Domestication
Mental and behavioural submission to a social and ideological system, accompanied by a loss of will and proper judgment, and a physical dependence on material conditions.
This term was originally used in reference to domestic animals — incapable of autonomy and entirely conditioned by man. According to ethologists, man is ‘self-domesticated’ to the degree his behaviour is yoked to culture rather than to his impulses. For us, however, ‘domestication’ has a slightly different sense, designating that situation in which Western man’s passivity and dependence renders him incapable of reacting to the system, however noxious it becomes.
Its symptoms are innumerable: susceptibility to ideological conditioning (audio/visual, scholastic, professional, etc.), dependence on consumerist ways of life, loss of independent judgment in respect to propaganda and culpability, the banishment of all spirituality (replaced by the media gnosis), etc. Domesticated man is a conformist, he doesn’t revolt, he never resists, even when he engages in the simulacrum of emancipation and originality. For the sake of social rewards, he blindly follows his many inculcated prejudices. He sees the global catastrophe provoked by the immigrant colonisation, but doesn’t dare rebel and instead takes refuge in flight. He’s the perpetual victim of fashion. Above all he doesn’t want to feel ‘Other’, independent, for that would mean being excluded (the great contemporary terror). The system provides his dog food, his minimal subsistence, a financial pittance — in return he abdicates whatever critical spirit might touch him. Domesticated man is profoundly attached to the social structures conditioning him, devoid as he is of all revolutionary spirit and historical vision. Whether at the top or the bottom of the social scale, he is a human type incapable of autonomy, the model citizen of our neo-totalitarian age, the modern figure of the slave.
The paradox of the domesticated man is that he has been made to feel that he is an ‘individual’; and indeed narcissistic individualism has become his sole horizon. He’s a little like the artificially bred pig who is force-fed in his cramped cage. The individualism of this domesticated creature, though, actually conceals his submission to the herd’s morality.
How many intellectuals, artists, and brilliant philosophers, on the Right and the Left, have been domesticated (that is, sterilised by the dominant ideology and the fear of displeasing it), made to stand at attention, to dissipate their talent, and act as muzzled watchdogs? What a terrible price to pay for renouncing oneself and sabotaging one’s talent.
This sort of human being has unfortunately become the dominant type. In case of shock, serious crisis, or system failure, the model he represents will simply collapse — and then he will have to count on those minorities who, in every society, are never domesticated.
One should also consider the false resisters — those who ‘resist’, in private, in words, but from whom nothing consequential ever follows. The system has already got to them, these domestics. They can accommodate anything, provided they are fed. But they aren’t important. The best case against domestication is found in La Fontaine’s fable of ‘Le Chien et le loup’ (‘The Dog and the Wolf’).
Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695) was a French poet who wrote many fables, in addition to other works. ‘The Dog and the Wolf’ describes an encounter between a starving wolf and a well-fed dog. The dog tries to entice the wolf to take up his lifestyle, pointing out that to the wolf, who must fight for every meal, and the dog merely has to submit to his human masters for food. The wolf, horrified by such a loss of freedom, decides to go back to his hunting lifestyle.
