In case you missed it, part I can be read here.
There are common patterns in societies that operate like a giant pyramid scheme. They all have similar outcomes like rapid soil degradation, unique diseases, warfare, social division, inequality, hyper-competitive attitudes, high levels of stress…and a long list of negative externalities goes on from there.
Turns out western society over the ages has a pretty dismal record of maintaining any form of sustainable peace. It’s understandable that all social constructs will endure their hardships, but western society is different from most indigenous cultures like Native Americans for instance. As Native Americans found out first hand, the ideologies stemming from the West have a penchant for being aggressively violent and really are not interested in peace, love, or voluntary cooperation, but rather accumulating power and serving egotistical desires.
What is true of nearly every civilization that seeks to colonize and dominate the world with its presence is they all have a formal social hierarchy with set rules to hold it in place. What I’m going to speak to in this writing is the disruptive influence of these social systems of dominance, where arguably their very formation leads to conflict, and makes peace near impossible while maintaining the ruling hierarchy.
Peace Inhibitor No. 1: Social Hierarchies
I’m going to take the liberty to fully disagree with Jordan Peterson here and say that any semi-rigid social hierarchy is bad news for peace and overall well-being of life on Earth. What hierarchies effectively do is stymie human social evolution in favor of holding the hierarchy in place and demands we continue to relate to each other in hyper-competitive ways that feed into empowering ruling hierarchy and trigger the most egotistical parts of ourselves.
To give a working definition of social hierarchies for the purposes of this writing, it’s mostly what it sounds like. There’s ruling control at the top of the pyramid of power consisting of some amalgam of an oligarchy, powerful individuals, or ideological hierarchy with a power structure underneath held in place by rewards and punishments doled out to supporters and dissidents respectively. The seeds of fascism are always present under hierarchy that typically establishes itself like a violent gang allowing a few to control the many. Kinder leaders may sometimes get control, but largely the hierarchy came to rise through violence and maintains its order by it. Despite what a more enlightened leader may do it only takes one determined regime to turn something unpleasant into something horrific.
At times the fascism may be lite, or work under inferred threats, or outsource the pain to other areas of the world, but the structure is always there waiting to control each situation to maintain the hierarchy at all cost. Due to the monopoly on violence commonly imposed by hierarchies, resentments can run deep, so those at the top of the hierarchy are always keenly aware that someone is likely gunning for them. Thus they deeply entrench their position as to keep their heads firmly fastened to their necks with a thick haze of paranoia guiding their decision making process.
There are claims by some in science who say social hierarchies are innate. However this doesn’t seem to be necessarily true, though once a rigid hierarchy is established it’s a difficult pattern to break away from since it will tend to insulate itself with systems and people who have jobs to make sure the hierarchy is maintained and the system remains in place.
Maintaining hierarchy is a balancing act, it takes checks and balances to keep it standing upright, which are not the checks and balances we are taught in elementary school there to protect the people from tyranny, rather the checks and balances in government, and most corporations too, are present to hold the hierarchy in place so that some lower part of the pyramid scheme can’t sufficiently acquire leverage to overthrow those at the top.
To suggest hierarchy is innate speaks to it being a genetic inevitability, yet our social configuration is a choice as humans, and turns out some simians have shown the ability to choose between hierarchy and cooperative forms of living together as well.
In this regard neuroendocrinologist researcher Robert Sapolsky has done some interesting research. Specifically his work observing social patterns of baboons and how stress levels rise in the troop when living under a competitive domination style hierarchy vs. a more cooperative group dynamic.
Here’s a short video detailing Sapolsky’s findings that’s worth a watch if you have the time:
In Sapolsky’s study when baboons were living without hierarchy in place he observed lower cortisol levels, indicating lower stress and happier baboons when they cooperated as opposed to when living under hierarchy imposed by alpha males. He found that after the troop was free of social tyranny they’d resist future domination as a group after cooperation became the norm. Hence, the baboons understood the difference and they chose cooperation.
Sapolsky also noted that when the alpha males ruled they’d pass the pain down hierarchy to maintain control. Something like a dark version of Pay It Forward, perhaps Pass-the-Pain-Down is an apropos counter-slogan.
“You get a big male who loses a fight and chases a sub-adult, who bites an adult female, who slaps a juvenile, and knocks an infant out a tree all in fifteen seconds. Tremendously psychologically stressful for folks further down on the hierarchy” – Robert Sapolsky
In human societies it’s easy to see how the bullshit rolls downhill, as the saying goes. The person in power gives a subordinate flak and that person will then give someone they have power over similar treatment and on down the line it goes until it either reaches the bottom of the hierarchy or someone in the line has the wisdom to not be reactive to their base impulses.
I believe more than a few of us have directly experienced this as children when one of our parents had a bad day at work you’d better steer clear or else you’re likely going to get some trouble over something trivial, in the worst situations getting in trouble amounts to beatings. If a kid gets beat it’s not all that unusual they find a smaller kid to unleash their angst upon. Creating mass misery because everyone feels that the power structure is unfair, but what are they going to do? It’s normalized everywhere, inescapable. Someone is going to tell you what to do and if you don’t do what they want you could potentially face emotional, physical, or financial consequences.
The pain caused through hierarchy and the collective social angst it creates are undeniable, but many who are drawn to power are seduced by the idea of controlling others despite the overall negative consequences. Power is well known as a kind of drug, its allure creates many players and only a few winners in games of one-upmanship. After all, hierarchy has limited positions of power and requires heaps of proletariat commoners at the bottom of the pyramid who take orders their entire lives being told what time they need to be places, what they should be doing, and how they should be dressed for the greater majority of their lives. Despite claims of countries claiming to be democratic the people at the bottom of the hierarchy have almost no real voice reflected in the system that is merely placating them with democracy in name only.
This civilization calls what we have now freedom merely on the basis it’s better than pure chattel slavery. The oppressive eight inch knife plunged into the back of the masses was merely extracted two inches when industrial capitalism took over and western societies began labeling it as freedom and democracy. They started using all those fancy words in the enlightenment period to make it sound ever so noble and egalitarian. However not a bit of those words has ever stopped the hierarchy from doing all the stuff they were doing before. They just went about it a little differently and used different labels.
Social hierarchies function through a system of payoffs at the upper levels. Those near the top of the hierarchy all serve some critical role in holding up the structure and will receive rewards in approximate correlation to how important they are to keeping the hierarchy in power. Conversely, those that challenge hierarchy in even the most trivial ways will often face shame or be punished in some capacity for not falling in line.
Further, when oppressed people under the hierarchy want to change what’s happening the immediate tendency is to want to get a hold of sources of power in order to fix the system. Those sources of power though were installed by deleterious thinking and lead to a similar trajectory when the same hierarchy that caused the problems is used to try and fix the problems.
Even when people have the best intentions, by the time one amasses enough power for themselves to have some effect by gaining leverage against their opponents in a hierarchical system they are then so sold out by what they’ve had to do to get that power, and after working so hard for it, they are usually unwilling to give it up. So the game continues.
As such, it’s not uncommon to see those among the oppressed who are able to move up the hierarchy will end up instituting the same kind of policies as people who oppressed them since it’s largely all they know coming from a perspective where hierarchy is normalized. The oppressed then become the oppressor and the whole thing depressingly recycles itself over and over.
As philosopher, educator, & author Paulo Freire notes:
“…But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or “sub-oppressors.” The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors. This is their model of humanity. This phenomenon derives from the fact that the oppressed, at a certain moment of their existential experience, adopt an attitude of “adhesion” to the oppressor.
In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not… turn (into) oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both. This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well.”
- Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed
It would seem that the only cure for hierarchy is to stop becoming a reaction to it. Think outside the set values and boundaries of this long standing culture of hierarchy and start relating to each other in new ways. Terence McKenna spoke many times regarding the value of escaping the cultural social inertia:
“We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you’re giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told ‘no’, we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral. ‘Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.’ And then you’re a player, you don’t want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”
― Terence McKenna
Looking at the history of hierarchy in western civilization we can see that long standing peace has never really existed or even was ever seriously considered by almost anyone, and times of relative peace only happen when there’s a stalemate, e.g. when different powers have nuclear weapons the cost to invade one another becomes too high so the aggression subsides until there is a clear advantage. However that doesn’t stop them from consistently trying to weaken opponents hoping the opportunity will arise to usurp others into their own hierarchy. We can see this happen with nation states, as well as corporations, organized religions, and so on.
And a final note on hierarchy here. There’s a distinction between rigid hierarchy with set positions and customs vs a flowing dynamic hierarchy in a cooperative society where someone takes the lead when it’s agreed upon they have something to offer in the situation which is built on trust in long standing direct relationships. This is opposed to more rigid hierarchies with assigned titles, or a pecking order determined from the top down that is determining who is worthy of our trust for us, which is what I’ve been speaking in this writing as disadvantageous for a peaceful world and social cohesion.
That’s all for part II. Check back for part III soon, or follow and subscribe to email so you don’t miss it. Thanks for reading.
And more stuff…
“The labor of those lower on the pyramid enriches the ones towards the top. To stay stable, the economy has to draw in more and more resources-colonizing new continents, workforces, and aspects of daily life. The resulting inequalities can only be maintained by ever-escalating force.
We’re encouraged to compete against each other to improve our positions on an individual basis. But there’s not enough space at the top for all of us, no matter how hard we work-and no pyramid scheme can go on expanding forever. Sooner or later it’s bound to crash: global warming and recession are just the first warning signs. Instead of going down with the pharaohs, let’s join forces to establish another way of life.” – Text from below poster (no affiliation)
