Understanding Domination Paradigm through the Roe v Wade Leak
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Politico published a leaked draft ruling of the US Supreme Court that overturns the landmark Roe v Wade decision protecting women's right to abortion. This brings Bill Stierle and Tom's discussion towards the domination paradigm. The two discuss how people of authority tend to overpower others, killing individualism and one's ability to decide for themselves. Bill and Tom talk about how conservatism in the United States is slowly turning into power play and how the domination paradigm applies to other current events, primarily the Russia-Ukraine War.
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Understanding Domination Paradigm through the Roe v Wade Leak
We've had an earth-shattering moment that occurred. There's a leaked draft decision from the Supreme Court of the United States that indicates that the court has already voted to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing a woman's right to an abortion. There are so many things that come to mind that our show deals with a lot in terms of communication. It's hard to ignore. I don't know where this is going to go, but let's talk about it.
I appreciate that. When you mentioned it to me, I had already gone to bed so I didn't hear about it. When you were telling me this, I was thinking to myself, "How do you be compassionate and empathetic to both sides of this equation?" A lot of times in communication, we want to bring empathy, care and compassion towards both points of view.
Both points of view are fighting for two very different things. One is allowing an individual to make a choice for themselves as, "This is my body. This is my pregnancy. I don't want to do this pregnancy," for multiple sets of reasons. This other person is saying, "We all got here through this life thing. We value life. We need to pay attention to and engage in life in a healthy way. As soon as you get pregnant that is a divine being that you are bringing into this world. My spirituality says that it has to be protected. That's got to be number one on the list."
Immediately, we've got two different points of view to talk about. You and I do the best we can to talk through difficult, ethical, and moral values on the show. We do our best to bring both points of view, even though our points of view might be skewed in one direction. We do our best to step towards the middle, which is how do you become an empathetic person to a woman now that once enacted, she has to meet her need for choice in a different way by leaving the country or doing something illegal. That's what she's got to do. That is her new choice. The law and the government are not going to support a person making a decision over their own body.
To have a point of clarity, this decision doesn't make abortion illegal countrywide. It was overturned as a constitutional right. Each state can decide on its own. We're returning to the 1960s as it was when the State of New York had it legal. Close to about half the states, as of now, it would be legal. A lot of women who live in the deep south of Texas, Louisiana or Florida are maybe not going to be able to afford to travel to New York, California, or somewhere where they know they can get the care they need and have control over their own lives. There's going to be a financial barrier. You have a job and you can't take a week off to go travel to another state to get this done. It's going to set women back from one perspective for half a century.
I appreciate you putting that into perspective because we like to think that in our modern age, choice is something that we value in the United States, except for pregnancy. It's a weird way for a nation to have duality, but guess what we have in our nation. We have a nation of duality. You win this battle, but the question is, "Do they now lose the war on many other issues?" The firestorm that may start or may not start from this issue is, "Oh, yeah, you're taking choices. Well, I'm showing up to vote because this is something that either I was glad that I went through. If I didn't have that choice my whole life would have been trapped, stuck with or brought in that direction. As a young person, a twenty-year-old, I would have lost my choice and that would have brought my life in a completely different direction."
The hard part about it is for men and their part. We do our best to support women in their decisions, even though we might not agree with their decisions. A lot of times, we supported that sometimes at the expense of our own choices. Many men are in that supportive place. Some men are not in that supportive place. Clearly, at this moment, men are not in the supportive place of going like, "We think we get to have a say on that." We have to see what that bigger impact is going to be. Are women going to come out to vote during the midterms now? There's a little bit of energy around that now, even in the ‘24 election.
I would be very surprised if that wasn't a huge part of the motivation of whoever leaked this document from the Supreme Court because had they not leaked it now at the very beginning of May 2022, this decision would have come out in late June or July from the Supreme Court. That was the expectation. They've got at least 2 to 3 more months for this thing to rally, women and like-minded men around the country, to realize how little control they have over their future unless they come out and vote.
I'm sure that's a huge part of the motivation to whip up the Democrats but women, in general, to take action. It's pretty typical in a midterm-election season like this of 2022 for the party that holds the White House and maybe controls Congress, In this case, it's all three, to not be motivated to come out and vote. The opposition usually turns out in greater numbers. This may very well be a rallying cry that backs that trend.
I would see that as something that we'll have to observe as it unfolds. It's something that we don't know how the nation will go. There are a lot of people that think from their belief structure that this is the way that it should be. This is a moralistic vote on this issue. We're going to let the states do that. Every state gets to have whatever their moralistic decisions inside that state get to be for women's rights. That causes people to move if they can or be suppressed if they can't.
I watched a long interview of the people that have exited Russia and moved to Georgia because they were going like, "I can't live in that country anymore." Many times, the person-in-charge or the authoritarian says, "Good riddance. You don't believe what I do. You don't believe the things I stand-in. We don't want you here anymore because you have wrong thinking. You must be in agreement." They are making up a negative message about the person that has left. Instead of going like, "They have a right here. We need to provide some space for all different people."
There are two different paradigms that sit here. There's a thing called a domination paradigm and a partnership paradigm. I have this little book about choice. There are two different pages. One has one belief in it and another has another belief in it. There's a little paragraph about it. What do you believe? This is a great example of those two different things. There's a partnership paradigm. What does mean to be in partnership with another human being? What does it mean to have a domination paradigm? It means there's a little bit of authority over another person.
For example, in the partnership paradigm, there's cooperation with others even if you don't believe in what they believe in. It is a part of the practice. They believe that the value of that relationship, that life matters and that we thrive together in a relationship. It is more cooperative and collaborative. We might disagree, but we're not necessarily going to kill each other. We're not going to be at odds with each other. This cooperation paradigm that sits around partnership can make a big difference.
The domination paradigm sits in a very different place. It lives around authority over another person, “I know what's best and because I know what’s best, I'm making a decision for you." They believe that power and sovereignty are granted to a few in order to create safety and order for all. That's a little bit more like what we're seeing in Russia right now. We're not seeing a cooperative paradigm.
We're seeing a power over, "I'm in charge. I have sovereignty. I get to wipe out this other country or city. All I got to do is wipe out the city because I am safe from the invading hordes. This is one way to make it safe. I get to wipe out that thing and all the people that live in it. I don't care if I rebuild it at all." That mindset asks that as an authoritarian, I'm aware without supervision that our well-being is threatened by self-seeking individualism. America is built on rugged individualism, isn't it?
It is. To me, the domination paradigm is the authoritarian playbook or mantra. Whereas the partnership paradigm, the cooperation is supposed to be a lot more about what America is about. It's very interesting having these opposing views on choice from your book. It's quite something. I appreciate that. There are so many things that come to mind. I have to say empathy is not the first one that comes to mind for me.
No, it doesn't. It's going to get you fired up. I'm not empathizing for all the years that Roe v. Wade has been the law of the land. People who believe that life is sacred and there is a spiritual and a moralistic reason why people should not have an abortion have been suffering for years from their viewpoint. This is something that's wrong. It has been very difficult for them to square choices.
As soon as you say to them, "You're going to lose other choices too." They go, "No, I'm not. It's never going to go that far." It's like, "Didn't you see what just happened to this other group? There are other things that may come in your direction too.” If you allow the domination paradigm to stay in place, it gives the power to the few over the needs of the many. As soon as you start taking votes away, as soon as you start further redlining and doing these other things, it's really hard. You may want to figure out a way to get a healthy version of that for each side gets to win some time rather than, "My way. My decisions," because it is for the greater good of things and it is better than yours. You're not fostering individualism.
It is very hard. It also shines a light on some things that are pretty disheartening about the Supreme Court of the United States that's not supposed to be a politically motivated body. Each of those conservative justices on the court, some more directly than others but in their own way, told the Senate when they were having their confirmation hearings that Roe v. Wade was settled law.
I can't help but see that they lied to the Senate hearings. They lied to those senators to say that they understood that Roe v. Wade is settled law. The most recent one, Amy Coney Barrett said specifically that she has not been brought there as a justice of the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. That's not what she is planning to do and not her goal. It's one of the very first things that she is a part of here as a sitting Supreme Court justice. To me, this is open season on court precedent. There's nothing that we can consider being settled law. The Supreme Court is proving that it's as political as any other branch of government.
It's very difficult. You and I got into a discussion and brought up slavery as one of those things. Every country’s development, opportunity and regression, the world, America, Hungary and Russia, we're struggling with what the word conservative means. Conservative doesn't mean power over, that the need for the few gets to make decisions over the need for the many. That's not what conservative means, but they're making it mean that.
If I scare this person enough about their safety issues, they will hand over their power to me. You and I have talked many times about how certain forms of media are all about scaring people to vote and give up their power. They don't even know that they're giving up their individualism by voting that way. If you vote this way, you give up your individualism. If you overturn an election, you are giving up your individualism because you're saying one person gets to run the ship for their entire life. You're going to give that up, "It's much stabler that way because then I don't have to talk about difficult issues because my guy is in charge."
There are 76% of Russians right now that believe that Vladimir Putin is doing the right thing because they're fighting a very difficult war over there because the belief and biases are in place that he can do no wrong. Why? Because they kept being told the same thing over and over again. Instead of, "They are a country that was friendly to you that you shared history and families with." There's a lot of death over there now. You don't know about it yet, but you will over the next years. You don't know about it as it is going on. You're going to be pissed, but it's too late then because the person that you love died because you believe this other guy. It's really hard. Americans have these moments of reckoning and this is a good example of a moment of reckoning.
I think it's going to be a big one. This one goes down in history no matter what plays out from this point forward as an absolute watershed moment in one way or another. It has to be. Historians are likening it to the 1857 Dred Scott decision regarding slavery that declared both Black Americans had no rights that a White man was bound to respect and that Congress had no power to prohibit human enslavement in its states and territories. That was only four years or so before the Civil War broke out. This is a serious moment.
This is as big as that. The only thing that's different and this is where we can stick the landing on this particular show is that the slavery piece was economic. The states were going like, "Don't mess with our economy of slavery. Don't mess with our economy."
What is this decision then? It's more moralistic. Is that the idea or is it power over?
There's a power over, "I'm going to create stability around women, I can have the power." This is a long discussion about moralistic and who gets to make the rules. We collectively get to make the rules. There are a lot of things in this nation that we believe collectively one way, but the law is written in the other way. There are a lot of things that the majority do not agree on. Generally, people respect that we can tolerate some of these things. I don't think this one is one that the nation tolerates, but that's because I'm more individualistic and I don't want my choices taken away. I most certainly don't want the choices taken away from women. That is not my thing.
I'm in agreement. It's going to shine a light on a lot of ways that those choices may not exist in other areas. It's just that there hasn't been enough light shined on that. This may be the beginning of the scale tipping in the other direction as we look back on this moment in history. It has been interesting. There are lots of different things to talk about and unpack more as we go forward here with the show.
It's a good discussion. Thanks a million. Thanks, everybody for reading. Feel free to leave comments and let us know what you think.
Thanks, everyone.
