Historians once proposed a theory known as “pan-Babylonianism,” according to which virtually all cultural phenomena were understood as developments of ideas originating in ancient Babylon.
Economists have coined the term “pan-economism” to criticize approaches that treat economic relations as the sole factor determining the course of history.
Both concepts are reductive. They attempt to explain complex human realities by reducing them to a single cause. Thi can be called pan-reductionism.
It may be useful to introduce a similar term: pan-domination. By this I mean a view of the world in which all human relations are interpreted as struggles for dominance—relations of power, subordination, and resistance to subordination.
An example can be found in a scholarly monograph on eleventh-century monasticism. The author argues that vows of celibacy were taken in order to escape the authority of the family and to place oneself under the authority of an abbot.
Such an interpretation fails to account for the existence of eremitic life. The phenomenon of hermitage is simply ignored by the author. It does not fit the framework, and therefore it disappears from the analysis.
It is true that struggles for dominance permeate social life, often turning it into something resembling a living hell. But to claim that nothing else exists in social life is to fail to see reality.
To exercise power does not necessarily mean to be a morally degraded person in every respect. Conversely, to be oppressed, to be a victim of manipulation, does not automatically confer moral virtue. Suffering, in itself, does not ennoble.
History offers many examples. An oppressor—a nobleman, a slave owner—may also be a poet of freedom, a great composer, or an astronomer. The oppressed, for their part, may be ignorant or even defenders of the very systems that bind them.
The drive for domination can become a monomania. But if it were always such, humanity would not survive—not because people would destroy one another, but because the human psyche cannot sustain a single, all-consuming obsession. It breaks down, leading to irrational, dangerous, even self-destructive behavior.
The desire for domination stands in tension with other human capacities: for love, for creativity, for communication. A person can live with this tension, just as one can live with a limp or a stutter. Life might be easier—perhaps better, especially for others—without this impulse. Yet it does not define the whole of a person. It can recede, become secondary, or nearly disappear.
This is what allows human life to persist.
It is why a marriage can be happy even under conditions of inequality. It is why creativity remains possible even in unfree circumstances—both for the oppressed and, paradoxically, for the oppressor. Not inevitably, but possibly.
And this possibility marks a fundamental difference between human beings and the characters of a game. Human life cannot be reduced to economic interests, nor to power alone, nor to any single principle that claims to explain it entirely.