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Zen-ish Thoughts About The Power of Culture

We celebrate (promote, highly reward, idolize) the "alpha" individual as the prime mover of personal and group success. Observations of unrelated wolves in captivity gave us the model for "alpha males": one individual who socially and physically dominates. This is then conflated with being the leader, rather than merely the top aggressor. This alpha ethos is especially aggrandized in the American cultural myth of Rugged Individualism.

Corporations eagerly took the alpha male wolf as the ruling metaphor for leadership. It matched what political leadership has looked like since the invention of warrior kings. Management books and self-help culture enshrine "alpha" assertiveness as the engine of progress, and actively disparage being non-alpha, which of necessity is almost everyone. Disparaging almost everybody as inexplicably and pathetically not-alpha is not one of our great achievements. And, oops. That's not what wolves have to teach us. That's not how wolves live in nature.

A natural wolf pack is typically composed of parents and their offspring. The "alpha" male isn't the "alpha" due to constant battles for dominance, he is the father. This wolf father does not "lead" by intimidation, alliances, or brute force. When the pack moves, he actually takes up the last place in line, not the first, providing a protective rear guard, and noting if any pack member needs help.

Let's shift to a model in which a company's leaders, and our political leaders, act like protective fathers, ensuring that we are all okay. That is what it actually means to be the alpha wolf.

For another example of humans misconstruing the reality of leadership in nature, see Learning From Animals.

Let's take a look at what can happen in a social group when the alphas are no more. Perhaps it will just be chaos, leaderless, disastrous. Maybe being led by ego-maniacal, narcissistic bullies is a price we have to pay. Let's see. The Forest Troop was a group of wild baboons in Kenya that neuroscientist/primatologist Robert Sapolsky studied for decades. As is the normal case for baboon troops, this one was:

Does any of that sound familiar?

The territory of a nearby troop included a tourist lodge garbage pit loaded with leftover food. Some of the most aggressive alphas from Forest Troop started fighting over that food with the nearby troop on the regular.

At one point, the meat in the garbage was contaminated with bovine tuberculosis. Tuberculosis spreads fast and is usually fatal in nonhuman primates. Over the next year or so, all the high-alpha garbage-eating males who ate the contaminated food died.

As a result, Forest Troop was left with far more females than males, and a set of "beta" males less given to aggression and dominance. The troop's social life was transformed. Did it devolve into chaos, or improve?

The culture shifted from "mean, tough neighborhood high school" to one in which there was much more pro-social behavior. Sapolsky's team found that stress-related hormones dropped in this lower-aggression, more social setting.

As males migrated into this troop, and especially once the male-female ratio re-normalized, it would not have been surprising if the old order reappeared, but it didn't. But instead, even 20 years later (about two baboon generations later), researchers found that the incoming males had adapted to the prevailing culture, and this troop continued to be less aggressive and more pro-social than other baboon troops. That is, neither population genetics, nor exogenous individual genetics, individual psychology, or prior learning caused higher levels of aggression to reassert themselves when the culture was not oriented in favor of it. Maybe we are not as sophisticated as baboons, but I think: if baboons can do it, we can do it.

For prevailing culture to be so powerful is chilling (think 1930s Germany, 2020's America, and sadly limitless other examples), but it is also very clear, positive instruction. The way to make our world a better place is to make our world a better place. We don't have to kill the so-called alphas who perpetuate and worsen our most nightmarish circumstances. We just have to stop feeding them, and stop self-destructively revering, honoring, and celebrating them, and stop allowing them to lead.

They have no desire to change a system in which their narcissism is self-justified. They literally believe that Might Makes Right, that if they obtain something, that in itself is proof that they deserve it. They believe that anyone who thinks otherwise is evil, "beta", radical, "socialist", or perhaps even "terrorist".

Does any of that sound familiar?

They actively ignore that the countries with the best social outcomes for the most people (low crime, highly ranked healthcare, education, employment conditions, family benefits, religious freedom, and robust civil liberties) also embrace capitalism and innovation, and don't prevent individuals from making more than enough money to live lavishly, and to be safe from financial concerns across multiple generations.

They don't want to change what is working exclusively for them, but the rest of us, we have a desire for change, a growing passion for and impatience for change. It won't come from them. We must not wait and hope. It can only come from us. We must become more active. It's not actually complicated.

We just have to stop feeding the bad guys, and self-destructively revering, honoring, and celebrating them, and allowing them to lead. To which companies do you give your labor, and to which do you give your purchasing dollars? Who and what do you respect, seek to emulate, vote for, or actively speak against? Changing the culture changes everything. Changing the culture is how we change the culture. Make changes in your daily existence. That is when and where everything happens. You are the savior you are waiting for.