Did You Say ‘Domination’?
Contemporary critics obsess over “domination” while ignoring a far more insidious phenomenon: alienation. Unlike domination, which implies a clear divide between oppressor and oppressed, alienation ensnares everyone—exploiters and exploited alike—in a system of unconscious servitude. Drawing on Rousseau’s insight that masters are as enslaved as their subjects, and tracing the concept through Hegel, Marx, and Ellul, Alain de Benoist argues that modern capitalist society produces a population that has internalized its own subjugation, becoming, in Kundera’s phrase, “the ally of its own gravediggers.”
One of the paradoxical traits of the dominant ideology is that it claims to be hostile to domination—which does not prevent it, of course, from dominating. The critique of “domination” has even become ubiquitous today.
Misandrist neofeminists denounce “patriarchal and heteronormative” domination, “decolonials” and wokeists denounce the domination of “white men.” At the extreme, any social differentiation is seen as the effect of a “domination” that, as such, is declared “unjust.” This critique of domination is a moral critique. The proof is that it argues in the name of justice (domination is an “injustice”). Hence the injunction to always support “the dominated.” But when the argument becomes generalized (all domination is unjust), it loses all meaning.
In a society that no longer understands the difference between power and authority, potestas and auctoritas, what is actually desired is the abolition of all hierarchical distinction, all verticality. A Sisyphean task. An impossible task — because it refuses to make the slightest distinction between unacceptable dominations that must indeed be fought and those that are not only legitimate but necessary from the standpoint of the common good.
Since the dominant/dominated divide exists everywhere, and has existed at all times, believing in the possibility of making domination disappear is just as utopian as dreaming of a world purged of all possibility of conflict. Max Weber established that there is no politics without domination. And one escapes domination all the less given that most people find themselves simultaneously in a position of dominant in certain domains, and dominated in certain others. Every social relationship becoming a form of domination, and all domination being “unjust,” the society “without domination” emits an asocial vision of society: a society without conflicts, without social relationships, without powers or authorities.
Here we see reappearing the death-dealing dream of a strictly horizontal and undifferentiated world, which could, if one took the trouble, definitively escape conflict. A definitively “pacified” world where men would live as if they were already dead. Every difference then becomes an obstacle to “justice,” every collective preference as well: the planet being no longer considered inhabited except by abstract men, it follows that citizens must enjoy no right that would, for example, distinguish them from non-citizens or foreigners.
Curiously, critics of domination remain blind and silent before a much more important and much more dangerous phenomenon: alienation.
The first theorist of alienation was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One who believes himself the master of others is nonetheless more of a slave than they,” one can read at the beginning of Du Contrat social (The Social Contract). The first sentence is most often cited, but the more interesting one is the second. Rousseau does not merely denounce those who exercise unjust social domination; he states from the outset that they are just as much “slaves” as those they enslave. This is what gives his argument its strength. To fail to understand this is to condemn oneself to errors of the sort: we have killed the tyrant, therefore there is no more tyranny! Or: the proletariat has taken power, therefore there is no more class struggle!
“A society “without domination” reflects an asocial vision of society: a society without conflict, without social relations, without power or authority.”
Alienation goes well beyond domination or exploitation, for it encompasses the dominators just as much as the dominated, the exploiters as much as the exploited, the colonizers as much as the colonized. Under the capitalist system, alienation affects all of society. It already begins when one
“learns to reify one’s emotions to match the profile demanded by a dating site, when the daily eater finds himself ordered to count his nutritional intake, when the individual adapted to the norm of perfect health reduces his last sensible performances to algorithms, and of course when every worker finds himself mired in the constraint of time and the fulfillment of quantified objectives detached from any conceivable meaning” (Renaud Garcia).
Alienation (from the Latin alienus, “foreign”) is a mode of dispossession of the self. It is when there is no longer identity between being and the self, between what one is and what one believes oneself to be. It is the becoming-foreign to oneself. The word was elevated to the rank of philosophical concept by Hegel, Feuerbach (alienation through religion), Karl Marx (alienation through labor and the commodity), Georg Simmel (alienation through modernity), Ferdinand Tönnies (the alienation of communities by the societal), Georg Lukács (alienation through the transformation of social relations into objects), and Jacques Ellul (alienation through technology), notably. In the young Marx (the Manuscrits de 1844 [Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844]), in the capitalist system, real life is reduced to an abstraction under the effect of alienated labor: workers are alienated because they become foreign to the product of their labor, because their productive activity is transformed into “human resources,” and because their activity is itself dispossessed of its purpose.
The power of alienation resides in the fact that it is most often an unconscious, even voluntary servitude. The dominant ideology today rests on consent because it is internalized. One must never forget that a pact of submission can be freely consented to, which further consolidates the submission. Soft totalitarianism, the forms of submission privatized by the constraints of the material or immaterial economy, are part of alienation. Today’s society is that of a multitude of dominated who have fallen in love with their chains. To be alienated, Milan Kundera said, is to become “the ally of one’s own gravediggers.”