The Domestication of Consciousness - part 2

essay

“Your mind for a job,
your mind for a TV,
your mind for a hairdryer,
your mind for consumption…”
~ John Trudell, from “Look At Us/Peltier (AIM Song)”

Thanks to Steven Newcomb for prompting part 2 by responding to my part 1 mention of “madam” from mea domina “my lady.” My interpretation in the stereotypical modern household context was of the female being domesticated/dominated by the male, “my dominated lady,” yet Steve added, with his deep historical awareness of what he refers to as “the domination system”:

“Domina translates to Lordess, a female version of Lord. Think: the Lord and Lady of the Manor (house), who own and thus control “the household.” The household with servants or slaves who are also known as “domestics.” They were powerful, and formidable, and often vicious and deadly on a mere whim.”

Coincidentally i had recently seen at a local bookstore, a book about the Gilded Age in New York City by Margalit Fox, The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss: “America’s first great organized-crime lord was a lady—a nice Jewish mother named Mrs. Mandelbaum.”

Roman habits die hard.

For a more current example:

“As of Jan. 1, [2019], the CEOs of four of the nation’s five biggest defense contractors — Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and the defense arm of Boeing — are now women.”

Same death-machine weaponry, different gender.

Lord and Lady 2.0
One of the first things that came to mind with regard to Lord and Lordess/Lady is how factories and sweatshop labor became the new ‘household’—while in America, women have made ‘progress’ in the work world, the 1950s stay-at-home stereotype a thing of the past. This contrast exposes the shell game chicanery of globalism and the dualistic perception it fosters, belying fair treatment of a global family aka we are all children of Mother Earth.

Adding to the modern nuances of Lord and Lady, i venture to say that, women are some of the main drivers of buying stuff to decorate and domesticate the household, while the male is out back or in the garage with the tools. I feel it’s important to mention this in context because while ‘the patriarchy’ is typically blamed, and rightly so, for much of the world’s ills, females also play a big role in perpetuating the domestication of consciousness.

Add to that the parental catering to the peer-pressured whims of teenagers who have to have “it” because all their friends do! Women and families wield purchase power.

Anecdotally, while having coffee one day, i overheard a woman telling presumably her husband about the color of the wallpaper or paint for their house, and his response was, “Whatever makes you happy, dear.”

Make it to the top
Capitalism goads people in the “pursuit of happiness” by encouraging them to make it to the top. Further looking at the “dome” in domestic reveals that such goals were embedded in the very structure of the house itself:

Dome: "a round, vaulted roof, a hemispherical covering of a building,"… from Greek dōma "a house, housetop" (especially in reference to a style of roof from the east), related to domos "house." In the Middle Ages, German dom and Italian duomo were used for "cathedral" (on the notion of "God's house")…”

In effect, the Lord and Lordess/Lady of the household are themselves under the dom(e)ination of a ‘God roof’ yet then project that domination, or, as the saying goes: lord it over others. I’m reminded of the TV series “Upstairs, Downstairs” which “depicts the servants—"downstairs"—and their masters, the family—"upstairs”.”

The upstairs/downstairs alludes to another significant factor: Those people downstairs are closer to the Earth . . . and that in turn alludes to a too-often overlooked aspect of commodities and commercialization: So-called domestic goods all come from Mother Earth and are produced by, if not the new wave of robotics, human beings in specific locales.

Find out where stuff you use comes from! The answer is always Mother Earth—yet fraught with specifics, for example, slave labor, including minors sometimes dying, mining cobalt in the Congo for cell-phones and other gadgets. The overall capitalist corporate globalist system uses slave labor to feed a domesticated lifestyle.

A few years ago i watched a documentary about a Chinese factory-village where people work and live, and some of them seemed very happy about it all, one couple talking about getting married—a literal example of factory as domos/household.

The largest factory in the world and Chinese labor - 46 minutes:
“The largest factory in the world was in China (NOW moved to southeast Asia). Chinese workers are working, living, studying in the same factory park. In 2009, the salaries for Chinese workers were around $150 per month. It is about $700 in 2014).”

The most memorable images to me are of workers doing the same thing over and over and over…and producing, for example, irons, grills and espresso machines at astounding rates, if i remember correctly, maybe 8 to 12 irons a minute!

There is slave labor—and then there are ‘slaves’ to consumerism. Or as John Trudell insightfully said, “They’re mining us”…“...we seek things to gratify ourselves, but that doesn’t mean we bring good to ourselves.”

50 shades of gold
Along with the cozy homey enjoyment of domestication thanks to sweatshop labor is the disgustingly ostentatious parade of lifestyles of the corrupt and infamous. The most offensive of recent (following on the heels of July, 2024, during the Biden administration, “Congress applauds Netanyahu's genocidal lies”) is the plan to build a resort on top of (dom(e)ination) a genocide grave site aka Gaza.

From a NYPost article:

“Trump shares AI video of his vision for Gaza — featuring giant gold statue and him lounging poolside with Netanyahu”

Turning a genocided people and ecocided land into a resort area with a golden Lord?! Cue the mini-rant: That’s an extremely bat-shit megalomaniacal horrid disgusting nouveau riche socio-pathological thing to attempt, let alone mention. Even many Trumpers were “outraged” by that.

Yet, too, as i calm myself, i realize this is essentially the same-o same-o, emblematic of 500+ years of ‘civilization.' Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent is an eloquent and heart-wrenching/heart-opening book that clearly shows how the mining apparatus helped create the luxurious so-called goods for Europe, then America—the mining done mostly by Indigenous and Black slave labor.

The epigraph to Galeano’s book is a call to speak up and take action:
“We have maintained a silence closely resembling stupidity.”
~ from the Revolutionary Proclamation of the Junta Tuitiva, La Paz, July 16, 1809

The lure of the materialistic golden lifestyle somehow mesmerizes people into abandoning all common sense.

From my 2016 book Musings with the Golden Sparrow:

“Gold rushes: Minas Gerais - Brazil, 18th century. Colorado, Georgia, California, Black Hills (Paha Sapa sacred to the Lakota Nations) -USEmpire early to mid-19th century and later. Australia mid-19th century displacing the Aborigines. Africa 19th century, to name a few. The raping of Mother Earth. The fat-taker. The hungry ghost. Manic greed.”

To loosely categorize: there are modern Lords and Ladies jet-setting their corporatized version of the globe while the slave laborers scrape by, if they’re lucky. And there are the average workers, for example, in the USEmpire, also scraping by yet managing to obtain the must-haves: cell-phone, coffee machine, TV, and other appliances.

As to the lifestyles of the corrupt and infamous (see above AI photo), my previous mention of female participation applies here, too, but in a different form: the female as seductive sexual object, what every Lord dreams of having; it takes two to tango.

Rome can’t be unbuilt in a day
Untangling and reversing such a long-standing system of domination with its sly veneer of hard-earned so you better enjoy it domestication takes time and a seemingly constant chipping away.

A few popular ideas/phrases to toss onto the seesaw: communities, communal living situations, local food sources, fair trade, use less stuff, attempt to shop ‘ethically,’ take on the responsibility of caring for your local area – from yard to ocean/forest/etc. – both physically and spiritually by tuning-in to receiving guidance from dreams, spirit-beings, tree-spirits, birds, the mouths of babes . . . One summer day a little kid friend, after noticing my patio planters exclaimed, “I like your flowers!” The simplicity and reverence in such a simple statement stays with me, gladdens my heart and my hands when working-playing in the patio garden.

While one can easily get discouraged at the enormity of global affairs and their local repercussions, one inspiring vantage point and model for action comes from Pete Seeger’s “teaspoon parable”:

“I imagine a big seesaw, and one end of this seesaw is on the ground with a basket half-full of big rocks in it. The other end is up in the air. It’s got a basket one-quarter full of sand. And some of us got teaspoons, and we’re trying to fill up sand…

“One of these years, you’ll see that whole seesaw go zooop in the other direction. And people will say, ‘Gee, how did it happen so suddenly?’ Us and all our little teaspoons.”