The Dominant Mindset: Empire's Oldest Psyop
Part 1 of the "Unmasking the Dominant Mindset" Series
This is Part 1 of “The Deep Dig” — the archaeological excavation of where the Dominant Mindset comes from. If you’re new here, How to Read This Substack has three doors in, depending on where you’re starting.
Imagine for a moment that you are part of a group—hungry, scared, and hypervigilant—moving deeper into a land no one in your group has seen before. Dangerous animals, likely to attack and kill you, lurk in the shadows. They have already killed some of your people. To survive, you must kill them first.
These animals look unsettlingly like you—humanlike, but different in appearance, language, and movement. Your group believes they are savages. You strategize on how to survive, how to clear the land so your people can claim it.
What you may not realize yet is that this isn’t just an ancient story—it’s also the programming running in you right now.
What if there was a set of strategies—proven in other conquests—designed exactly for this kind of takeover? Some call it history. Others call it strategy. I call it memory.
If you’ve already been sensing this for years — maybe all your life — you’re not alone. You’re one of the canaries in the empire’s coal mine, the ones who feel the poison before others can name it. What follows may confirm what you already know, but with a language that makes it harder for the system to deny.
Empires don’t just conquer. They program. They train minds to forget—numbing, destroying, or elevating above what must not be felt. They teach us to collapse in shame or fight to avoid it, to perform worth instead of inherit it, to chase status instead of connection, to survive by forgetting we are part of the All and Everything.
This forgetting is not a glitch. It is the psychological operating system of empire—what I call the Dominant Mindset.
Empire — the systematic organization of life through domination and extraction rather than collaboration and mutuality — didn’t just take land. It took reality itself, replacing being with doing, belonging with ownership, reverence with control.
I’m not talking here about the healthy forms of power that keep life safe and thriving. Boundaries, leadership, courage — these are forms of power that protect and sustain. The Dominant Mindset is something else entirely: toxic domination, the drive to control, exploit, and elevate oneself at the expense of others, the land, or the sacred.
If you’ve been told your whole life that dominance is strength, you were misled. Empire uses that confusion to keep all of us — even the “winners” — inside its cage.
You might recognize this self-sealing logic at work today — from dissent over U.S. wars being labeled “anti-American,” to critiques of a government being painted as anti-patriot, to calling out institutional harm being spun as “hating the institution.” This is one of empire’s oldest tactics: collapse legitimate critique into accusations of prejudice, so the conversation shifts from accountability to defending the system. It works not because people are weak, but because empire has taught us to fear shame more than we fear injustice.
Empire didn’t just take land. It took reality itself, replacing being with doing, belonging with ownership, reverence with control. And the conquest was not only external—it was internal.
Empire severed us from our own nature—not just our feelings or bodies, but our identities.
The Three Identities of Self
Before we name the inherited strategies, we must name what they were designed to destroy:
The Omnipersonal Identity: Who I am as the All and Everything—my sacred connection to the land, nature, mystery, ancestors, spirit, and religion, including the original teachings of Christianity and Jesus before empire broke them, and the living world.
The Interpersonal Identity: Who I am as part of a “We”—in friendship, love, collaboration, community, and conflict.
The Intrapersonal Identity: Who I am as Me—my internal sense of truth, self-worth, and presence with my parts.
Each of these identities holds a form of sovereignty. Each makes rebellion possible. So empire made war on all three—and trained us to help. Sometimes without knowing it, we’ve upheld the very system holding us down, perhaps while we were busy holding others down.
Here’s where this series will take us:
Part 2: How empire severed the Omnipersonal—cutting us from the sacred, the Earth, and the breath.
Part 3: How this rupture infected our relationships—turning love into leverage and trust into liability.
Part 4: How the inner voice was colonized—shame replacing truth.
Part 5: The Matrix of Self—a compass for remembering.
The Inherited Strategies of Empire
These aren’t just historical. They live in institutions, relationships, and inner voices. They’re not simply imposed from the outside—they’re internalized. Generation after generation, we’ve been taught to repeat them, reward them, and pass them on.
Each is a forgetting—designed to make us feel alone, unworthy, or dependent on empire’s logic to survive. And each works best when we help keep it alive—when we police each other, and even ourselves, on behalf of the very system holding us down.
Sever the Omnipersonal – Cut the thread to the All and Everything.
Discovery – We found it; therefore, it was empty.
Civilizing Mission – We know what’s best—for you.
Naming as Ownership – To name it is to claim it.
Divide and Dominate – If they turn on each other, they’ll never turn on us.
Sanctifying the Settler – We were brave, not brutal.
The Good Life as Weapon – Don’t resist—consume.
Inherited Innocence – That wasn’t us.
Selective Memory – Only some things get remembered.
Making the Map the Territory – The system is reality.
Historical fingerprints: • Doctrine of Discovery, 1493 — land was declared “empty” so it could be taken. (Wikipedia) • U.S. boarding schools for Native children — children were taken to be “purified.” (National Library of Medicine) • “Kill the Indian and save the man.” — motto behind assimilationist boarding schools. (National Park Service)
If you want proof it’s still alive, just turn on the news.
If you listen closely, the same severance whispers today—in the pause before your breath, in the way reverence falters in your mind. In Part 2, we’ll follow that thread back to its first cut—when Empire declared war on the sacred, the Earth, and the breath.
Next in Unmasking the Dominant Mindset: The Homesickness With No Address — tracing the first cut, when empire made war on the sacred, the Earth, and the All and Everything.
If you’re feeling the edges of something — a homesickness, a wrongness you can’t quite name — the Unveiling Self Assessment maps how the Dominant Mindset’s programming shows up in your life across all three identity levels.
It’s a 10-minute look at how Power, Love, and Presence are flowing across your inner life, your relationships, and your connection to something larger. Most people sit with their results for days.
New here? How to Read This Substack — three doors in, depending on where you’re starting.
Can't wait to read more! This is thought provoking and I hope it can inspire more discussion. It feels like a new framing of how to address our current problems.
Several lines really landed for me especially the framing of “the ones who feel the poison before others can name it,” the distinction between healthy power and toxic domination, and the way you name how conquest becomes internalized as inner voices.
I’ve spent the last few years learning how to give language to and navigate these dynamics especially inside myself, in intimate relationships, and while navigating the school system with my children, where all of this becomes painfully visible. I also work with embodiment as a physio in mental and sexual health, and that work feels inseparable from what you’re describing here, it truly lives in the body.
This post puts clear words to something that’s deeply ingrained and often treated as “just normal.” I really appreciate the clarity you bring to a subject that’s notoriously difficult to articulate especially in ways that can’t be easily dismissed by the very mindset you’re pointing to.