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Ideology and the Will to Dominate

Recent horrifying violence—specifically, two mass shootings in California within 48 hours and the brutal killing of Tyre Nichols by police officers in Memphis—has befuddled progressive thinkers. California has the nation’s most stringent gun control laws. The five police officers charged with killing Nichols, a Black man, are also Black. According to the progressive ideologies that surround gun violence and racist policing, such incidents should not have been possible: the laws restricting guns and promoting multi-ethnic policing are supposed to have made them impossible. How, then, can we account for these atrocities? 

Russell Kirk called ideology “the politics of passionate unreason” because “it denies the possibility of truth in politics or in anything else.” That is, whereas true ideas correspond with reality, ideology distorts reality to conform with its ideas. The grotesque reality on display in California and Memphis was the deepest level of depravity to which human beings can stoop. But rather than consider how human nature’s seedier tendencies challenge or fit into their theories, defenders of gun control and racist policing floated into the ethereal abstractions of ideology. 

On gun control, one columnist argued that mass shootings still occur in the Golden State “not because the laws are inherently flawed but because so much of the rest of the country has political leadership, backed up by conservative judges, that idolizes gun ownership and makes it ludicrously easy for anybody—including disgruntled, angry, violent, perhaps mentally ill Californians—to go into gun stores and purchase battlefield-grade weaponry that they can then bring back to their home communities to wreak bloody mayhem.” Kirk’s point about “passionate unreason” seems amply illustrated here.

The most depraved violence, as painfully evident in these incidents, arises not from broken systems but from the fallen nature of human beings. 

More baffling to progressive ideology is how Black police officers could take the life of a Black man. The real problem that prompted this tragedy, another columnist fulminated, was “the fact that there should have been federal legislation to prevent such killings.” Of course, all sorts of laws already prevent killing, and yet killing happens anyway on a daily basis. The strange comment shows how disembodied his ideology has become.

President Joe Biden attempted to put flesh on these ideologies during his State of the Union Address on February 7 by inviting and honoring Brandon Tsay, who tackled one of the California shooters to the ground, and Nichols’s bereaved parents. Yet the “courage and character” that the president lauded in Nichols’ mother was absent in his policy proposals aimed at halting gun violence and police brutality: he repeated the same tropes that these writers propose. More laws, more money, and better systems “can help prevent violence in the first place,” the president assured the nation.

Disembodied ideology overlooks the realities present within human bodies as another possible cause of violence. The most depraved violence, as painfully evident in these incidents, arises not from broken systems but from the fallen nature of human beings. 

St. Augustine understood the disordered human tendency toward violence as a product of the libido dominandi—the lust to dominate—that became part of human nature after Adam’s original sin. It stems from man’s love of self, and it manifests itself at an early age: the older sibling who teases the younger one, the bully who picks on the smallest student in the class, the boys on the team who object to a new player joining them. It continues through adulthood, Augustine explains in The City of God, in the exercise of greed, the pursuit of sex and pleasure, and the desire for glory and power. 

In cross-examining his own motives for stealing pears from a neighbor’s tree as a teenager, Augustine in his Confessions remorsefully acknowledges how his own libido dominandi came to dominate his very self: “There was no motive for my malice except malice. The malice was loathsome, and I loved it. I was in love with my own ruin, in love with decay. … I was depraved in soul, and I lept down from [God’s] strong support into destruction, hungering not for some advantage to be gained by the foul deed, but for the foulness of it.” 

It is here, in the mystery of iniquity that whispers siren songs to the human libido dominandi, that we must look for causes of, and remedies to, grotesque violence in America. The prevailing progressive ideologies could not be further away from the grim reality at hand. 

Plato clearly perceived that order in the state hinged upon prior order within citizens’ souls, and Augustine, who read Plato carefully, argued in The City of God that “the peace of all things is the tranquility of order, and order is the arrangement of things equal and unequal that assigns each its due place.” 

Addressing societal ills requires the hard work of taming the disordered inclinations within the human soul and reordering them into constructive energies that build up the community. This is done not primarily through laws that punish vice—though law certainly plays a role as teacher and disciplinarian in this regard. It is done most effectively through developing virtue within each individual, for virtue includes the discipline to restrain the impulse to malice as it pursues the good of human flourishing. 

Proponents of these ideologies are correct that the libido dominandi can be, and has been, written into systems of oppression. But they err by abstracting “systems” from the human beings who comprise them in the hope that changing a system will change the nature of human beings.

Human beings receive added motivation to develop virtue from the Christian religion with its promise of an eternal reward for good behavior. Hence President George Washington in his farewell address recognized that the religious incentive to virtue is critical for political prosperity: “Let it simply be asked where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice?” 

Unlike the law, whose strictures are external to human beings, virtue and religion aim to stir the human heart from within. The latter two, therefore, are more likely to elicit moral action than the law alone because they touch the very source of the libido dominandi.

But contemporary progressive ideologies have no place for the development of virtue within human beings, nor for religious obligation of any kind, in their diagnoses of the world’s ills. The individual moral agent, with his complex motives and wayward tendencies, does not feature within their framework. Following Marx, the master of ideology, contemporary social ills follow from impersonal groups seeking to dominate each other—the libido dominandi writ large. These groups, unlike individuals, are immutable in their desires and outlooks; they have become abstractions, ideas divorced from reality. They cannot develop virtue, they cannot be reformed, and they cannot be redeemed. 

Proponents of these ideologies are correct that the libido dominandi can be, and has been, written into systems of oppression. But they err by abstracting “systems” from the human beings who comprise them in the hope that changing a system will change the nature of human beings. Plato, Augustine, and George Washington saw the opposite: virtuous individuals generate a healthy society, while vicious individuals corrupt society from within. Systems do not operate in a vacuum; they are only as effective as the individuals who comprise them.

Ideologues cannot handle challenges to their established dogmas, as reactions to the repulsive violence in California and Memphis have shown, because they are too divorced from the human realities that undermine them. Fixing problems requires going to their roots. Since progressive ideologies have no interest in human nature—the real source of grotesque violence—they will never explain what they propose to solve.