CHAPTER TWO
URGE OF DOMINANCE
Urge
of dominance is the arch enemy of a healthy personality, and the well-being of
mankind.
Since this is the focal point of
discussion, I must state that heading an organization or institution as a duty,
is not dominance but leadership. Here, by dominance I mean imposing one's
spiritual or secular authority on others with a view to controlling their lives
even to minor details. This is the process which allows one person to paralyse
the free will of millions by saddling them with his own determination.
What is an Urge?
It is a psychological term which
may be described as a driving force. A motor car consists of an engine, a body,
wheels and scores of other parts. Yet it cannot move without fuel which actually
propels it. What petrol is to a motor car or coal is to a locomotive engine,
urge is to man. Drive is just another word for urge. It is a strong emotional
force which comes to control the behaviour of a person. Of course, man has many
urges - the urge to satisfy hunger, the urge to gratify sexual desire, and so
on. When an ordinary desire gains high intensity, it also ranks as an urge. For
example, a man falls in love with a woman. If he is just fooling around with
her, he is seeking the fulfillment of a desire, but if he becomes obsessed with
the woman, and all his dreams and actions are directed by the considerations of
her pleasures and displeasures, his desire begins to rank as an urge for being
the driving force of his behaviour. Every urge plays an important role in human
conduct but the urge that gains ascendancy over the rest is the supreme urge;
its right operation and magnitude of success or failure may decide the quality
of personality.
Dominance-urge, the root of evil
Of all urges, the urge of dominance
is the most severe because it goads its possessor to gain control of other
members of the species. It is evil by nature because "A's" dominance
over "B" is not possible without the latter surrendering his rights to
the former. And, there is nothing more sordid than depriving others of their
liberties; it is in fact an act of neutralising the free will of the dominated
person for making it a shadow of the dominant's volition. The evil nature of the
dominance-urge is displayed by the dominance-hierarchies found in domestic fowl,
birds, baboons, bumble bees, crabs etc. It is well explained by what is called
"peck order" and is commonly seen amongst chickens where bird
"A" pecks the weaker bird "B" who in turn pecks the still
weaker bird "C". It follows that pecking or repression is the main
characteristic of dominance-hierarchy which is organised on the principle of
"might is right". A better understanding of this concept is provided
by "Lek behaviour" which refers to a communal area where two or more
males of a species perform courtship displays. By a demonstration of brute
force, the winner establishes his dominance over all other males of the herd
which acknowledge his right to seduce any female, and priority to enjoy food and
water. This is what dominance is all about - the mania of self-preference to the
total exclusion of others.
Dominance-hierarchy
Dominance-hierarchy, of course, is
a must for social organization to avoid chaos, which is another description of
death, but even as a pillar of organization, it is virtuous only when every
member performs the allotted function as a duty to promote the cause of the
society.
In a dominance-hierarchy based on
dispensation of duty, it is the chief function of the ruler to establish a fair
system of administration for the dispensation of natural justice to safeguard
people's rights and liberties. Therefore, his office ought to rank as the most
reverential, but in practice this is not the case because, as a rule, he does
not administer rights and liberties to advance the cause of people but for the
purpose of prolonging his own rule and enhancing his own dignity. As a dominant
being, he knows that more freedom for the people means less power for himself.
This is against his nature because power to the ruler is what sight is to an
eye, lustre to a diamond and usury to a Jew. Since an increase in his power
leads to a decrease in people's liberties, he is usually wise enough not to
achieve his end with brute force. Therefore, he resorts to hypocrisy and raises
the dignity and sanctity of people's duty (except his own) so far above people's
rights that the former begins to look holy and the latter, profane. By
projecting the state as a goal in itself, he makes it the most powerful and the
f nal arbitrator because it is he who wields the state powers and therefore, the
state becomes the shadow of his personality. Thus he prepares a highly
sophisticated web of gubernatorial wizardry which allures people to get
entangled in it to suffer a volitional paralysis of their freedom.
Tamburlaine
A dominance-hierarchy is usually
operated by the mechanism of fear and favour to enforce the gubernatorial will
which is the child of the dominance-urge. Timur or Tamburlaine, one of the
greatest conquerors of history, provides a good specimen of the concept of
dominance, and fear and favour.
The entrance to Timur's Palace
boasted the inscription:
"The Kingdom belongs to Allah
The Sultan is the Shadow of Allah on Earth."
In fact, this inscription sprang
from his dominance-urge which prompted him to equate himself with God, though
indirectly, as his shadow or viceroy. It is interesting to know the practical
implications of this urge.
Timur, the conqueror, believed:
"Just as there is only one God in Heaven, so the earth can support only one
King". Therefore, he demanded of Bayezid (1360-1403) to acknowledge him as
his overlord. Bayezid, the great Turkish Sultan was himself a formidable soldier
and enjoyed the reputation of massacring a Christian army of 100,000 at
Nicopolis in 1396. Being stunned by this insolence, he challenged Timur to a
battle and threatened to take Saray-Mulk-Khanum, Timur's chief wife, as his
concubine. In the ensuing battle near Ankara during July 1402, Timur triumphed.
To display his dominance, he imprisoned Bayezid in a specially-built iron cage
and to magnify the inferiority of the vanquished foe, Timur took his wife for a
sexual partner!
His carnage of the Indians in Delhi
stood at 75,000. When his chroniclers incorporated this fact into an official
record along with the most horrifying details of rape and pillage, Timur became
angry. Considering his campaign a glorious victory, he remarked: "A cook
ought to be judged by the taste of the dish he prepares and not by the blood on
his hands when preparing it".
During his military expeditions
against the Arabs, he built high mounds with the decapitated heads of the
victims. The heads, which had been secured in position with clay, faced outward
to frighten passers-by. The mound at Aleppo was ten cubits high and twenty
cubits in circumference.
Tamburlaine and Fear
It seems reasonable to think that a
man like Timur would not be afraid of anything. But this view does not hold good
when we realise that on his deathbed, he trembled with fear and continuously
recited Kalma to acknowledge the lordship of the prophet Muhammad, the founder
of Islam who claimed to possess intercessory powers for granting his followers
the delights of Heaven. Not only that, when his grave was opened up in 1941 by
the Russian archeologists, they found two skeletons buried together; the other
skeleton was that of Sayyad Imam Baraka, his spiritual protector; they had been
buried together in the same mausoleum, and it was Timur's face that had been
turned towards Sayyad Baraka who was a descendant of Muhammad and thus endowed
with the grace to keep the flames of Hell at bay. Timur was as much afraid of
death and Hell as anyone else!
Timur excelled not only in
the art of frightening, but he was also generous to his loyal servants. He, like
most rulers, secured obedience by activating the instincts of fear and favour to
satisfy his urge of dominance. However, this urge is so frantic that its
tentacles spread far beyond the grave. Why? This is a complicated question and
does not admit a direct answer. Therefore, I shall add the next Chapter to
explain it.
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