Competition in the dominator model keeps us from experiencing the empowering joy of individuated, personal power that develops in itself and voluntarily contributes to the community. By its very nature, competition breeds fear. Our personal desire for unconditional positive regard can feel temporarily satisfied by succeeding in competition. For a second there, we feel really admired and regarded well. Of course, whenever I perform for regard, I can only endlessly and breathlessly earn conditional positive regard. In terms of competition, I have to keep on winning or I lose the winner's position and the regard that comes with it. The paradox of earning regard through the effort of identity and ego comes in its inevitable loss. When I win regard, I simultaneously fear its loss.[97]
This tension between conditional success and inevitable failure in loss also encourages us in our feeling the profoundness of the scarcity model of living In essence, in the scarcity model, I must have more in order to keep anything, and if that means, which it does, that others inevitably have less, so be it. I win. They lose. The scarcity model denies my access to compassion, so I fear the abilities thus the power of all others. If others can freely show their abilities and thereby power, it must all detract from my own. Scarcity consciousness contrasts dramatically with abundance consciousness. Scarcity consciousness depends on what we possess, what we own, what we have. Abundance consciousness finds its basis and strength in our being, our becoming self alone. These contrasting qualities of mind and belief form the difference between a having or being way of perception and life.[98] Competition and scarcity demand we have more and more and not be more. Having takes and being gives. That's a choice.
This holds true for many of us in our personal and professional relationships. Loving partners struggle, or at least jockey, for power between them. Both can deny the power of the children for whom they care. That is the kind of power we feel we can have and lose if others possess theirs. The same sort of thing can happen between business partners. In that way, the fear ridden, scarcity model of family and business life becomes reduced to negotiations and deal making for the best advantage in a world of scarcity which we produce and increase in the process. In those same lives we can experience the feeling and actuality of abundance wherein we create the very abundance in that process. The dominator wishes us to choose competition and scarcity thus fear. Fear links to our essential vulnerability, and once linked becomes a wonderful mechanism to produce conformity and alienation from each other and greater dependence, if the appearance of loyalty, on the dominator model. Competition denies compassion and it denies community. The qualities of compassion and community form part of the becoming self, the part in which we live in a way of being. Competition represents possession, the way of the reduced sense of identity and ego based on the materiality of having.[99]
In the book, To Have or to Be, Erick Fromm delineates two ways of perceiving, responding to, and forming ourselves within the reality we find ourselves: the way of having or the way of being. He rather encapsulates this philosophic viewpoint with the following: "If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?"
This rather bald choice stands at the very center of our conscious being and the place from where we truly start toward the becoming self. Interestingly, it stands at the center of our being along with the very idea that we can make choices, essential and existential choices about what we believe, what we perceive, how we act, and how we learn from those actions. Our recognition of the inherent power of choice and the choice of being rather than having takes us back to our working definition of the self.
I have shifted in my references to the self in this text to the phrase "the becoming self." The writing of this work brought me to understand that we never fully reach the self even as we never achieve complete individuation. We can't, and I find that's just as well. The search for the becoming self really does form a quest of aspiration which we fulfill in the process of the quest and never perfectly or completely fulfill as a goal we reach or, in dominator terms, conquer. The more we engage in the quest, the more we experience and learn. The more we experience and learn, the more we enhance the ever emergent quality of being. The self becomes. Thus I use the phrase "the becoming being." Happily and not paradoxically, this nature of the becoming self, in that it is becoming, precludes our deluding ourselves into believing we can ever possess it. If we possessed it, it would become stable and cease becoming, so if we possess becoming it ceases to exist as becoming. Our working definition of the self fits quite nicely with the idea of the becoming self. I never noticed before, but this definition is one of ongoing process and becoming. It develops at the very core of being. It becomes:
The self exists as a conscious, independent entity which perceives the world, takes information from that perception, learns from that information, makes choices based on that learning, and acts freely on those choices. The self experiences the results of those choices, accepts the responsibility of those choices and results, and the process begins again.
We could, therefore, change this slightly and replace the word "self" with the phrase "the developing self." That's longer and can feel more awkward. Language represents meaning perspectives as we have discussed. Most if not all of our words reflect our desire and our belief in the stability of the world. They certainly reflect how we define the world and how that makes us perceive the world. That's why saying something that differs substantially, sometimes even slightly from the dominator/conformist mainstream thought works quite awkwardly.
All languages demonstrate the linguistic idea of the "lexical gap." Such gaps appear in different languages because the meaning perspectives about the world differ and perceptions of the world differ. In English, my parents' siblings are aunts and uncles. These words show gender but they do not indicate to which parent they are a sibling. Their children are my cousins. The word cousin indicates that nature of the overall relationship, the offspring of a male or female sibling of one of my parents. In another language, the word "cousin" would be replaced by a word that signified the daughter of the sister of my father.[100] That's a gap in English. Silvia and I lived together many years without intending to get married. While we lived together, we had no simple word such as "married" to use to describe our state of relationship. "Living in sin" certainly reflects a meaning perspective. A full expression would run something like this: "The person with whom I live in a loving relationship with whom I have pledged and renew that pledge each day to remain together in the face of life's many variations without the encumbrance of a contract." That's quite a mouthful, but it avoids saying something about a relationship that defines it as an outlier relationship, abnormal in some way from the conformist norm. Even now, we resist calling each other "my husband" or "my wife" to avoid the possessive quality and the restrictive identity roles of those phrases. We say we are married.
The language of conformity represents an essential meaning perspective. How we conceive of language, holds real power over how we think. The use of the right language, conformist language, can save us momentarily from our perceived danger in expressing our being, expressing our becoming self. The daily language of dominator conformity speaks endlessly about competition and having not about the unconditional and being. It's hard to make a change.