Domination begins at home

But it doesn't have to

Photo by Marco Bianchetti on Unsplash

We don’t come into the world ready to discipline ourselves. We have to learn it.

I was a skinny kid. Too tall, and blind without my glasses. A weakling, a target. I learned early on the power of eye contact: I could out-stare anyone. People would come up and hurl some kind of insult or question at me and I'd just look through them, my expression blank. I enjoyed unnerving my tormentors. 

The question launched at me most frequently was "Are you anorexic?" I knew by the disgust, the screwed up face, that it was a bad thing to be an anorexic, but I didn't really know what the word meant. I figured they didn't either, but after this insult followed me around, year after year, I decided I might as well figure out if I was, indeed, this thing. 

I found The Golden Cage and read it in three days. I determined I wasn't, in fact, anorexic. But that book was the gateway to self help, a genre that kept me company throughout my adolescence and beyond. I loved the bullet points, the charts and pyramids on the page. I loved the stories of miserable people becoming happy people after following a series of steps. 

It wasn't too much of a jump, as I entered adulthood, from self help to productivity: bullet journals, highly effective people, themed and unthemed planners. Troubles anticipated and managed before they arose. Tasks moved from undone to done by the day's close.

I write this as if I'm no longer in thrall. But here's something I read last week, from a best-selling productivity book. It’s a list of habits I can use as a model, Ben Franklin-style, to improve myself:

Meditation. After I pour my cup of coffee each morning, I will meditate for one minute.

Exercise. After I take off my work shoes, I will immediately change into my workout clothes.

Gratitude. After I sit down to dinner, I will say one thing I'm grateful for that happened today.

Marriage. After I get in bed at night, I will give my partner a kiss.

Safety. After I put on my running shoes, I will text a friend or family member where I am running and how long it will take.

I confess that when I read the above, I put the book down. Who has to make a plan to kiss their partner at the end of the day? What would happen if they stopped reminding themselves? What is the author discovering in his one minute of meditation, standing in the kitchen with the last of his coffee perfuming his upper palate? What is it like to approach connecting with Spirit, or one's beloved, in the same vein as putting on a pair of shoes? 

I sound like I’m enlightened, yeah? But when I check my email or go through my to-do list I have more in common with this author than I’m comfortable admitting. So much uncertainty is walled off when the focus is on pushing forward; so much reassurance is thrumming away in the background when I know there are millions of people out there, ordering their lives in the same way I am, checking off their lists, kissing their partners at the end of the day, gathering around the table, Norman Rockwell style, to tell each other the thing for which they’re thankful. 

I was busy disciplining myself for years before I learned about Cartesian dualism; the superiority of the intellect over the body’s wants; Augustine's Confessions, his story of wrestling his lust to the ground and substituting prayer and virtuous action; Freud's id, rising up with its dark tsunami of desire to threaten the functioning social order, and the punishing, moralistic super ego's answering of that threat, battering the id into a temporary, resentful submission. These, the primary logics of Western individualism, rendered benign in the watered down cheerful prose of countless paperbacks, stacked beside my bed.

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In a time of such comprehensive physical, psychological, and ecological brutality, it can seem a bit precious to be talking about self discipline as a form of violence. Shouldn’t our focus and attention be out there, where the real violence lives? So I looked up the difference between discipline and domination.

Here’s American Heritage on discipline:

• Training expected to produce a specific character or pattern of behavior, especially training that produces moral or mental improvement. "was raised in the strictest discipline."

• Control obtained by enforcing compliance or order. "military discipline."

• Controlled behavior resulting from disciplinary training; self-control. "Dieting takes a lot of discipline."

• A state of order based on submission to rules and authority. "a teacher who demanded discipline in the classroom."

• Punishment intended to correct or train. "subjected to harsh discipline."

• A set of rules or methods, as those regulating the practice of a church or monastic order. 

• A branch of knowledge or teaching. "the discipline of mathematics."

By definition two we’ve moved from moral improvement to talking about the military; by definition five we’re in the terrain of explicit violence. 

Here’s domination:

• Control or power over another or others. 

• The exercise of such control or power. 

• The act of dominating; exercise of power in ruling; dominion; supremacy; authority; often, arbitrary or insolent sway. 

• A ruling party; a party in power. 

• The act of dominating; exercise of power in ruling; dominion; supremacy; authority, often when arbitrary or insolent.

In the eyes of American Heritage, it would seem that we discipline ourselves, and are dominated by others, either to “help” us learn better discipline, or to be forced to obey. Discipline is the training ground for domination, if we have the power; it’s the method of self protection, of becoming invisible, if we don’t.

What’s thrumming away under my to do list isn’t reassurance that I’m doing it right. It’s violence.  What I practice in my mind all day long is a rehearsal of what I expect from others. How can I enter into community with vulnerability and trust, if my daily practice is about locating and uprooting my deficiencies? How can I be present with my embodied experience if I daily split myself in half, being both the dominating authority and the obedient subject? How can I collaborate with others, if I see relationship dynamics through the lens of power over?

If this is the map of change that we are exhorted to practice, how the hell are we supposed to get to liberation?

--You can't keep asking yourself to add in just one more thing and think you can keep it up, year after year, and not end up numb and resentful and checked out.

--You can't dominate yourself all day long, and believe domination is how change happens, and access what you need to be free.

--You can't wedge a new volunteer opportunity into a daily planner and think it's going to combat the structures that support Western individualism.

--You can't write: after I finish my work day I will spend 5 minutes overturning white supremacy with a straight face.

--You can't task yourself with knowing what's coming, let alone to dream a new way of being, in the same way you can train yourself to take your supplements after you wash your dinner dishes, but we live in a culture that thinks we can.

Or, if you’re in a dark mood: we live in a culture that knows we can’t, and keeps us busy trying.

Look away from this screen. Look out the window, or up at the sky. What do you see? What have you been telling yourself all morning about what you can expect from the day? About what kind of world you’re living in and whether it’s coming for you, judging you, uncaring, contemptuous, indifferent. Whether that story about what the world is like is related to the story you are telling yourself about time, and what you are supposed to do with it?

You know I can’t end this post with a list of next steps, and exhortation to “do.” So I’ll just say —

Stay safe out there this week.

xo

Rebecca