The Hierarchy of Domination Could End Today

The caterpillar must die for the butterfly to be born.

What are you most afraid of?

Losing your job? Being homeless? Not having enough money to get by? To raise your kids?

Are you afraid of the climate shift? Afraid of immigrants moving into your space? Afraid of the perceived immorality of the youth?

Are you afraid of illness? Mental illness? Your own mind? Cultural objectification of your gender or race or sexuality?

How about your addictions? I know I’m more than a little afraid of mine! Your blood pressure? Your blood sugar levels?

Afraid of not ever finding love again? Or great sex? Of dying alone?

I think I make my point here. There are A LOT of things to be afraid of. So many, it’s absurdly easy to lose yourself down the rabbit hole of fear.

I know the 3 am worry over the planet, and money, and health concerns, and children all too well! I’m familiar with the sensations of a racing mind and a racing heart.

But I also know this.

How I choose to respond to these fears, and how YOU choose to respond will make all the difference.

When the power of love overcomes the love of power, then the world will know peace. -Jimi Hendrix

Jimi had it right all along. We must begin to shed our love of power and control. We must get rid of our deep-seated need for safety. We must stop fixating on WINNING at all costs.

Instead, we now have the option to choose love. It has always been there.

What lies at the root of all violence, fear, hatred, misogyny, and loneliness?

Fear is at the root of it all.

I believe it is the mistaken story of isolation and separation that we must address if we are to turn the ship of humanity in the right direction.

The selfish ethic of #mefirst — which was never a hashtag, but could have been if hashtags were around in the 80’s is not capable of saving us. Fear is at its root, a selfish emotion.

As Frank Herbert famously said, “Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.”

If we are to begin addressing the real illness at the heart of all of our collective angst and pain, we can start to see that the cure to loneliness has something to do with selflessness.

Where do the pathologies of patriarchy and domination mindset actually reside?

The answer to this question is simple and not simple all at once.

Living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet. -James Lovelock, Gaia Theory

The simple answer is that domination and the patriarchy live inside every one of us. Whether we want them to or not.

This is a scary fact I’ve discovered as a parent. Oh, how our children reflect back to us those parts of ourselves that we inherit and pass along without realizing it.

The not so simple part of this equation is that the social pathologies are woven into both our individual and collective dreams so foundationally that they have come to form part of the substratum of life itself. Or at least life as we know it.

To truly eradicate the pathology, there are two main steps:

First, we have to identify and include ourselves as carriers of the disease. The fight is not always with those with whom we disagree. Most of the time it’s internal.

Secondly, we must also be willing to kill off that part of ourselves benefits (perhaps unwittingly) by continuing to live with the associated illness. We must be willing to change ourselves first. This takes some serious courage and some clarity around how to make these changes in the first place.

What is the domination hierarchy all about?

And why is it problematic?

I’m assuming if you clicked on the link to this post that you are interested in what the world might look like if we COULD topple the hierarchy of domination in the world and with the urgency and alacrity demanded by the mounting crises happening on multiple fronts.

But in case you’re not entirely sure what I mean in the title, here’s a short synopsis of the concept.

The hierarchy of domination is a term coined by the renowned systems scientist Dr. Riane Eisler.

It refers to the rigid, top-down structure of societies and institutions where someone is at the top of a pyramid of power, and the majority of people are at the bottom.

Power is maintained by the elites using a combination of tools that include force, fear, and story.

There are winners and losers, and the consolidation of power is considered to be a zero-sum game. More for me is less for you, and so on.

Charles Eisenstein refers to the story used to maintain the hierarchy of domination as “The Story of Separation.”

It is a story of separation in which we are all independent actors in an economic model of growth. In this reality it is money that gives us value, and we don’t need anybody else because we have to buy what we need. — Rachael Steineckert

This story and its attendant hierarchical power structure is severely problematic because economic growth and even money itself are merely human constructs. They are not based on the bigger picture of the universe.

Our planet will not continue to work if we forget that we are born, live, and die as part of the greater living ecosystem called Gaia.

Only when the last tree has been cut down, the last fish been caught, and the last stream poisoned, will we realize we cannot eat money. -Cree Indian Prophecy

The money story is now falling apart.

This old story is failing us.

It is becoming abundantly clear that money is not going to give us the value or the cohesiveness we will need to survive in the future.

Take a look at this 3-minute film Greta Thunberg and Guardian journalist George Monbiot just released. It is so simple and at the same time so dire.

In the film, they cite the fact that only 2% of the money spent on cutting fossil fuel emissions are spent on natural climate solutions.

Investment in greenhouse gas emissions fell by 11% in 2018, despite the urgency of the climate crisis and the benefits of outlays were cancelled out by investments globally in fossil fuels and other dirty industries, finds a report by the Climate Policy Initiative. — The Guardian

Natural climate solutions include those such common-sense actions like protecting rainforests and wetlands that already act as carbon sinks, and promoting the planting and propagation of other healthy parts of the natural environment.

Instead, shortsighted and money-hungry people and policies are moving AWAY from these integral approaches to global health. For what? More money for people who already have plenty? More investments in fossil fuels?

And what does this money and climate topic have to do with our internal shifts? Actually, quite a bit. It has to do with the way the external system influences our internal choices on a day to day level.

How can we as individuals start to leave the old story behind?

And how does what you do internally impact the larger problem?

If you look around at the bigger picture of the world, the stress and tension that many of us are experiencing can be blamed on a bifurcation in the state space and the attractors of our society and culture.

If you want to get geeky with me, check out this cool article on Chaos Theory to fully understand that last sentence.

Or in plain English, what I mean is that we are ALL being called to choose whether we live on the side of money, power-over, and fear — or if we live in the realms of nature, power-together, and love.

This means we need to change the way we think about money, authority, morality, and power.

Do you want to contract away from the challenges of the future? Build walls to exclude the people we don’t want to have to deal with? Is violence at the root of moral authority? Or does it undermine morality altogether?

Are we willing to expand and open into the most painful places we experience as humans and accept them? Are we willing to move past certainty into the true mystery of being?

Can we afford to realize that we don’t always have to be right?

Are we brave enough to address and start to heal the wounds of our personal lives as well as our collective past?

These universal wounds are begging loudly to be healed. And we as people are beginning to respond.

The choice that I make, the choice that YOU make — these will determine which attractor our society will gravitate towards.

These individual-level choices will determine the state space we will be in as the climate and the global economy continue their slow and steady but headlong crash into what comes next.

And these changes start within our own homes.

Taking down the hierarchy of domination has to start as an inside job.

This is not about fighting the bad guys and winning. It’s about transforming from within.

We are not separate, but interdependent beings.

Here’s how to start bridging the gap between the old story and the new.

The hierarchy of domination lies within all of us. It is not a matter of ideological or political divides. We cannot bring down the powers that be by beating them. We must find the change of heart within our everyday actions and choices. There are no bad guys to beat here.

This is not a drill. — Greta Thurnberg

It is not about THEM. It’s about us.

It is about me.

And it is about you.

We can recognize the complicated and synergistic relationships of the complex system in which we live.

We can choose love and trust and belief in one another.

We can teach our children the new way of being, even when it is tough to model a world we desire but have never actually seen.

We can choose to examine (and change) our willingness to turn a blind eye to the interconnectedness of all people, things, and actions.

We can choose to overcome the distractions of the rat race and the busyness of modern life to begin to care about the world as a whole.

This is about living in the first world and rethinking the choices we might be making to drive a gas-guzzling SUV because of the large number of kids we might haul around — once or twice a year.

This is about whether or not we choose to buy things cheaply online rather than supporting local businesses — because we want more than we can actually afford to get.

This is about choosing to learn how to be better partners in marriage, better parents to our children, and better stewards of the land we live on. And it’s about not being too proud or too preoccupied with life to admit that sometimes we lack the skills to do these things. We all need to learn to admit when we need help.

This is about no longer pretending we are independent actors in our microcosms and choosing to recognize the choices we make have a ripple effect through the whole system.

It is about building a functional community with the people who live nearby, not just the people who we connect with online.

It is about recognizing our gifts and being brave enough to bring them to light, whether we can see a stable income deriving from these gifts or not.

It is about beginning to recognize the divine at work within each of us and realizing that if we don’t find the creator within ourselves, we will not find it anywhere else.

Newsflash: The M.O. of separation doesn’t work anymore and we should probably all spend some effort on waking up to our true state of interdependence before we no longer have that choice.

I’m writing this as a love letter, to myself and you as well dear reader. I have been guilty of all of the above transgressions.

Now, what will we choose to do? How will we proceed?

I think the changes have already started to bubble to the surface. The mythology created by marketers is falling to pieces. The cracks are showing.

From #occupylove to the #metoo movement, to #fridaysforfuture and #naturenow — as Greta so succinctly puts it in her video, “This is not a drill.”

What you do counts.

What you choose to do, and how you choose to speak and think and feel — these are the molecules with which the substance of our reality is built.

The tides are turning. Which side of history will you choose to stand on? Fear or love?

Our very future rests upon our choices.

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Kaia Tingley is a writer, artist, podcaster, digital strategy nerd, and sometimes hot-tempered supernova with a wild, free soul. You can find her on Instagram here or on LinkedIn here. Feel free to reach out by DM there if you want to reach her directly.