On domination and its bankruptcy

Good morning, friends.

Let's talk about domination.

Human history has been one long process of domination. Men dominating women. Races dominating other races. Religions dominating other religions. Nations dominating other nations.

What has that gotten us? Have we improved as a species? Yes, it's a truism that war advances technology. But is it a truism? Is it a truism simply because that has been the default of human civilization?

I wish to conduct a thought experiment. Imagine a culture, a worldwide human culture in which domination and power dynamics were not at play. A culture in which all human beings were able to fulfill their full potential without having to kowtow to powers and principalities. A culture which valued exploration and knowledge over force and wealth acquisition. I speak of a culture in which every human person was secure in his or her status, could pursue education to every level, had a basic standard of comfortable living. A standard of living which allowed every human person to explore their full potential, and contribute to human advancement.

We have that happening in many ways. NASA has deployed a space telescope, the James Webb, which is rewriting cosmology by the day. We have ordinary people exploring how to provide limitless, clean energy to humanity from basically out of their garden sheds. The Internet we now so revile began as a Utopian experiment. I was there. I saw it. I spoke to people from around the world. We exchanged ideas, stories, lives. 

But these are exceptions in the culture. The culture in which we live is one of domination. Of power. Of people and corporations and states seeking to exert control to continue and enhance their privileges and wealth. They see nothing of worth save their own power. Everything is a zero-sum game. Woe betide you if you're on the losing end of that ledger.

This, I will argue, is untenable. It no longer meets the needs of this global culture. A Xi Jinping amassing power for himself is an anachronism. He thinks himself an emperor in the old mold. His self-aggrandizement would fit in quite well in the time of the Ming. But in an interconnected world where problems are both global and local, he and those like him are no longer fit for purpose. They are dinosaurs before the asteroid. 

The crises we face are not solvable by power politics. They are not judicable by laws which are dead letters. Climate change cares not for national boundaries, or the nostrums of the central committee. We have global, existential problems which call for global action. 

Domination is like the human appendix. It serves no function in the body, but is a vestige, and a vestige which can send you to the hospital, or to death. As a species we must bring the time of dominance to an end. If we don't, that appendix will burst, and there will be no doctor available to treat it.

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