"The Slow Unwinding of Our Primate Troops"
by Paul Rosenberg
"The primary organizational model of humanity is the primate troop. That may seem degrading, and in a way it is, but it’s also the truth. I spent many pages detailing this in "Post-Primate Society," and won’t go through it all here, but the few ruling over the many and status hierarchies are very definitely primate models. Humans hybridize them, of course, and justify them far more intricately, but the central model of human organization is the primate troop, writ as large as possible. Whether or not this is comfortable or flattering are separate issues; the facts are quite clear enough for those who wish to see them. The good news is that we’re growing out of the primate model, and rather more quickly of late.
“Primate ways” are rooted in primate chemistry, and it’s a chemistry that we humans have inherited. Our hormones, among other things, are primate hormones, and while we’ve come a long, long way from baboons and chimps, primate chemicals do have their effects in us. Here, just to establish primate style, is a passage from "The Primate Origins of Human Nature," by Carol P. Van Schaik: Animals in groups can often be ranked in a dominance hierarchy, based upon who can displace or attack whom and who must flee or acknowledge subordinate status. And so the dominance hierarchy rules primate living."
And as noted above, it remains the primary organizing principle of human groups, even in our technological age. Nation-states, to be blunt about it, are little more than elaborate primate troops: "Primate life involves layers of status and privilege, with big animals at the top, punishing those who fail to obey. Human life involves layers of status and privilege, with rulers at the top, punishing those who fail to obey.
This model has remained intact through monarchies, democracies, communist regimes, theocratic regimes, and indeed every variant of the few ruling over the many. Justifications for this primate model – everything from the divine right of kings to the assertions of Rousseau and Hobbes – change nothing: The fundamental operating statement of every “few” ruling over every “many” has been identical: Do what we say or we’ll hurt you."
Whether or not they’ve ever examined it, people understand that there’s not just a troop-not troop line, but borders between each level of the social hierarchy. And there are hormonal barriers between the levels. Imagine standing at a cocktail party with rich, educated, high-status types. Then imagine one of them turning upon you and loudly criticizing you for some comment you made. Then imagine the rest of them turning toward you with disgust in their faces. The gut feeling you would get from this is the hormonal enforcement of status. And it’s very effective.
There’s much more to be said about this (and it’s said in the book), but let’s move on to the important part of this: "We’ve been moving away from dominance hierarchies and into decentralized arrangements which treat humans as primary entities rather than secondary entities.
A great number of us have grasped that we shouldn’t live as auto-reaction machines, selecting from pre-scripted reactions and narrowly-defined choices. We’ve seen businesses trying to “flatten” and reengineer, the Internet blasting through information bottlenecks, Bitcoin’s radical decentralization, Abraham Maslow’s findings that human health is inverse to control, Marshall Rosenberg’s non-violent communication, free-market economics, the repeating failures of command economies, and even historians slowly turning their eyes from the potentates at the tops of hierarchies to the people who grew, built and invented everything."
These and a dozen others are recognitions that decentralized interactions are far more central to human thriving than their hierarchical alternatives. Still more important, even crucial, is this fact: Decentralized society rests upon human virtues. Hierarchical society rests upon human weaknesses. You might want to think about those two lines a bit. Hierarchical, primate-modeled society requires frightened, confused and compliant subjects; it couldn’t function otherwise. Decentralized, post-primate societies require individual will, action, passion and endurance; otherwise they couldn’t exist.
An Epoch of Adjustment: From the moment proto-humans were gifted with their prefrontal cortex, a long period of adaptation – a period of confusion – was inevitable. Mixing the operations of the new model brain with primate chemistry really couldn’t produce anything else. But we’re already a very long way down that road, and it has brought us to a surprising place. Consider this, please: Over this epoch of adjustment, good has triumphed over evil in the human species.
This is not to say evil has vanished, but among the vast majority of humans, evil is unable to win an open confrontation with goodness. You cannot simply walk down the street, find a random passer-by and get them to do a few murders with you, no matter that they might get some goodies out of it; almost no human will choose to be overtly evil. Large numbers of humans have indeed supported evil, but they had to be tricked into doing so. Before they were used for evil, they had to be convinced that their actions were servicing the good in one way or another.
This is huge… and true. Regardless of continuing and successful abuse, our goodness-producing core stands, and once our abuse is recognized as abuse, its power will drain away. And this unwinding of primate ways resounds throughout history. However little-understood it may be, another crucial development has been a movement away from collective religions and into individual religions. (You can find more here.) The oldest religions were formed to collectivize people: to make rulership more effective and more scalable.
By this model, the gods treated the populace of a city as a single entity… as a collective entity. If the god was displeased in some way, he or she took it out on the city as a unit. The inhabitants of the town, then, were trained to see themselves collectively. We see precisely this from Sumerian records, as well as others. And there are secondary effects from this: Once people see themselves as a collective, being punished or rewarded as a single unit, they police themselves, punishing anyone who strays from their model.
This model was changed by the ancient Hebrews. What they did – and the importance of this is immense – was to turn the collective religion of the Sumerians into a personal religion. This Hebrew heresy was an earthquake in human organization that reverberates to this day... and is resented to this day. (Lots of info here.)
The religions of the empires, all the way through Rome, were collective religions. Under the Hebrew model, only the individual who behaved badly would suffer for it, and that hobbled rulership. (There are a few Bible passages that imply a collective model, but they are few, old and widely ignored. The belief that resounds is that we’re responsible for our own actions.)
This revolutionary sentiment continued in the Christian gospels. The God of the Hebrews – the God of Judaism and Christianity – reached down to the humble and turned his back on the mighty. And even if modern Christians and Jews would rather not see themselves as wild radicals, they are. Not surprisingly, history shows the effects of this radicalism:
The Hebrews moved consistently toward monotheism, a merciful God and meaningful stories. The Hebrews had no king from their beginnings until about 1000 BC. And even then, their prophet Samuel warned that it was a fundamental error. The Hebrews had no priests from their origins until they were established in Canaan, then abandoned that priesthood as they left. Judaism turned the Hebrew model into a portable religion once territory was no longer available to them. Christianity adopted the Jewish model almost entirely.
More or less every time a Christian group breaks away from another, they major on scriptural passages that define and support the decentralized model. There’s a great deal more to be said about this, but all of these were steps away from primate-mindedness and into individualistic, decentralized models of life and thought… into Post-Primate models of life and thought.
We can see an analogous move in Greece, as the ancient model broke down at 1200 BC and formed into a decentralized model. The Greeks borrowed their gods from the Babylonians, but the Greeks worked them into stories which addressed men’s souls. Greek myths can help you to understand and develop yourself. In the Greek stories, men were not small, insignificant and powerless before the gods. In fact they sometimes challenged the gods and even won. Still more importantly, Greek heroes defeated the gods, not through strength or speed, but by innovative thinking. Again this created a more personal, decentralized model, in which Greek minds could open and expand. It also made it very hard for a ruler to find a place. In the ancient era kings were universal; in the Greek world they were rare.
I’ll jump forward more quickly now, but another important movement away from the primate troop began in northern Italy, as an open commercial model took hold. This model, featuring reliable currency, clear descriptions, literacy and a moral populace massively increased the ability of people to engage in commerce. And as in the other cases we’re noting, this empowered a decentralized and personal model of life. This, of course, was the beginning of the modern commercial model which has flooded the earth with a prosperity the ancients could only dream of. (See here for more.)
It’s Only A Matter Of Time: As I write this, the primate troop model is being forcibly maintained across the planet, at least at the large scales. In our family lives, however, it is recognized as “dysfunctional,” and for good reason. We also reject it for individual-level activities like Little Leagues; in those areas of life we insist upon personal cooperation.
The intermediate areas of life are where the primate model is succumbing these days, with the enforcing upper layers beginning to crack as well. And so the primate model that tries so hard to impose itself is in some distress. And like the Pharaohs and Caesars of history, it will eventually fade into obscurity. If this happens isn’t in question, only when. In its place we’ll expand upon our existing decentralized structures, improving faster and farther than we expect. This also is a question of when rather than if. Some generation is going to grasp this, and some body of people will enter into it."
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