ElizabethSawin - Patterns of Domination

Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social January 31, 2026 at 12:48 PM

Abuse of children is fractally self-similar to all the other patterns of domination that hold each other up and that often find embodiment in the most powerful people in our current destructive systems -- white supremacy, nature domination, and patriarchy to name just a few.

You could call the self-similar pattern domination with refusal to seek consent. All that changes from one form to another is who is dominated, who is held as an object rather than a being with sacred and inalienable rights.

If the other is a river that's ecological destruction, if it is a 14 year old girl, it is child abuse.

When we think we are fighting different monsters with different predilections we focus only on the specifics when the common pattern also needs rejection, disruption, and viable alternative patterns.

While we work to mitigate immediate harms (to rivers, to children, to nations, to future generations) I believe it's important to name the pattern, and use similar language for each instance of it. It is clarifying and fortifying.

We think we are fighting different monsters, but it is the patterns that live on and on, the patterns which must be disrupted as well as harms prevented, it is alternative patterns that need to strengthened, embodied, lived in, grown into.

The current regime is extremely coherent (in the complexity science since of the term, where coherence means high fidelity to the same pattern across multiple domains.)

This is clarifying if we pay attention.

Also coherent, by the way, are the mutual aid actions in so many places. In this case coherent to a pattern of mutuality, inherent rights, and interdependence.

As is often said about worldviews, these two worldviews tend to be incomprehensible to each other. It is hard to comprehend one when you are living in the other.

I think that is part of why regimes underestimate community cohesion (what do you mean "love thy neighbor"), and why people embedded in systems of care can be shocked when the hidden/private behavior of the elite is revealed ("he did what?").