Confronting the Powers that Be: The Domination System (Session 4)

"Why 99, you know we have to murder and kill and destroy in order to preserve everything that's good in the world." --Maxwell Smart to Agent 99

Faith in violence, Wink says, is the real religion of our time, its spirituality,because people believe violence "saves" and that it seems to be inevitable.

He traces the development of the conquest state in history, which led tothe predominance of what he calls the Domination System:

No matter what shape the dominating system of the moment might take from Ancient Near Eastern states to the Pax Romana to feudal Europe to communist state capitalism to modern market capitalism), the basic structure has persisted now for at least five thousand years, since the rise of the great conquest states of Mesopotamia around 3000 B.C.E. (TPTB 39-40)

A parallel result was the spread of what Wink calls the Myth of Redemptive Violence, the notion that violence "saves," that it is successful and reallyrepresents the natural way things are. This persists as an unexamined assumption behind our thinking today:

This Myth of Redemptive Violence is the real myth of the modern world. It, and not Judaism or Christianity or Islam, is the dominant religion in our society today. (TPTB 42)

The biblical myth presents the opposite. In the biblical faith the creation is good, and Jesus taught love of enemies, not their extermination.

We see the domination myth enacted again and again in comic books and TV cartoons: Helpless people are threatened or brutalized by evil creatures. A hero flies in to rescue them. At first he loses and suffers greatly but eventually prevails. The evil beings are defeated and usually destroyed. It is seen regularly in movies and books and reenacted in public life.

This does not encourage support of democracy and law. It is a vigilante kind of justice, as when the lone western hero outdraws his evil opponent and leaves him in the dust. It reflects impatience with legal protections, a desire for instant justice, violent solutions, a yearning for a white knight on a great horse who will set all things right. This is infact a totalitarian fantasy. Wink writes:

The myth of redemptive violence is the simplest, laziest, most exciting uncomplicated, irrational and primitive depiction of evil the world has ever known. Furthermore, its orientation toward evil is the one into which virtually all modern children (boys especially) are socialized in the process of maturation. (TPTB 53)

The myth of redemptive violence appears on the large screen in the nation state and its supportive religious idolatry. Such a system cannot tolerate a real and absolute God, only a tamed one. So if God can't be eliminated, He (sic) must be domesticated. Religious language is used constantly by the leadership of the nation in support of violence.

It was fine men who tortured the woman we spoke to in Argentina. One insisted to her, "But I go to Mass every morning too." Another proposed marriage (they had tortured her husband to death two years before). These men were not sadists. They had merely surrendered themselves to the idol of the state. Once they had crossed that line, any evil was good if it served the idol... (ETP 97-8)

2. Are there similarities and differences between the undercover work of James Bond and that of Oliver North? If so, what are they?

3. What arguments can you think of for or against this minister's statement? "God uses war to cleanse the earth from wickedness. When it's time for a war, God allows certain evils to be exterminated."

4. Where do you see violence in your own life? How do you see the Myth of Redemptive Violence being lived out in world politics right now?

Copyright © 1998 by Vern Rossman