Systemic Resources

Domination/Partnership

Articles/Essays/Op-eds

One study found that testosterone-related increases in anger and hostility did not affect assertiveness. However, another study found that high-testosterone students entered a room more quickly, focused more directly on their targets, and displayed a more forward and independent manner.

Testosterone is a steroid hormone that is associated with dominance behaviors in both animals and humans. Some of the ways testosterone is associated with dominance and status include:

Social dominance

One study found that adolescent boys who were perceived as socially dominant by unfamiliar peers had higher testosterone levels.

Status-seeking

Testosterone is associated with status-seeking motives in human social interaction.

Social hierarchy

High levels of testosterone promote behaviors intended to enhance one's status over other individuals and to climb up the social hierarchy.

Endogenous testosterone promotes behaviours intended to enhance social dominance. However, recent research suggests that testosterone enhances strategic social behaviour rather than dominance seeking behaviour. This possibility has not been tested in a population whose members are known to vary in social status. Here, we explored the relationship between pre-existing social status and salivary testosterone level among members of a rugby team at a Japanese university, where a strong seniority norm maintains hierarchical relationships. Participants played a series of one-shot Ultimatum Games (UG) both as proposer and responder. Opponents were anonymised but of known seniority. We analysed participants’ acquiescence (how much more they offered beyond the lowest offer they would accept). The results showed that, among the most senior participants, higher testosterone was associated with lower acquiescence. Conversely, higher testosterone among the lower-status participants was associated with higher acquiescence. Our results suggest that testosterone may enhance socially dominant behaviour among high-status persons, but strategic submission to seniority among lower-status persons.

  • Trump Knows Dominance Wins. Someone Tell Democrats. M. Steven Fish

    “Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. exerted dominance in liberal ways and to prodemocratic ends. They obeyed the law, told the truth, and honored liberal values.... (More recently), Democrats typically refrain from transgressive language and often present themselves as vulnerable and menaced....

    In a 2016 exit poll, more than twice as many voters said they wanted a “strong leader” than one who “shares my values” or “cares about people like me.”... Since the 1980s, the candidate who rated higher on “strong leadership” has never lost....

    High-dominance messaging necessitates unfailingly asserting your side’s moral superiority.... Psychologists have also shown that Democrats are conflicted about the appropriate use of aggression....

    (King said,) “It may be true that the law can’t make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me,” and affirmed “the weapon of love” and (used) language that expressed self-assurance and faith in the nation to establish moral superiority....

    Mr. Trump may sometimes pay a price for his extreme dominance style.” [read more]

  • Perceptions Of Social Dominance And How To Change Them, Marjorie Hecht.

    This article presents evidence that even infants are aware of and respond to social dominance. However, its proposed remedies are weak. Merely reducing income inequality somewhat and helping more people climb social ladders is insufficient. How many openings are there on the higher rungs anyway? The Top-Down System’s primary mission is to encourage everyone to relentlessly, energetically climb these ladders, dominate and look down on those below, and submit to those above — for personal gain. The solution is to establish a higher purpose for society and make justified, democratic hierarchies a means to serve that purpose rather than ends in and of themselves — in a Bottom-Up System. “Starting gate equality” that leaves losers on their own or in need of aid is inadequate.

  • The Willingness to Submit, By Wade Lee Hudson

    Conformity comes in many shapes, and often it’s rational. Unfortunately, society fosters irrational submission that undermines personal and collective empowerment. Determining if rebellion is justified can be tricky, but these decisions are essential, and engaging in effective resistance is critical.

    Many people please their teacher to gain good grades and please their boss to get promoted. They self-censor and avoid expressing their views on controversial topics to minimize the risk of job loss or career opportunities. They work for dictatorial employers who regulate their speech, clothing, and manners and threaten to fire them for their political activities, diet, or almost anything bosses care to govern. 

    [read more]

  • Why Trump Won’t Let Go of His Dream of Domination, Thomas B. Edsall.

    Dan P. McAdams: Trump’s unique personality profile — the high extraversion and low agreeableness, the narcissistic motivations, the “warrior” life story — seems perfectly suited to assume the authoritarian mantle at a time in American history when many Americans crave the security and exult in the excitement that such a mantle seems to confer. Even as he creates chaos, Donald Trump — as president of the United States — confidently assured Americans that he would deliver them from chaos. We will be standing safe and strong in the end. We will win. We will dominate…

    Kevin Smith: [Democratic Norms] are incredibly hard to institutionalize but, unfortunately, apparently much easier to destroy. And once they are gone, they may be incredibly hard to re-establish. If that’s correct, then the end result may be a political system that is indeed more open to shocks of unconstrained coercive alpha male behavior but also to unprincipled behavior among political elites more generally. If there are few costs and clear benefits to such behavior, what’s the argument for not seeking power solely to benefit you and yours and to heck with everybody else?

  • What Happens When a Woman Chooses Career Dominance Over Her Relationship, Jessica Grose.

    ...For women who didn’t want to take a step back, there were two additional barriers to success. One was “the pressure to give up what they saw as their relational style in favor of the hard-charging ‘masculine’ style the firm venerated in client interactions.” The second was that the mothers who did make it to partner were “routinely” belittled by colleagues as bad mothers and bad role models. ...Ely and Padavic interviewed one man who was, in their words, “resolute in his conviction that women’s personal preferences were the obstacle to their success.” This left him “unable to account for such anomalies as childless women, whose promotion record was no better than that of mothers. In his calculation all women were mothers, a conflation that was common in our interviews.” ... And this truth has echoes in economic research like that of Claudia Goldin, this year’s winner of the Nobel in economics. This week, in an interview about her award, she said, “We’re never going to have gender equality until we also have couple equity.” ...[The film] “Fair Play” at least understands that we’re a long way from that happening.

  • The Shame Industrial Complex Is Booming. Who’s Cashing In?, (behind paywall), Alissa Bennett, The New York Times.

    Where “The Shame Machine” seems to rattle off its tracks is in O’Neil’s discussion of what she refers to as “healthy shaming” — let’s call it a lateral punch. The lateral punch is the blow that we strike against people who do not share our social value systems; it’s the self-righteous bravado we feel when we tell an internet stranger, after the fact, to put his mask on; it’s the thrill of watching someone be reprimanded when they violate our understanding of how things should be. Though O’Neil outlines how the lateral punch often successfully influences behaviors that result in a genuine collective benefit (she provides Covid-19 vaccinations as an example), she neglects to fully excavate what role sheer pleasure plays in our impulse to shame in those situations that have neither obvious victim nor victimizer. It seems disingenuous to ignore what is quietly at play in even the “healthiest” of shaming: a request for compliance that is hinged to a threat of ostracization. The basic “us” versus “you” dichotomy that foregrounds even the most benign of shaming always stands in the shadow of the hierarchical tower.

  • The Shaming-Industrial Complex, Becca Rothfeld.

    ,,,the book ends by recommending that we “detoxify our relations.” It’s self-improvement that’s paramount. We should stop feeling shame, and we should stop inflicting it. “Don’t get outraged—or at least don’t make a habit of it.”

    But how much does it matter whether we make a habit of it? The suggestion that our emotional practices have such outsized political import belongs to a dubious theory of cultural change. There is little evidence that electoral havoc is an offshoot of private insecurities, to be discussed and dismantled on the psychoanalyst’s couch. Vicious gerrymandering and laws that continue to disenfranchise millions are at least as consequential as a handful of private outbursts.

    The force of shame stems from its status as a social condition, not from its emotional resonance. The bad feelings that shamings instill are incidental to the material injuries they inflict. No matter how supreme our sanguinity, how unshakable our equipoise, people who get raked over the coals online can expect to find themselves jobless in the aftermath,....

    “The trolling works only when the target is ashamed,” she writes sunnily, concluding that “shamelessness can be a healthy and freeing response.” But if fat-shaming is the result of the weight-loss industry’s machinations, we almost certainly cannot alter our feelings without altering the institutional arrangements that support them. Flanagan may be right that emotions are culturally specific—but we will still have to change a culture in order to change the emotions that it generates. How effective can a personal crusade really be when the gears of the shame machine go on grinding?

  • The Desire to Dominate and the Willingness to Submit, 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..." [read more]

  • The Gender Gap Is Taking Us to Unexpected Places, Thomas B. Edsall.

    “Women are just as competitive as men, Haidt wrote, ‘but they do it differently.’… Benenson writes:

    From early childhood onwards, girls compete using strategies that minimize the risk of retaliation and reduce the strength of other girls. Girls’ competitive strategies include avoiding direct interference with another girl’s goals, disguising competition, competing overtly only from a position of high status in the community, enforcing equality within the female community and socially excluding other girls.... The result of these two somewhat conflicting motives is that girls and women seek high status but disguise this quest by avoiding direct contests.

  • Apotheosis Now, Fara Dabhoiwala.

    “What does it mean when men are worshiped, willingly or not, as gods? …It also serves to mask the extent to which Western attitudes depend on their own forms of magical thinking. Our culture, for example, fetishizes goods, money, and material consumption, holding them up as indices of personal and social well-being. Moreover, as Subin points out, none of us can truly escape this fixation:

    Though we may demystify other people’s gods and deface their idols, our critical capacity to demystify the commodity fetish still cannot break the spell it wields over us, for its power is rooted in deep structures of social practice rather than simple belief. While fetishes made by African priests were denigrated as irrational, the fetish of the capitalist marketplace has long been viewed as the epitome of rationalism.

    …We all make our own gods, for our own reasons, all the time.

  • Why Everyone Is Always Giving Unsolicited Advice, Tressie McMillan Cottom.

    “Even though we resist being judged, we enjoy being the judge. Advice is a method by which we manipulate status to negotiate interpersonal interactions. By giving advice, we enact tiny theaters of social dominance to signal or procure our social status over others…” (read more)

  • Cultural Transformation Theory.

    “Cultural transformation theory (CTT) was introduced to a general readership in Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade (1987). It has since been the framework for many other works…, CTT contradicts the conventional notion of a linear progression from “barbarism” to “civilization.” Based on archeological and mythical data, it proposes that the earliest cradles of civilization oriented more to the partnership system until, during a period of chaos, there was a shift in a dominator direction. It further proposes that today it is more urgent than ever before that we reverse that shift — and work together to accelerate the move from domination to partnership.”

  • The Desire to Dominate and The Willingness to Submit.

    “Changing laws and structures can help cultivate compassionate community. Controlling or overcoming the desire to dominate and the willingness to submit is also important. So long as humans are driven by these emotions, legal and structural reforms will be limited in their effectiveness. Advancing holistic and systemic transformation requires understanding why humans are prone to dominate and submit.”

  • Justified Domination.

    “Individual liberty is valuable. Self-determination enables co-equal partnerships, nurtures cooperation, and helps build strong communities, which benefit individuals in a virtuous circle. Limits to individual freedom are essential, however. The classic example is a child running into traffic. How to define and enforce justified domination is not easy. Doing so can provide massive loopholes that undermine efforts to dissolve exploitative domination…”

  • The Human Crisis, Albert Camus (1946 lecture).

    “The SS and the German Officer no longer represented man or mankind, but rather...the triumph of a doctrine… 

    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... 

    ... 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... [read more]

  • What Makes a Cult a Cult? Zoë Heller.

    “The line between delusion and what the rest of us believe may be blurrier than we think... The problem with any psychiatric or sociological explanation of belief is that it tends to have a slightly patronizing ring. People understandably grow irritated when told that their most deeply held convictions are their “opium.”... The analytical mind may be quietened by cult-think, but it is rarely deadened altogether.” [read more]

Books

  • The Holy Thursday Revolution, Beatrice Bruteau.

    “Drawing from a wide range of disciplines Bruteau presents a unifying vision of a world that must move from…domination to one of equality and sharing… Presents [jesus’] two teaching events of Holy Thursday -- Footwashing and Holy Communion -- as entry gates into a new way of living and loving in a world of domination, power, and separation.”

  • Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson.

    “The human impulse to create hierarchies runs across societies and cultures, predates the idea of race, and thus is farther reaching, deeper, and older than raw racism and the comparatively new division of humans by skin color.

    In a world without caste, instead of a false swagger over our own tribe... we would look upon all of humanity with wonderment… Being male or female, light or dark, immigrant or native-born, would have no bearing on what anyone was perceived as being capable of… We would all be invested in the well-being of others in our species if only for our own survival, and recognize that we are in need of one another more than we have been led to believe. We would join forces with indigenous people around the world raising the alarm as fires rage and glaciers melt. We would see that, when others suffer, the collective human body is set back from the progression of our species.

    A world without caste would set everyone free.” [read more]

Videos

  • “Women Are On Fire,” Alicia Garza.

    "A woman said I don't control the channel changer in my house.... I've got to change conditions in my house, I've got to change conditions in my neighborhood, I've got to change conditions where I work."

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