In his seminal philosophical treatise The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel wrote that self-consciousness itself is an evolutionary byproduct of dominating—and of being dominated by—another human. And it isn’t just self-consciousness. Society, culture, and history are produced in the back and forth, or “dialectic,” between the powerful and the powerless—the master-slave dialectic, as Hegel’s pairing came to be known in subsequent iterations.
