On Creating Without Taking

It’s impossible to create without taking, on some level. This is present throughout the novel. Even when thinking about cults or intentional communities, the idea of self-sufficiency and separateness is not actually real. What is possible is to counter existing forms of dominion with gentler forms of domination that work with people’s natural tendencies.

The Pattern isn’t an alternative to domination—it’s a different kind of control technology. It’s clear what’s happening: it’s cultivating and nurturing people into their best selves rather than following a breeding logic that treats individual subjects as something for consumption or some other purpose. Butler recognizes the possibility to build a different kind of society where people work collectively for the collective good. Yes, people are controlled, but they’re controlled in ways that align with things they already have inclinations to do. Those needs are taken care of and not used in an exploitative, domineering way.

Structures and Leadership

This connects to Jo Freeman’s work on structurelessness. The idea of a leaderless or structureless system is not real. There are always structures. It’s just a matter of whether you can identify them.

Butler is a pragmatist, not a utopian. There is no world free of power dynamics. Fundamentally, people need systems. They need leaders. Someone is always in charge whether it’s acknowledged or not. That’s just the nature of how things work. Learning from early feminism shows that’s true. So the question becomes: what can we do to look at that realistically and then see what we can achieve? What is a gentler, better system that we can live under, as opposed to dreaming for something that’s not possible?

Collective Power and Necessary Boundaries

Collective power and the ability to accomplish things together—the sense of purpose that people get from being part of a group doing something—requires submission to social forms. You need restrictions and coercive power and the ability to exclude from the group. A totally libertarian, open space quickly becomes useless to the people who are actually inhabiting it.

Power and Lived Experience

Understanding of what power is and how it operates differs depending on how you’ve experienced it. Butler’s position as a Black woman matters—these things fit differently for people of color inside the United States.

Mary, the actives, the latents—their relationship to power is naturally going to be different because of their history with Doro. That’s very different from somebody who’s only understood power from the perspective of traditional power structures like the government. Mary and the telepaths understand power from having lived under Doro’s absolute domination, versus people who only know power through traditional institutional structures.