Built to last - The mechanics of domination

In order to analyze feminism, we need to understand the foundation of gender hierarchy.

The architecture of domination

I've spent years on trading floors, in prestigious offices, elite academic institutions, and some of the most competitive cities in the world. And the question that has followed me through all of it is this: what drives people to psychologically distance themselves from the harm they cause others in their pursuit of dominance?

The assignment of dominant and subordinate roles is based on establishing inequality. The kind that matters most is permanent, ascribed at birth. Race, gender, nationality. There is no intention, within the system, to ever reverse it. So, where does this idea come from?

The naturalization of hierarchy

The phrase “survival of the fittest,” applied evolutionary logic to human social organization, arguing that inequality was not a political condition but a natural one. Those who dominated did so because nature selected them for dominance. Those who suffered did so because nature had determined their inferiority. This framework emerged at precisely the moment when colonial hierarchies, white supremacy, and patriarchy were facing intellectual and political challenge, and it served to place those hierarchies beyond argument. What was in fact a human architecture of power was dressed in the language of biological inevitability, and the architects disappeared from the picture entirely.

The psychology of compliance

Why don’t members of dominant groups question the system they inhabit? People have a tendency to treat systems of human origin as if they existed above and beyond any human agent, beyond the control of whim or human feeling. The human element behind agencies and institutions is denied. What was built by people, to serve the interests of people, acquires the feeling of impersonal inevitability. Nobody asks whose system it is, or why its designers should be served while its victims suffer.

People begin to negate the human consequences of their actions. They devalue their victims after harming them, concluding that their suffering was the product of their own deficiencies, that they deserved it. And devaluation does not only follow harm, it precedes it. Subordinate groups are systematically prepared for harm through narrative and propaganda. Step by step, entire groups are excluded from the category of full human being, making their destruction first thinkable, then actionable.

Formation, not force

Not all power is accepted willingly. Dominance interactions are based on coercion or habitual deference, and the two are not the same thing. Power is more often taken than granted, and deferring to it is not the same as authorizing it. Over time, however, habitual deference begins to look like consent, to outside observers and sometimes to subordinates themselves. People can become so accustomed to yielding to dominant groups that they lose sight of a fundamental truth: they are the source of the dominant group’s power. Without deference, the hierarchy has nothing to stand on.

The tools of domination are most effective when they operate not through force but through formation. Dominant groups do not only restrict what subordinates can do, they shape who subordinates believe themselves to be. Dominant groups exert the greatest influence over cultural narrative and legitimacy, embedding the terms of the unequal relationship into society’s guiding principles until those terms feel like common sense rather than imposition. Subordinates begin to internalize the representations, values, beliefs, and norms that the dominant group has authored about them.

The result is a kind of social childhood that never ends. Subordinates come to be characterized by the same qualities ascribed to children in relation to adults, such as immaturity, weakness, helplessness and dependency. They are encouraged to develop personal characteristics that serve and please the dominant group: submissiveness, passivity, docility, a lack of initiative, an incapacity for independent thought or action. And crucially, this conditioning is most effective when it begins early. The earlier the devaluation starts, the more thoroughly it is absorbed as self-knowledge rather than experienced as imposition. By the time a subordinate reaches adulthood, the hierarchy has already been built inside them.

Why do subordinate groups “accept“?

Research on learned helplessness demonstrated that repeated exposure to inescapable harm eventually extinguishes the impulse to resist, even when resistance later becomes possible. The brain learns that action is futile. It stops trying. What looks like passivity or acceptance from the outside is in many cases the neurological residue of repeated defeat.

At the ideological level, this becomes internalized oppression. The subordinate does not only stop resisting, they absorb the dominant group’s explanation for why their position is deserved. The external hierarchy migrates inward and becomes self-policing.

This is why the question that dominant groups so often ask, that is, why didn’t they resist, why didn’t they leave, why didn’t they speak, misunderstands the nature of domination entirely. Silence is not consent. It is survival. And survival, sustained long enough, becomes physiology.

The normalization of dominance

Over time, it becomes normal to treat others destructively, to devalue them, to construct false explanations for what is really being done, and to oppose any action toward equality. Those who identify with the dominant group come to see this pattern as the natural order of things. Many do not think of themselves as participating in harm at all.

The intellectual error at the heart of it all

Yet the entire edifice rests on a fundamental intellectual error. Those who invoke biology to justify racial and gender hierarchy mistake what exists in nature for what must exist in human society. They confuse the possibility that biology shapes behavior with the determinist claim that biology fixes it permanently. The argument that male dominance is natural because it appears in animal societies ignores what makes humans distinct; our capacity to learn, to build culture, and to consciously reshape behaviors that conflict with our values.

Equality is not found in nature. It is made. It is a cultural achievement, hard won through deliberate human effort, and only possible because human beings are not simply animals acting out biological imperatives. The existence of hierarchy in nature tells us nothing about what human society must be.

And yet the architecture of domination depends entirely on us believing otherwise, on us forgetting that it was built, that it is maintained, and that the architects have always been human. What has been made by people can be unmade by people. That is precisely what those who benefit from dominance have always needed us not to know.

This is the first of a series of articles that will lay the foundation of feminist theory, before we dive into the analysis of policy and law. How familiar were you with this foundation?