military dictatorships. Likewise, pre-Reformation Catholicism was organised on feudal lines, and it reinforced authoritarian power structures wherever it went, with the modest professed aim of total global domination; as with fascism and communism.
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. And where there is a control-freak with a will, he can find his own way to power way; for sure. In fact Hitler produced a book or a film entitled “Triumph of the Will.’
“We can’t fix all this in ours or the next or the next generation, since we currently see through the lens of a balance of power.”
Longtermism holds that future generations must be safeguarded, as those not-yet-born have the same rights as those alive now, which more often than not means ignoring the needs of those suffering today because humanity is full of unrealized potential that must be protected at all costs Silicon Valley leaders, from Tesla’s Elon Musk to Peter Thiel of Planatir Technologies, wholeheartedly endorse this ideology. (Jake Pitre “Who owns the future?” The Globe and Mail, Oct. 15 2022 O8)
Response to climate change may hasten changes.
The everlasting economic growth machine is still held to be real and achievable in the minds of the financiers in the present day. (Amanda Rees & Charlotte Sleigh, “Human”, 76-77
Consider the investment in EVs. Collaterally this requires expansion of the grid for recharging and mining (including deep sea mining) more minerals, including rare earths, for batteries. There is a conflict between the benefits of clean batteries and the rights of people who live on top of the materials needed to create them. (Ian Morse “Who Gave The Battery Such Power?” September 29, 2022 https://www.noemamag.com/who-gave-the-battery-such-power/) Are personal cars really so important that swapping them for zero-tailpipe-emission ones must consume a significant chunk of climate financing, material and time? (Paris Marx, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/697233/road-to-nowhere-by-paris-marx/) Maybe we have to make changes within the ‘system’. Paris, the Netherlands, London … now limit personal vehicles.
Individual change is not sufficient. Local community change is possible within the ‘system’ (e.g. Ellen LaConte “Life Rules” and others)
The impact of climate changes may force changes in priorities of current power structures. Would I rather eat or have the latest iPhone?
I really enjoyed this analysis, but I take issue with the idea that conservative men will be on board with ‘transgenderism’ when they realise that it affirms male domination, because I’m reasonably certain that they already do.
Conservative men, however, see it as left-wing men grabbing power; and since it’s only the men in political opposition they feel any rivalry with, they’re going to oppose the movement on those grounds whilst still being in favour of ‘transing the gay away ‘ in their own children.
After all, we’ve seen what happened to abortion rights in the US: as soon as the left decided to make abortion rights a matter of party politics, the right felt duty-bound to oppose them, despite conservative women being major users of the service. Elsewhere, abortion rights have been seen as a medical issue, and have been supported across party lines. In other places, they’ve been seen as being anti the dominant religion, and have been pre-emptively banned; here in Ireland, it required cross-party support for a referendum to change the constitution, which could only happen once the country had become a truly secular state.
Conservative men see their political allegiance as already conferring power over women and children; they don’t want to share with left-wing men.
That sounds very nice, but once again I’m strongly inclined to think the deeper problem is human brain wiring. It’s the fatal flaw of every model.
Except it was the right that decided to make abortion rights a matter of party politics. Roe v. Wade wasn’t all that controversial when it happened; in fact, the Southern Baptist Convention supported abortion rights. But when the right was searching for an issue that would bring them back to power, hopefully permanently, they found that issue and ran with it. And groups like the SBC had a takeover of radical religious rightwingers, and the rest is history.
Thank you, iknklast, I stand corrected.
@Omar, #3:
Unfortunately, the overthrow of an oppressive and/or colonialist regime requires a military force…
Not necessarily, e.g. the Arab Spring and earlier revolutions throughout the XXieth century (most of the time in Eastern block, though certainly not always neither). All of these political events might even be most close to what Mike called evolutions, and they were certinaly revolutions too in a way. Though everyone of them illustrates a fairly bad weakness in the process of countering an abusive regime or an abusive law, or an abusive situation: if it doesn’t overthrow violently the power structure in place, it remains and everything can start back again, so that the evolution may be a failure (I am not implying that revolutions aren’t failures neither, in my opinion they are, most of the time). That’s the pessimist point of “evolutions”, hierarchical structure is so deeply engrained in our collective psyche that nothing has ever been imagined to bypass it. The sad thing is that people are often not really convinced, if they were things would evolve spontaneously for the greater good. Instead, we have history.
… and the overthrow process creates plenty of people who lose their privileges and social status in the process, and thus look for allies bent upon revenge and restoration.
I’m unsure this is a generality, let alone a specificity. Most people who lose privilege and status following a revolution are not trying to get revenge. It’s mostly those who lose command, i.e. the oppressors in chief, that do. This is probably due to the fact that people know that restoration is actually impossible, from an individual standpoint, nothing can really get back to previous state. Grossly the stakes are high and benefits really low.
While the loss of status is still a very good point and in my opnion explains why we do nearly nothing to mitigate climate change: citizens of Western societies are well aware this would require getting rid of lots of unearned privileges, so they let it to inertia.
@John Wasson #4:
The impact of climate changes may force changes in priorities of current power structures.
Only when people have lost their consummerist privileges and are beginning to endure consequences, and then commit to organise for a political change involving doing something about climate. This is only beginning for the poorer among us. I think this will more probably lead to fascism than anything else, given the current trends in democracies everywhere, unfortunately. And this is of course what we are discussing here, authoritarianism as an innate posture, which is massively reinforced as a trend when the situation is bad enough.
Would I rather eat or have the latest iPhone?
I don’t have an iPhone (and never had), but I’m spending a great amount of time securing food production. I want to be ready when this becomes an issue. Most of people I talk to about this tend to think I should better start learning how to use arms, and this is also the point of the discussion we have here. I think if these times come sooner then expected, aggressive dominators will be backed up. I think –or at least hope so, that solidarity and sharing will take an important place in the post-industrial-abundance world, even if only the very basics will remain. This might well be a local community future.
tigger, you’re welcome. It can be difficult for a person living in one culture – even one as similar to ours – to know all the nuances of the political history of another culture.
Some of my friends will just double down when I try to point out that they have a major point wrong.