Any child finds enough distractions and disconnections from the becoming self when she/he lives within the small community of the immediate care giving group. Many of the interactions happen simply between the child and one other. As we can see and remember, such interactions offer many complications, and many meaning perspectives that propel identity and ego to the fore at that point. At a very early age, we have begun to learn to shift attention and concentration from the becoming self to a more conformist being, a conformist identity and ego.
When we consider that human nature yearns for and strives for the becoming self, to search for the individuating self, we can only wonder at the other, very powerful impulse toward conformity and the dominator model. That impulse rises out of our essential vulnerability, another significant part of our shared human nature. Our personal vulnerability connects us to the processes of unconditional positive regard, compassion, forgiveness and acceptance. Without such vulnerability, physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual, our need for connections with others would find limitation in the physical. So long as physical needs are met, we would feel no vulnerability. Because of the Edenic entering into and growth of consciousness, these other vital vulnerabilities arise. In that we feel such things, and we feel a need to make connections with others to allow us to answer needs and avoid violating that vulnerability, we connect with everyone else's vulnerabilities and needs. It may be that one crying baby stimulates others to cry for perfectly understandable physical causes we can materially measure. It may also hold true that the other babies cry because of a human connection through vulnerability which happens on a less material basis and may offer difficulty in measuring.[92] The becoming self finds enhancement in the shared vulnerably with others, our community of vulnerably, yet we learn to shift away from the recognition of shared vulnerability and, therefore, away from the becoming self and individuation.
The dominator model, and all its representatives in our daily lives, teaches us to compete instead of responding to our needs and the needs of others. That's how we gain some, even if limited and conditional, regard. We learn how to compete, and through competition, we learn to withdraw ourselves from the shared community of vulnerability and the becoming self to self exclusive vulnerability which supports and encourages the development of identity, ego, and the reliance on conformity. Indeed, it demands that development. We learn about winning and losing. Many if not most of us find that a very painful and continually painful lesson we learn and relearn in a countless number of ways.
When we win through competition, we beat someone or even something else to some shared and desired goal. There exist many and varied rationalizations for competition that try to take the sting out of this simple and bald representation, but they always remain rationalizations.[93] When beating someone else becomes our aim, we find a powerful need to separate ourselves from that other person, to sever our shared vulnerability because we cannot beat the other if we feel our violation of a shared vulnerability. We feel a desire to win and to avoid a violation of our own vulnerability. The more we desire to beat the other, who has now become an Other, the more we fear to lose. We have learned the lessons of aggression and fear which form an intricate and ultimately harmful interplay.[94] We have learned to compete.
At its core, all competition comes from the demands of the outside world which form part of the demands for conformity. When we compete, we conform. We become part of the competitive model which finds its strength and support from the dominator model. The dominator encourages, if not demands competition in almost all parts of our lives because it makes a concerted joint effort among people nearly impossible. If we all compete, then we do so to defeat others not to work with them. The dominator may occasionally make competition a joint effort, as in warfare, but allows that because the joint effort centers on a common, external enemy, never on the dominator itself.