DUTY OVER DOMINATION

As the world crossed from 2025 into 2026, there was little illusion that the road ahead would be smooth. Climate disruption continues to accelerate, reshaping how we live, produce, move and gather. Artificial intelligence advances at a pace far outstripping our desire or capacity to govern it responsibly. Geopolitical tension deepens even as societies show clear signs of fatigue. The volume rises, the ground fragments, and certainty becomes scarce.

January 2026 did not soften these realities. It confirmed them.

Early in the month, Stephen Miller, Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy in the Trump administration, articulated a worldview that has been gaining renewed traction. Speaking on CNN, he argued that the world is governed by strength, force and power, “iron laws,” as he described them, that have existed since the beginning of time.

It is a compelling narrative. Simple. Unambiguous. Reassuring in moments of instability. And for many, it sounds honest.

But history, and lived experience, tells a far more complicated story.

I grew up in a country where domination was not theoretical. It was codified. Administered. Enforced.

Apartheid was not merely a political system determined to keep people apart; it was the basis of an architecture of daily life. It dictated where you could walk, sit, work and love. It stripped people of personhood and replaced it with classification. Power was omnipresent in uniforms, in checkpoints, in prisons. Dignity was treated as a threat to be contained.

The logic of this system was explicit. In 1986, during South Africa’s nationwide State of Emergency, then-Minister of Defence Magnus Malan stated that security forces would crush any threat to the state, regardless of cost. This was not rhetoric born of panic. It was doctrine. Force was not a last resort; it was the organising principle.

And yet, it failed. 

Not because the regime lacked weapons or authority. But because it lacked legitimacy.

Domination may enforce compliance, but it cannot sustain consent. And without consent, no system endures.

When Nelson Mandela was released after 10,052 days in prison, many expected retribution. Even violent revolution. We had been conditioned to believe that power flows in only one direction, that once seized, it must be wielded, or it will be lost.

Mandela chose a different path. He understood what authoritarian systems repeatedly forget: domination may control the present, but it cannot claim the future. He refused to replace white domination with black domination. He rejected the seductive simplicity of revenge. In doing so, he dismantled the logic of apartheid more completely than violence ever could.

What ultimately defeated the regime was not superior force, but superior legitimacy. Mandela’s rise to become the first democratically elected black President of the Republic of South Africa was a salute by South Africans, and the world, to the vision he believed in, and the choices he made. For Madiba the world is forever grateful.

This lesson is not historical. It is urgent. Because the dynamics of domination are no longer abstract. They are visible in every direction we look, in Minneapolis, in Caracas, in Washington, in Davos.

In the United States, federal immigration agents shot and killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti during protests against immigration raids in Minneapolis. Investigations stopped. Prosecutors resigned. The Justice Department was brought increasingly under direct political influence, with pressure placed on legal institutions to pursue perceived enemies under the banner of “correcting” politicisation.

This was not accidental. It was promised. And then, something shifted.

Within days, sixty leaders of major Minnesota based companies, including Target, Best Buy, 3M, General Mills, UnitedHealth Group, US Bancorp and Cargill, issued a public call for immediate de-escalation. Shortly thereafter, the head of the Business Roundtable echoed their concern. Corporate leaders, long cautious, began to recognise that fear was no longer isolated to vulnerable communities. It was spreading, to employees, consumers, markets and supply chains.

The signals followed. Consumer confidence fell to its lowest level in twelve years. Gold prices surged even as equity markets remained high, a typical indicator of anxiety beneath apparent strength. Internationally, confidence in US reliability weakened. Europe accelerated trade engagement with Latin America and India. Canada and the UK began engaging China more openly. Assumptions shifted.

This is the economic footprint of domination.

Across parts of the world that once positioned themselves as defenders of liberal order, familiar patterns are re-emerging. Militarised responses to civilian anxiety. The reframing of communities and increasingly viewpoints as threats. Dissent recast as disloyalty. Dialogue narrowed, then closed. Complexity dismissed as weakness.

Internal enforcement powers expand. Troops appear on domestic streets. The language of “order” replaces the language of care. Strength is performed rather than exercised responsibly. We are told this is realism. That restraint is naïve. That force is inevitable.

I have heard this argument before. It sounds convincing at the beginning. It always does. But it ends the same way, with societies less safe, less free and more afraid than before.

Domination extracts an immediate and deeply human cost. Lives are lost. Families fractured. Fear becomes ambient, shaping behaviour and narrowing possibility. These are not abstract chapters in history; they are lived realities whose consequences persist long after the rhetoric fades.

There is nothing noble in this suffering. Nothing stabilising in sustained fear. Domination produces compliance, not consent. Order, not resilience. And systems without resilience do not endure.

It is in this context that the remarks of Mark Carney, Canada’s Prime Minister, in Davos warrant attention. It is why they caused a global stir of conscience. He spoke not of transition, but of rupture. a world where integration has been weaponised, supply chains turned into leverage, finance into coercion, and interdependence into vulnerability. Nostalgia, he warned, is not a strategy.

He is right. There is no returning to what was. But recognising rupture does not require embracing domination as the only response. The contemporary world may indeed today be shaped by three major powers, the United States, Russia and China, each willing to deploy force, leverage and coercion. That reality must be acknowledged. But history is unequivocal about what happens when power is severed from legitimacy.

Culture often understands this before politics does.

During the struggle against apartheid, artists across South Africa and across the globe gave voice to what power attempted to silence. Songs like Biko and Asimbonanga preserved memory, dignity and moral clarity when institutions failed to do so. Artists rose to become the unofficial anthem creators for activists. That tradition continues. When Bruce Springsteen released Streets of Minneapolis, naming Alex Pretti and Renée Good, he refused to let them be reduced to statistics. These acts are not entertainment. They are moral resistance.

This is not idealism. It is pattern recognition.

Every system built primarily on coercion eventually fractures, not because people suddenly become brave, but because they grow tired of pretending. Tired of silence masquerading as consent. Tired of living within lies.

The most effective resistance movements do not defeat domination by mirroring it. They defeat it by refusing its terms, by insisting on dignity, sustaining moral ground, and building solidarity where fear was intended to divide.

True strength is not the capacity to impose one’s will indefinitely. It is the ability to govern without constant force. Authority rooted in trust. Power that does not require perpetual performance.

The most dangerous myth of our time is that domination is inevitable. It is not.

It is a choice, made when fear feels easier than courage, and control easier than care.

History does not belong to the strongest. It belongs to those who refuse to become what they oppose.

And that remains the most powerful alternative we have.