Why Are We Talking About This?
You may be wondering at this point what any of this has to do with practical governance as it matters to you, your family office, your company department, your senate, etc.
The answer is, in short, everything. When a group—be it a corporate board or a street gang—is not intentionally designed, a dominance hierarchy governs it by default. The impulses associated with our time lived as tribal apes even infect governing bodies intentionally designed to defeat these impulses. The concept of a board at your company that votes on decisions is rendered somewhat pointless if an internal hierarchy forms within the board in which a single individual ends up making almost all the decisions. The same can be said for a senate sub-committee that devolves into intertribal conflict, or a family office in which an individual can amass power by tarnishing other family members’ reputations.
For this reason, we are far from finished exploring dominance hierarchies. While we use tropes associated with middle school cliques to illustrate dominance hierarchies, this fundamental governing structure is at play in most adult interactions. We default to childhood examples because they serve as a common reference point with which almost all of our readers are familiar and because these younger individuals have trouble with impulse control, which makes their struggles for dominance more transparent. When dominance hierarchies drive something like a senate sub-committee, there are 15 levels of subterfuge and metagames layered on top of them, making them harder to recognize.
Consider some of the real-world impacts of dominance hierarchy governance:
U.S. Politics
The phenomenon of cultural drift is currently fueling a profound polarization and radicalization of U.S. political parties. This book was published during the longest period of U.S. history in which each party has maintained a specific, unique, and constant identity, giving each party time to form an extreme echo chamber—an echo chamber that is amplified by social media. All the work our founding fathers put into the system may be rendered pointless by the instincts of apes.
Criminal Gangs
Gangs have fairly unsophisticated governing structures in that they typically lack intentionally designed checks and balances designed to curb dominance hierarchy rule. This means slights between members of different gangs in which an individual isn’t shown sufficient deference according to their rank can quickly boil over into group animosity, which in turn instigates gang wars that kill large numbers of individuals.
Higher Academia
Because academia is a large, world-spanning bureaucracy with organically-evolved governing mechanisms, and because it has far fewer positions than it has applicants (who have already dedicated years of their lives to moving up the chain), there is an extremely high tax on failures to adhere to tribal identity. This makes it very costly to present a new idea, way of doing things, or even political beliefs that don’t fit into a specific brand of liberalism.
Ironically, this causes academia to grow increasingly stagnant—not just in terms of participants, but in the generation of new ideas, which has caused corporations to lead the development of technological breakthroughs over the last few decades. We discuss the stats on this in more detail in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality. For example, more than 50% of sexual psychologists reported willingness to hide or otherwise obfuscate results that showed a biological basis for any mental sex differences.[[58]](#_ftn58) (Needless to say, developing a viable alternative to the transparent failure of the h-index and tenure system is one of our nonprofit’s core objectives.)
Societies that Value “Face”
When an individual does something for someone else, they perform a subtle act of dominance over them—this explains some fights to pay bills at restaurants. In government systems with large bureaucracies and a cultural tradition of “face” like that in China, this dynamic produces rampant corruption, with bribes being given out not just for their monetary value to those above you, but also to demonstrate dominance over those below you.