Brutality, Bullying and Domination
In my life experience, I have concluded that the "desire to dominate" must be the highest animal-based desire. When it manifests without boundaries--unmitigated or uninfluenced by human virtue--the desire to dominate appears as "brutality," "bullying," "domination," and "violence," including intimate partner violence.
Bullying is defined as: "the use of force, coercion, or threat, to abuse, aggressively dominate or intimidate."
In our introductory quote, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., calls this behavior "brutality." And Jon Meacham in his book, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, when describing such people writes:
"Too often, people view their own opportunity as dependent on domination over others, which helps explain why such people see the expansion of opportunity for all as a loss of opportunity for themselves...."
When the desire to dominate is uppermost, undiluted by other desires and disconnected from virtue: acting without limits--it manifests as a form of delusion. Domination uses control to attack and destroy freedom. It creates a psychological condition where "othering" is the norm. At minimum, it generates an authoritarian attitude and at worst it creates an authoritarian personality structure whose sole objective is domination. One becomes the intellectual animal.
Dominance and Information Manipulation
Over time, authoritarian individuals and governments have become less reliant on violence and mass repression to maintain control. A 2019 study by Guriev and Treisman, found that authoritarians have increasingly resorted to lies--the manipulation and misrepresentation of information--as a means of control. [1]
As such, it should be crystal clear that the deliberate creation of misinformation enables domination and control. An individual or group whose motive is single and solely one of domination--excluding all moral and ethical boundaries--is extremely dangerous. It constitutes pure, brutal, animality.
Such individuals don't believe in fair play or the rule of law. They only believe in power and domination. For them "Justice" means the successful domination of the "other," by any method.
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