Hegemony – Not Under My Dome

My last post presented an argument for emphasizing the positive, as various elements drawn from life’s experiences are selected and collected to fill the area beneath your dome of heaven. Another way to emphasize the positive is to exclude the negative whenever possible. Excluding negative experiences is not possible since the are inscribed in your memory. The best you can do is dilute or overwhelm the negatives of your experience with an increasing number of recollected and as yet to be discovered positive experiences. However, there are some negatives over which you have power . These are the negatives of attitude, ideologies, philosophies, practices, and beliefs.

What lies beneath your DOH is for your mind’s eye only. Even those individuals you include in the confines of your dome cannot visualize the entirety of any dome of heaven but their own. What you include under your dome of heaven reflects ‘you‘ to ‘yourself’. What others see, is a you based on what you stand for. They see and know you by your attitudes, ideologies, philosophies, practices, and beliefs. These overt behavioural and attitudinal elements define your persona in their eyes. Thus, in many ways you define your public self by the attitudes, ideologies, philosophies, practices, and beliefs you reject and exclude from your dome of heaven. What you exclude from your DOH, is as important an indicator of the true nature of you as a person, as what you include. I will use the remainder of this post, and a number of subsequent posts to share some of the negatives I have exclude from beneath my dome of heaven.

Hegemony has no place beneath my dome of heaven, even though hegemony is what makes the world go around. The word is derived from the Greek, and means leadership in terms of who is in control. In its most benign form, hegemony is the force that generates a stratification of society with the leaders at the top, and all the various other components of society forming strata below the leaders. The uppermost strata, composed of a commonly recognised and acknowledged, but not necessarily homogeneous leadership group, imposes its rules on that society. This, of course, requires the consent of  society as a whole. Hence, one leads with the consent of the led.

It is interesting to note that Hegemon was the Greek goddess who held dominion over plants, whose role was to ensure that they would produce flowers and bear fruit when they were supposed to, and to bear the best flowers and fruits possible. Likewise, the role of leaders in a society is to ensure that it is a healthy structure and bears its metaphorical fruits and flowers prolifically as required. Unfortunately, leaders who have dominion over societies often transmute the ideas of dominion into the reality of domination. How often in recorded history do we see the revolutionary leadership become the next dominating force, controlling the lives of individuals, and limiting their freedom. Domination can be overt or covert, but it is domination non-the- less.

I’ll have some more to say about hegemony, and why it is excluded from my dome of heaven in my next post.

As always, your faithful blogger,

L. Alan Weiss – Author – Through a lens of Emptiness: Reflections on Life, Longevity and Contentment

Please visit my author website at www.lalanweiss.com

What would the Tea Party Republicans think about this? Please comment…