Read the PASSAGE | Unmasking the Domination System

If the Domination System is so insufferable, why do people tolerate it? Why do they not rise up against a way of life that provides advantages to so few and misery to so many? How is it possible that literally billions of people permit themselves to be hoodwinked and fleeced by tiny circles of elites propped up by armies far from adequate to subdue the population of the world? Surely this is the greatest political mystery ever: the regular failure of the masses to use their overwhelming numerical superiority to throw off their oppressors.

One of the first to identify this political confidence trick was the French political philosopher Etienne de la Boetie. Writing around 1552, he asked how it came about that so many people, so many villages, so many cities and nations, suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power his subjects freely bestow upon him? How can such a ruler maintain power when all that is required is for the people, not to rise up in arms, but simply to refuse to consent to their own enslavement? “It is not necessary to deprive him of anything, but “simply to give him nothing,” he wrote. You let this one man dominate you, plunder you, take your property and sons, yet

   

he who dominates over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least … among the infinite numbers dwelling in your cities; he has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer on him to destroy you. How has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you, except through you? What could he do to you if you yourselves did not connive with the thief who plunders you? If you were not accomplices of the murderer who kills you? If you were not traitors to yourselves?

Then, in words that not only anticipate the nonviolent struggles of our time but also offer an agenda for a whole new politics, de la Boetie says, “I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.”‘

Why have women allowed themselves to be despoiled of their rights, generation after generation, despite often being a majority? Why did so many women oppose the Equal Rights Amendment? How can six million whites subjugate the twenty-nine million other South Africans? Why did the lower and middle classes sit supinely by and watch the Reagan administration scuttle the graduated income tax, providing massive tax relief to a tiny fraction of wealthy people while the real incomes of everyone else were in sharp decline? Why do the poor and homeless not unite to form a powerful political bloc to win their universal human right to adequate food and housing?

A popular saying of the 1960s ran, “The hardest battle isn’t with Mr. Charlie. It’s with what Mr. Charlie has done to your mind.” When Jesus laid out his devastating critique of wealth, and asserted that it is practically impossible for a rich person to enter the reign of God, the disciples responded, “Then who can be saved?” So deeply had they internalized the values of the Domination System, and the apostate theology that identifies wealth with blessedness, that they were incredulous that the wealthy might be excluded from the kingdom of heaven. They apparently regarded economic stratification as ordained by God. As Ched Myers notes, they actually believed the rich man’s claim to have kept the whole law-to which Jesus had added pointedly, “Do not defraud” (Mark 10:19).

People would not be so acquiescent in their own oppression unless they were caught in a powerful delusion. “Delude” is from the Latin deludere, “to play,” specifically, “to play with anyone to his injury or frustration, to mock, to defraud; to befool the mind or judgment so as to cause what is false to be accepted as true.”

Exposing the delusional system is the central ascetical task in our discernment of the Powers. For the Powers are never more powerful than when they can act from concealment. To drop out of sight and awareness into the general surroundings, to masquerade as the permanent furniture of the universe, to make the highly contingent structures of current oppression appear to be of divine construction-such is the genius of their deceptive art. They have armed might at their fingertips, to be sure, but they know, far better than the oppressed, how fragile and potentially impotent it is. Of what use were Philippine army tanks in 1986 when their commanders refused to carry out orders to roll over unarmed civilians? What power was left to Philippine dictator Marcos when his own pilots refused to bomb nonviolent demonstrators and instead defected to a nearby American air base? The mighty prefer, therefore, to rule by means of invisible constraints: unseen filaments tied to the public’s arms and legs, and imperceptible spiritual brain-implants causing the masses to will to be what has been made of them.

The delusional system is a game being played on us by the Powers That Be. That game is nowhere more trenchantly exposed than in the surrealistic images of Revelation 12-13.

Excerpt From: Walter Wink. “Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination.”

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