I’m often plagued by dreams of violence and domination — sometimes as the perpetrator, sometimes as the victim. Through these dreams, there comes a realization that whether one acts on them or not, we are all willful participants in tremendous and unspeakable acts of violence on a regular basis. Just by engaging, however peacefully, with a violent system, we are vicious killers enjoying our own dominion over those whose misfortune placed them beneath us in the social order we have accepted.
“[Anything which] is a living and not a dying body… will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant – not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power… ‘Exploitation’ … belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will to life.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche (from Beyond Good and Evil)
