Humans are domesticated animals

Culture, in the anthropological sense,

is an effort to provide the conditions

for collective domestication of man.
Claude Lévi-Strauss

The concept of human domestication might disturb strong believers in free will. However, I assume that if humans were not domesticated, they might not be as comfortable being heard.

There are two essential components in human domestication: the first is the innate instinct for obedience in the human race. The second is the tendency of every dominant group to use physical, psychological, or symbolic violence to maintain and reinforce power relationships, discipline individuals, and suppress dissent or deviations from established norms.

In the experiments in the 1950s about conformity conducted by Solomon Asch it was unraveled the extent to which individuals succumb to group pressure, even when it contradicts their own perceptions. The setup involved participants matching line lengths, with confederates purposefully providing incorrect answers. Many participants chose to conform to the group consensus, highlighting the pervasive influence of social pressure on individual decision-making.

Stanley Milgram’s renowned experiments, conducted in the early 1960s at Yale University, demonstrated how the influence of authority, could override the moral compass and engage people in actions that might otherwise be considered ethically challenging. In these experiments, participants were instructed to administer increasingly severe electric shocks to a confederate (an actor pretending to be a participant) when they answered questions incorrectly. The confederate, although not actually receiving shocks, would react with distress, and the study aimed to observe how far participants would go in obeying the authority figure (the experimenter) despite the apparent harm they were causing.

In the Stanford Prison Experiment (1971), Philip Zimbardo investigated the psychological effects of perceived power and authority within a controlled setting. Participants were randomly assigned roles as either prisoners or guards in a simulated prison environment. As the experiment progressed, participants completely immersed themselves in their assigned roles, resulting in a concerning escalation of abusive behavior among those designated as guards.

Obedience is enforced through various means, including social sanctions, rewards, punishments, and the internalization of disciplinary mechanisms.

As a result, individuals become compliant and adapt to the structures of power and authority present in society.

Simple violence is the first tool for obedience enforcement, however, real domestication, is achieved only by indirect violence, namely, through Ideology (Karl Marx), structural violence (Galtung), symbolic violence (Pierre Bourdieu), social orthopedics (Foucault), cultural hegemony (Gramsci), and social control (Hirschi).

Marx’s concept of ideology explores how dominant ideas and beliefs in society serve the interests of the ruling class, perpetuating and justifying the existing social and economic order.

From these premises, Gramsci develops the concept of Cultural Hegemony, understood as the ideological dominance that the ruling class exercises over other social classes by disseminating and controlling dominant values, ideologies, and cultural representations, through control over the means of communication, education, art, literature, and other cultural institutions and practices.

The ruling class, according to Gramsci, uses culture to create a system of values and beliefs that reflect its interests and worldview as normal, legitimate, and desirable.

These values and beliefs become an integral part of the identity and mindset of other social classes, prompting them to adopt the viewpoints and goals of the ruling class, often without fully realizing it. Similarly, Symbolic violence, as conceptualized by Pierre Bourdieu, operates through symbols, language, and cultural norms, making existing social orders and inequalities seemingly natural and unquestionable. Individuals may unwittingly accept these norms, contributing to the reproduction of social inequalities. Bourdieu’s notion of “cultural capital” underscores the unequal distribution of cultural knowledge and skills, reinforcing the dominance of certain groups.

A crucial aspect of this process is that the dominant culture tends to portray the values and interests of the ruling class as universally valid and objective, ignoring or marginalizing other perspectives and alternatives. This fosters a cultural consensus that aids in maintaining the social status quo and consolidating the power of the ruling class.

According Hirschi’s social control theory the ruling class establishes and maintains control over society through cultural influence, shaping ideologies, beliefs, and values. Often such believes and values take the form of “social control bonds,” and they include attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief.

Erving Goffman calls ‘normalization’ the social mechanisms that work towards establishing a standard or norm for what is considered acceptable or typical within a given societal context. The process of normalization involves the construction of a collective understanding of what is deemed normal, often rooted in cultural, social, and historical contexts. Stigma, in this context, plays a pivotal role in shaping the parameters of normalization. Stigmatized behaviors or characteristics are those that deviate from the perceived societal norm, and the social tools at play work to either reinforce or challenge these norms.

Social interactions, through various mediums such as communication, media, and interpersonal relationships, contribute to the reinforcement or transformation of societal norms. As individuals navigate these interactions, they internalize and perpetuate societal expectations, further contributing to the normalization process.

In the context of Foucault’s analysis, in order in order to establish norms, rules, and behaviors, and shape conformity, societal norms and expectations, ‘disciplinary power’ take the forms of prisons, schools, hospitals. Foucault employs the concept of ‘social orthopedics’ to elucidate the evolution, spanning the 16th to the 19th centuries, of a framework comprising surveillance, exercises, maneuvers, annotations, files, positions, classifications, examinations, and recordings. These mechanisms were designed to train individuals, rendering them docile and useful simultaneously.

The result of these mechanisms are human beings who can perform as domesticated animals. Like horses, oxen, and donkeys, willingly plow fields, pull carts, or carrying goods for other humans; as horses, donkeys or camels, help in transportation. In the past directly, today, with the help of machines. Like cows, pigs, chickens, and goats they are involved in the production of food. Like breeds of dogs, they can work in tasks related to security and protection. Like certain birds, they can work for show and entertainment.