Early hunter-gatherers were notoriously fiercely egalitarian and maintained “reverse dominance hierarchies” (where the tribe teams up to bully, exile, or kill anyone who tries to act like an “alpha”).
I agree that a human alpha cannot rule alone, he is typically a leader of a clique. But if egalitarianism is our nature, why is there so much bullying at schools, reinvented independently?
I am not just making a claim, this egalitarianism you refer to is the conclusion of modern anthropology. You’re right that the inference from ‘people suppress bragging’ to ‘egalitarian society’ deserves scrutiny in isolation. The logical point is sound, but you’re applying it to a straw version of the claim. The anthropological case isn’t built on the thin inference ‘people suppress bragging, therefore egalitarianism’.
You are doing a few things here; one is conflating egalitarianism with lack of violence, drama or conflict, another is a misunderstanding of what our social skills actually evolved to do and in what context.
Our social skills evolved for groups of at most Dunbar’s number (~150 people). When hunter-gatherers exist in such small groups, there is no need to specialize. Classes (such as a warrior class in your post) don’t exist yet, as specialization only occurs after farming was invented. With a good balance of information (skill) symmetry between peoples, power mostly concentrates along social lines (who has respect) and not violent ones. This is because most people know how to fight and are themselves strong, making it difficult to truly physically resist the group.
Hunter-gatherer reverse dominance hierarchies work because the group is small, everyone knows everyone, and there are constant interactions. Schools are large, semi-anonymous institutions where those accountability mechanisms are weak or absent. The persistence and reinvention of bullying cliques in schools is precisely what you’d predict if the egalitarian mechanisms of small-band lifedon’t transfer to large modern institutions. Robin Hanson’s own framework predicts that in small bands where dominance is hard to achieve physically, prestige-based status dominates.
I agree that a human alpha cannot rule alone, he is typically a leader of a clique. But if egalitarianism is our nature, why is there so much bullying at schools, reinvented independently?
My alternative explanation is that it is simply the dominant clique maintaining order.
I am not just making a claim, this egalitarianism you refer to is the conclusion of modern anthropology. You’re right that the inference from ‘people suppress bragging’ to ‘egalitarian society’ deserves scrutiny in isolation. The logical point is sound, but you’re applying it to a straw version of the claim. The anthropological case isn’t built on the thin inference ‘people suppress bragging, therefore egalitarianism’.
You are doing a few things here; one is conflating egalitarianism with lack of violence, drama or conflict, another is a misunderstanding of what our social skills actually evolved to do and in what context.
Our social skills evolved for groups of at most Dunbar’s number (~150 people). When hunter-gatherers exist in such small groups, there is no need to specialize. Classes (such as a warrior class in your post) don’t exist yet, as specialization only occurs after farming was invented. With a good balance of information (skill) symmetry between peoples, power mostly concentrates along social lines (who has respect) and not violent ones. This is because most people know how to fight and are themselves strong, making it difficult to truly physically resist the group.
Hunter-gatherer reverse dominance hierarchies work because the group is small, everyone knows everyone, and there are constant interactions. Schools are large, semi-anonymous institutions where those accountability mechanisms are weak or absent. The persistence and reinvention of bullying cliques in schools is precisely what you’d predict if the egalitarian mechanisms of small-band life don’t transfer to large modern institutions. Robin Hanson’s own framework predicts that in small bands where dominance is hard to achieve physically, prestige-based status dominates.