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To dominate is to control something (force).
To inspire is to influence something to control itself (power).

The idea of domination is somewhat of an illusion, because the only form of discipline is self-discipline. As said by Glenn Doman, founder of The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, "You can beat me, you can punish me, you can do anything you want to me, but you can't discipline me. Only I can discipline me. Only I decide what happens to me."

Self-discipline and self-control are close to the same thing.

Let's try an experiment. Let's look at replacing one word with another.

total global domination
vs.
total global inspiration

When I read each one I get totally different impressions about intent.

This brings back to my original comments about the U.S. system and how it works. It is set up to contain more inspiration than domination. It allows the people to make their own decisions about how they are required to live. They accomplish this through voting in representatives to advocate for them. That is why candidates run on platforms. When a candidates platform is important to the people, the people are more likely to vote for that candidate. If the candidate is elected he or she then has the job of living out that platform properly. If that doesn't happen, then he or she is likely to get voted out the next go-round. This is the people's choice. This is how the people discipline themselves. It is a system made to inspire not to dominate.

To combine the U.S. system and ideals with the idea of "dominating" worldwide is self-negating and a bit of a contradiction. Can the U.S. influence and inspire? Absolutely. Would that be a good thing? That depends on exactly what that influence is. Like I said earlier, the U.S. has its own flaws and if some of that inspiration came from a flawed area, well, as they say, "Garbage in, garbage out."

The U.S. should be careful about being a Good Samaritan out to "save the world" from itself, because sometimes the man just wants to stay there in the ditch for a while. The man may hate Samaritans and refuse the help. If the Samaritan tries to help him, the Samaritan may find it futile. Some men need to learn to find their own way out of that ditch. Some men may need for the Samaritan to return at a later time. Nobody can force true surrender on a person. Forced cooperation only builds hostility in the long run. Then it's not cooperation it is compliance.

It could be argued that this is all semantics, but in an online venue when all we have to go on is the black and white of the words on the screen, no facial expression, tone of voice and/or body language to assist communication, semantics becomes more important in communication. Even so, words mean things. Domination is a strong word. And it does imply a forced control. The U.S. does not operate (or is not supposed to operate) that way.

The U.S. can be a great inspiration to other nations. But the prerequisite is that those other nations are open to being inspired by the U.S. Only those nations decide what happens to them.

I could not agree more Charity. We need to take responsibility for ourselves and stop trying to rescue the whole world. We are wasting a lot of resources on problems that cannot be solved with money. A person has to want to help themselves.

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I think these two paragraphs carefully considered give a good indication of how it is going to go down (in the future, globally).

It is about bring ORDER into a lesser order, if not chaos.


Respectfully,

Learner