Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to 3M Is Unusual

primitive dominance heirarchies
Robert — (archived)

Yep, humans are primates, and it's in our genes to instinctively create primate social orders whenever two or more people form a permanent association.

It's not all negative. Maybe because it's so natural to us, those hierarchies are very stable, if very conservative and rigid. The Catholic Church is the outstanding example of a primitive dominance hierarchy that's survived two millenia. It so faithfully reproduces a primate tribe that it has a parallel and subservient hierarchy of females, and occasionally over the centuries the alpha male has been deposed by force by ambitious betas.

People keep experimenting with other types of organizations, but I don't know of any that've survived so well as the natural one. Experimentation thrives when times are good and there are few threats to the order, but we seem to naturally fall back on the safety of the hierarchy under pressure. The present wave of patriotism and support for the alpha Bush is pure primate instinct. As the threat recedes in memory people have started to question the leader and betas are beginning to maneuver to bring him down.

We're such monkeys...ook ook!

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