Suppose you want to master or own or control another human being. This is a very common thing that human beings want to do. It can manifest itself at the social and political level as slavery, but it’s evident in much more subtle ways as well, say for example the relationship between parents and their children. Part of what it means to be a parent is to be aware of the dangers of trying to own one’s children. Ownership of children would mean controlling everything about those children, making of them an image of oneself and denying to them, implicitly or explicitly, the capacity to develop as free human agents before God with their own idiosyncratic characters. And we’ve all seen, I suspect, and done a version of that. But it’s a question of how much one does it. There are extreme cases where one sees parents who really are caught in the habit of trying to own their children, control them, make them into themselves, make them utterly subservient. Another common example occurs in intimate or romantic relationships. The same desire, what Augustine would call the “concupiscence for domination,” is apparent there too. What we want from other people in our intimate or romantic relationships is not them—what we want is simply an object to fulfill our own desires.
I would say that the experiments of modernity with respect to radically remaking political orders or revolution and genocide provide larger instances of this lust for mastery. One way to achieve mastery is to remove everything except yourself. If you are all that’s left, you’ll be in charge. But to do that is almost an ideal type of the desire for mastery that is characteristic for sin. And so if you look at the great genocides of the twentieth century, they’re all informed by that in a way. In a sense, they all begin when someone says, “Things are really bad; things have gone wrong; the way to set it straight is to gain complete control over it, to restart it.” That will almost always mean killing everybody. And there are a lot of examples of that.
Those attempts at mastery can all become habitual, and the interesting feature of such attempts at mastery is that they inevitably fail. The desire to have mastery or control over a lover or a child, for example, precisely removes that person from being a lover or a child and it tries to make them something that by definition they’re not; it fails as an enterprise.