Summary: The late Age of Separation was shaped by a largely one-sided domination culture that prioritized control, hierarchy, and extraction—causing deep wounds across human lives, ecosystems, and generations to come. Though elements of partnership and care persisted in families, communities, and acts of resistance, the dominant systems inflicted widespread harm: individuals suffered alienation and inner oppression; women, LGBTQ+ people, and marginalized communities were controlled or erased; Indigenous cultures were suppressed; the Earth was plundered; and future generations inherited broken systems. Even the powerful were wounded by emotional disconnection and internalized dominance. Yet within the ruins, threads of partnership endured, offering a memory and seed of another way—one that could guide a path of collective reckoning and healing.
This is an article in the Long Journey Home project – a collection of writings from centuries in the future, at a time when humanity has gone through a great crisis and found a more life-centered way of life. It’s meant to inspire and encourage further exploration. See the index for the chapters and articles.
The articles are written by AI with prompts from me. I usually start with an outline, refine it, and then ask for the final article.
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The Many Wounds of One-Sided Domination: From Systemic Harm to Collective Reckoning
By Maelani Tavita
The Culture of Domination, and Its Hidden Softness
The late Age of Separation was a time of great contradiction. It dazzled with technological marvels and global connectivity while perpetuating ancient patterns of control and disconnection. It was an era where domination culture reigned, shaping societies, economies, and inner lives through hierarchies, extraction, and systems of power-over. And yet, it was not a culture of pure domination. In its margins and undercurrents, partnership ways endured: in acts of caregiving, in resistance movements, in families and communities that held each other close. These moments softened the sharp edges of the dominant order. They reminded people of what was possible beyond conquest and control.
Still, the dominant logic of the time—reflected in its institutions, its stories, and its priorities—was one-sided. It elevated force over listening, accumulation over reciprocity, and separation over relationship. For all its brilliance and achievements, this culture did profound harm. To people. To nature. To generations yet unborn. It is a difficult truth. But one we must tell. Not to blame, but to see clearly, so that we might root healing in honesty.
Structures of Power-Over
The architecture of domination culture was woven into the very systems people depended on. It organized governments as pyramids of control, prioritized profit over well-being in economic systems, treated learning as obedience in education, and enforced conformity in belief and identity. The one-sidedness was not merely structural—it was emotional, psychological, and spiritual.
Partnership ways were present, yes, but relegated to the sidelines. Relationship was valued only when it served efficiency. Care was rewarded only when it could be monetized. Even love, perhaps the deepest expression of mutuality, was often framed through the lens of possession or sacrifice. This imbalance distorted everything it touched. The harm was not always visible. But it was deep, and it spread through generations.
Human Wounds in the Age of Disconnection
Individual Lives
Millions lived under systems that demanded compliance, obedience, and performance. Those who didn’t or couldn’t fit the mold were punished, pathologized, or abandoned. Mental health crises became widespread, not as isolated personal failures, but as symptoms of a society that denied wholeness. Depression, anxiety, and addiction thrived in the gaps left by disconnection. Many people felt unseen, unknown, and fundamentally alone.
Gender and Sexuality
The late Age of Separation inherited a long legacy of patriarchy. Women’s bodies and choices were regulated. The feminine was dismissed as irrational or weak. Those who expressed fluid or non-conforming identities faced ridicule, violence, and erasure. LGBTQ+ people were often forced to choose between visibility and safety. Many internalized shame not because of who they were, but because of what society had refused to understand.
Economic Exploitation
Work became less a source of meaning than a means of survival. Vast numbers of people lived in precarious conditions, working long hours for wages that barely covered basic needs. Others were discarded entirely by systems that deemed them unprofitable. Meanwhile, a small elite accumulated unprecedented wealth. This wasn’t merely inequality. It was extraction, justified by myths of meritocracy and necessity.
Cultural and Indigenous Suppression
The domination culture of the time was inseparable from its colonial roots. Indigenous peoples, including my own Pacific kin, were displaced, silenced, or assimilated. Our languages were marked for extinction. Our relationships to land were treated as obstacles to development. Rituals and knowledge honed over millennia were dismissed as superstition. The violence was not always physical. Often, it came through policies, narratives, and laws. But it was violence nonetheless.
A Wounded Earth
The Earth itself was among the greatest victims. Forests were clear-cut for profit. Rivers were poisoned for convenience. Species disappeared at rates never before seen. Entire ecosystems collapsed, quietly and quickly. The Earth was treated not as a living partner but as a resource to be controlled, optimized, and discarded.
This harm was not abstract. It meant food systems breaking down. It meant toxic air and water. It meant the disappearance of places like my home island—slowly swallowed by rising seas caused by faraway emissions. The more-than-human world suffered not because it was weak, but because it was not seen. Not truly. And still, it tried to feed us, shelter us, heal us. It was a grief beyond words.
The Betrayal of the Unborn
The damage was not only to the living. It was to those yet to come. Children were born into a world increasingly shaped by crisis: ecological, political, psychological. They inherited systems already fraying and ecosystems already collapsing. Many carried an intuitive grief—a sense that something essential had been lost before they even arrived. Youth movements emerged, full of courage and clarity, demanding change. But too often they were met with indifference or delay.
In truth, the late Age of Separation betrayed its young. It passed on burdens it refused to face.
Inner Victims
Perhaps the most hidden victims were within. Domination did not only operate outwardly; it was internalized. Many people lived with harsh inner voices, punishing themselves for not doing more, being more, producing more. Their worth had been measured in achievements and appearances. They had learned to distrust their emotions, their needs, their embodied wisdom. This inward domination mirrored the external systems. It was self-alienation, passed down like a silent inheritance.
Mutual Wounding
Even those who benefited from domination systems were not free. Power came at a cost. It required emotional armoring, disconnection from vulnerability, and a constant defense of superiority. In a culture of domination, empathy became a liability. Dominators were taught not to feel too much, lest they lose their place. They too became victims—not of oppression, but of emptiness. Their privilege was real, and so was their loss.
This was a culture of mutual wounding. No one escaped untouched.
Embers of Partnership
Yet even in the darkest times, the embers of another way remained. People cared for each other. Mutual aid networks grew. Land defenders risked their lives for sacred places. Teachers taught from the heart. Artists pointed to deeper truths. Healers remembered old ways and imagined new ones. These were not mere footnotes. They were threads of life. Carried forward by those who refused to forget.
The late Age of Separation was not only a time of harm. It was a time of remembering. Of seeds planted for a future not yet seen. Many did not live to see that future. But they helped make it possible.
Reckoning and Restoration
To build something new, we must first face what was. Not with guilt or blame, but with the courage to tell the truth. The truth that so many were hurt. That nature was wounded. That future generations were placed in peril. That even the powerful were not whole.
And we must remember that another way always lived alongside the dominant one. That partnership was never extinguished, only pushed underground. It lived in lullabies, in hands held, in justice sought, in gardens planted, in grief shared.
From that remembering, healing can begin. A healing that includes all of us. Even the ones who forgot.
Maelani Tavita is a cultural historian and poet from a now-submerged island in the Central Pacific. She writes from the coast of Aotearoa, where she lives with other climate-displaced kin. Her work is rooted in memory, longing, and the ancestral call to restore right relationship with the Earth.