If You Don’t Dominate, You’re Wasting Your Time
And if you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I originally published this on Medium during the pandemic, over three years ago. This was written six months before my last post, Fuggedaboutit, subtitled: Why gangster family values are not conducive to large-scale problem-solving, which centers on the values Donald Trump manifests as he makes his merry way to the eight or ninth circle of hell, at least, and why they are not helpful.
This post references DJT’s continuing belief that domination is necessary to get what you want. It is about the delusion that achieving domination will solve your problems. I’m sharing it now because it relates to what is happening in the Gaza Strip and all over the world in different ways and places. When a shooter goes into a restaurant in Maine and kills people with a gun, he is having a fever dream of domination, for a few minutes. The desire for domination by any group, any individual, only brings forth cruelty, suffering and death. Final solutions don’t work. Life always flows on.
Oct 12, 2020
You have to dominate. If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time. They’re going to run all over you, you’ll look like a bunch of jerks.
…the word is dominate. If you don’t dominate your city and your state, they’re gonna walk away with you. And we’re doing it in Washington, in DC, we’re going to do something that people haven’t seen before. But we’re going to have total domination.
~Donald Trump, in a call to state governors on June 1, 2020, sharing his idea of how to handle protesters.
Good luck with that. Anyone who thinks total domination is a viable path to anything other than destruction is drunk on 190-proof imaginary power.
Domination is a game for fools because its endgame ends the game. There’s no there there. The I-got-a-hammer-and-that’s-all-I-got approach is so focused on immediate gratification that it cannot see dynamic systems — cause and effect. It is a short-term solution that answers to the will, at the expense of understanding. Domination, especially Total Domination, applied to any living system, and carried to its logical conclusion, is death. It is stopping life. It is stopping the breath. Get off my neck. I can’t breathe.
Wannabe Total Dominators killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for long enough that his inability to breathe ended his life. But unless you go all in (out?) for a Final Solution (Hitler’s Big Idea), you can’t kneel on a whole group of people without that pressure eventually causing an opposite reaction. Domination may work for periods of time in particular places and circumstances, but Newton’s third law of motion — that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction — is always running in the background.
Your only guarantee of success (if you can call that success) is to kill everything. If your highest value and goal is to DOMINATE, why not attempt it in any way you can? Like taking over all the institutions that are meant to check your power and getting rid of anyone who stands in your way. And if ‘getting rid of’ turns out to require poisoning a few adversaries (or encouraging them to have unfortunate accidents) or killing thousands or millions of people, why not? In for a penny; in for a pound. In for Total Domination.
Only you’re never going to be able to kill everything, so your plan for Total Domination probably isn’t going to work in the long run. Ask Attila the Hun, Hitler, Idi Amin, and all the rest of them. Ask all those ruthless kings and queens, petty despots, bad bosses, bad cops, schoolyard bullies, etc. How’s it going? How’s that plan for total domination working out for you?
I’m not saying that tyrants, despots, and dictators, grand and petty, don’t cause enormous harm before their total domination plans self-destruct. The ungrounded will to power is a grave danger to anyone or anything in its path.
What I’m saying is that the will to power of the few over the many can only be the power of destruction — the power to censor, to suppress, to manipulate, to maim, and to kill. The total domination program always devolves into slash and burn, clear-cutting, fracking, live for today for tomorrow we go straight to hell.
There are many ways to frighten, confuse and control people. One problem: frightened and controlled people are not going to come through for you when the going gets tough. In every story about evil ones lusting for total domination — Palatine, Sauron, the Wicked Witch of the West — their armies, controlled by fear, always cut and run as soon as they see failure, while the loyalty of those inspired by love endures until the end.
An example of this:
Reality(’s) Rules.
One of our most notable traits, as humans, is the ability to imagine what is not yet actual and make it so. However, there’s a catch-22 that comes with that ability — a very important disclaimer in the fine print:
If what you create is not based on understanding cause and effect beyond your immediate goal, it probably won’t work (or worse) in the long-run.
We are dependent on reality because we are part of reality, and all efforts that ignore this simple fact will end in failure. There is no way that the human animal is ever going to make itself invulnerable to time, space, and natural law.
We humans are in a delicate spot at the moment. Either we figure out that natural law is the ground of our being, or those laws will hit the delete button on our species. Hammers won’t save us. Whether or not our species has what it takes to survive and thrive on this sweet planet remains to be seen.
What the world needs now, in addition to love, sweet love, are people with wisdom, vision, and good intentions. It needs us. We can use tools of connection and communication to amplify our voices. We can stand up for sanity, compassion and sustainable systems. We can feel deeply. We can act bravely. We can vote. We can make art.
Let life ripen and then fall,
Force is not the way at all:
Deny the way of life and you are dead.from the Tao Te Ching, by Lao-Tzu, translated by Witter Bynner
T H A N K Y O U ! ! !
Reading every post, Janina, and appreciating your voice. Thank You!
So... KEEP 'EM COMIN', which, by the way, also happens to be what I say to friends of my generation on their birthdays.