When I refer to a dominator or the dominator model, I mean a societal and personal consciousness not some specific cabal of power hungry persons in direct communication conspiring to control the world and all who live there. No matter how powerful, almost all people in every society participate according to the meaning perspectives received through their lives. They live within their own dominator model at all levels. Often, we can watch people in all conditions being driven by unquestioned meaning perspectives. These meaning perspectives dominate the lives of the powerful as surely as those powerful people may dominate the lives of other people within some large-scale hierarchy. The powerful operate like the character Faust. They gain the illusion of power and authority, but the real power resides in the Mephistophelian meaning perspectives that drive Faust. The drives motivate Faust to use himself as a means to the Mephistophelian end. As a means to a higher purpose, Faust may gain position power for some time, he loses personal power by becoming a means to another end.
Our inner process to find or create a balance of identity, ego, and self as always leaves us with more personal power, and we have always remained free and an end in ourselves not a means to another end. No matter how much we see and believe the dominator model operates outside the moral sphere, compassion and the rest remain universal and absolute for even those who work for and live in the dominator model. As we pursue our own liberation, we do so for everyone else within the dominator/conformist hierarchical model. That's why making sense out of competition, among other ideas and manifestations of the dominator model forms part of the existential search for the becoming self for ourselves and the human community of selves.
Competition reasserts the hierarchy. There is no competition without hierarchy and no hierarchy without competition—thus the word "loser." Whenever we see one side as a winner, we reassert the hierarchy thus we reassert the hierarchy in all things. In essence, everyone other than number one, the winner, perforce become losers. The chance of staying the winner will elude everyone. Ultimately, we cease being in the number one position, so in such a competitive hierarchy, we are all inevitable losers.[95]
Competition operates in the externalized world. Our becoming self has precious little to do with competition. It is the realm of our identity and our ego. Our identity gets established in some competitive arena, an apt sports metaphor of our time, and our ego defends that identity against all comers. The winner or the presumptive winner will do anything necessary to accomplish the win and stay in the number one position or usurp that position and take it for her/himself. We see this in the macrocosm of business and sports world most publically, but we can see it in the microcosm of our own lives as well. Competition for the number one power position does harm at all levels, and it does the most immediate harm in our own intimate lives, in our own homes, the place where we wish to find unconditional positive regard, not a struggle for position and, therefore, power. Competition in a hierarchy is always a competition for power. The higher in the hierarchy, the more external and position power we find.
The struggle for power in our homes and more intimate lives doesn't help us toward the becoming self or operating in a way that helps to make an environment of unconditional positive regard that we all desire as a natural part of our environment. In our discussion of how we see our children I quoted the following: "(Children) learn to use their charms and strengths to get their way and negotiate more power in the family." In the competitive model, according to this quote, we see the children for whom we care as competitors for power as if we will lose something if they feel their power and use it in the family.
Outside the dominator model, we don’t fear the power of others, even children. The power they manifest comes from within them, and it doesn't need to threaten any of our power unless we, as competitors, feel that our power stems from dominating others. If everyone in a family or other situation feels free to manifest their personal power and not establish some sort of positional power, then the power of each adds to the whole and all the individuals in that whole.[96]