The Desire to Dominate and the Willingness to Submit

By Wade Lee Hudson

Exploitative domination and submission produce fear; justified domination produces trust. Whether it’s done directly with interpersonal intervention or indirectly with legislation, domination of those who violate the rights of others is justified. It reduces the fear that poisons relationships and fosters exploitation.

Learning to control or overcome the desire to dominate or submit for personal gain nurtures compassionate action. The more you’re driven by the desire to serve rather than by ego, the more you can support others individually and help establish democratic-equality structures throughout society.

Ideally, power is a last-resort tool to protect human rights, not a means to personal status in the eyes of others. Recognition is icing on the cake.

In August 1949, Jiddu Krishnamurti presented a talk titled “Why do we want to dominate or be subservient to another?” His comments included:

To be open in relationship is very painful… Is not domination a process of separation which destroys relationship?… Domination becomes a means through which we can take flight from ourselves…

[At times] this unconscious desire to dominate takes the guise or the cloak of service, of love, of being kind, and so on… Can there be love when there is domination? Can you be in relationship to someone whom you say you love, and yet dominate? Then, surely, you are merely using; and when there is using, there is no relationship, is there?… So, the first thing to understand is the desire to exploit people, which means the desire to have for yourself power, position, prestige…

But such a process denies a search for truth, the search for reality… If we are caught in sensation and belief, then we will use others… But [being in relationship] requires a great deal of honesty; that entails an aloneness, which can be understood only when one has been through loneliness, and has gone into it fully, completely. And as most of us do not want to go through the pain, the sorrow, of facing the complications of our psychological states, we are distracted by these exploiters; and we like to be exploited. It requires a great deal of patient awareness, of freedom from identification with anything, to understand, to grasp the whole significance of reality.

Exclusive identifications — whether with religious dogma, political ideology, political party, nation, race, or any other narrow identity — result in rigid in-group demonization of out-groups and predefine how you interpret reality. They protect you from having to struggle with unexpected experiences. They protect you from seeing reality for what it is and admitting mistakes. They help you avoid the pain of freedom.

The importance of vulnerability has been addressed by Brene Brown, who believes:

Vulnerability is hard, and it's scary, and it feels dangerous… [It involves] uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. It's that unstable feeling we get when we step out of our comfort zone or do something that forces us to loosen control… [She affirms] having the courage to show up when you can't control the outcome… To love is to be vulnerable, to give someone your heart and say, “I know this could hurt so bad, but I'm willing to do it; I'm willing to be vulnerable and love you.”… You do vulnerability knowingly or vulnerability does you… It is so much easier to cause pain than feel pain, and people are taking their pain and they're working it out on other people… Show up, be seen, answer the call to courage...'cause you're worth it. You're worth being brave.

Martin Buber’s influential 1923 masterpiece I and Thou also challenged exploitative relationships. With society’s “I-It” attitude, Buber wrote, relationships ”can never be spoken with the whole being…. I perceive something. I am sensible of something. I imagine something. I will something. I feel something. I think something…. This and the like together establish the realm of It.” Other human beings “becomes an object among objects.”

In contrast, Buber’s “I-Thou” relationship involves spontaneous, honest, compassionate, equal, mutual dialogue that engages one’s “whole being,” during which each party is completely present, without reserve, and cares for the other unconditionally — communicating spontaneously from the heart, open to whatever may emerge. Buber affirms, “If I face a human being as my Thou, and say the primary word I-Thou to him, he is not a thing among things, and does not consist of things.” I-Thou relationships are characterized by dialogue and “total presentness,” with each participant being fully concerned for the other person. For Buber, this “genuine contemplation” unlocks itself “in the mystery of mutual action.”

Simone Weil proposed a similar mode of self-transcendence. Merve Emre says Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through is inspired by Weil’s “doctrine of attention.” She writes, “Each conversation the narrator has is an exercise in attention: an occasion for her to shed her sense of self and to wait to receive the being she is looking at, just as she is, in all her truth.” She then quotes Weil:

The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing. The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: ‘What are you going through?’ It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labeled ‘unfortunate,’ but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction.

Krishnamurti, Brown, and Weil affirm a willingness to “grasp the whole significance of reality,” however it unfolds. Making this personal commitment is key. It precedes action.

Adopting the I-Thou attitude and being open to honest encounters brings no guarantee of mutuality. The other may be unable or unwilling to engage fully as an equal. You cannot force I-Thou relationships to happen. You can only be open to their emergence. Disappointment may result. And when mutual encounters do happen, pain may result. Paying attention to another’s suffering and being open to all reality without fear, or having the courage to set aside fear, is not easy. Trying to dominate, becoming submissive, and adopting rigid beliefs are often attempts to avoid this pain and fear.

In her critique of paternalism, Elizabeth Anderson addresses the superior attitudes that Krishnamurti describes as a “cloak of service.” She criticizes “luck egalitarians” who say the imprudent “are entitled to special paternalistic protection by society against their poor choices” due to alleged limited capacities. But Anderson considers this paternalism to be disabling. Rooted in domineering, superior attitudes, it provides “helpers” with a sense of identity and self-esteem, but it undermines democratic equality and peer community.

It is hard to see how citizens could be expected to accept such reasoning and still retain their self-respect... Luck egalitarians ought to be able to argue that some outcomes are so awful that no one deserves to suffer them, not even the imprudent. Negligent drivers don't deserve to die from a denial of health care. 

Luck egalitarians fail “to treat these unfortunates with equal respect and concern.” Anderson argues instead that everyone is entitled to the means to a decent life throughout the course of their life, regardless.

The egalitarian attitudes affirmed by these authors involve a personal commitment to control or overcome both the exploitative desire to dominate and the willingness to submit to exploitation. This effort involves setting aside ego, the need to be recognized for great accomplishments, and the drive to climb social ladders and look down on those below. Only then, with humility, can you form egalitarian relationships and cultivate democracy.

Ideally, reliable employment, a sense of national unity, healthy families, and supportive faith communities help provide a foundation of security that nurtures trust and cooperation. However, worsening social conditions on many fronts are aggravating fear, competition, and the desire to dominate or submit.

Unfortunately, most activist efforts to deal with these social problems inflame fear and use domineering strategies. In particular, activists rely on the old definition of leadership: a leader is one who can mobilize followers to do what the leader wants. They presume to have the answer and believe they simply need to build enough power with their own top-down organizations to impose it. This approach undermines the growth of the participatory, democratic communities that are needed to build popular power.

A commitment to democratic, collaborative leadership and a willingness to compromise holds more promise. How to structure this decision-making is complicated. There’s no easy answer or one method. Possibilities are included in the Social and Political proposed actions. Regardless, solutions must involve personal commitments to constantly seek co-equal partnerships and reconciliation. With these commitments, activists can minimize the exploitative domination of submissive members — and focus on the justified domination of those who violate human rights.

The same analysis of domination and submission applies to foreign policy. America must stop affirming a definition of leadership that involves persuading or coercing other countries to do what America wants. In our globalized world, no one country or group of countries can dominate. Instead, the world needs liberal democracies to strengthen cooperative alliances that make joint decisions about how to advance liberal democracy — with the understanding that the best way for each country to do so is with the power of example.

Over the course of almost 200,000 years, the lifestyles of most hunter-gatherers deeply embedded egalitarian cooperation in human nature. More recently, for some 10,000 years, agricultural lifestyles have nurtured accumulative, competitive, and militaristic tendencies. Self-awareness can help humans counter these tendencies and tap their deep-seated “inner hunter-gatherer.”

In a 1946 lecture in New York City, Albert Camus said:

Inside every nation, and the world at large, mistrust, resentment, greed, and the race for power are manufacturing a dark, desperate universe... [with men] captive to abstract powers, starved and confused by harried living, and estranged from nature's truth, from sensible leisure, and simple happiness... They are no longer protected by mutual respects… We know perfectly well that the venom is not gone, that each of us carries it in our own hearts... 

Reflecting on these realities, Camus recommended:

Put politics back in its true place, a secondary one... This world must...become the world of men and women, of fruitful work and thoughtful leisure… [Advance] the spirit of dialogue... All other efforts, however admirable, that rely on power and domination can only mutilate men and women more grievously.

His words still ring true. Compassionate in-groups can nurture communities that treat out-groups with respect.