This week the New Zealand mass consciousness has been obsessed with the issue of Parliamentary bullying. The cases of Sam Uffindell and Gaurav Sharma have revealed that there are some deeply abusive and sadistic people among our Parliamentarians. This essay explains why this is, and why we would be foolish to expect anything else.
Parliament is the top of the social dominance hierarchy in New Zealand. The people in there get to decide what the rest of us are allowed to do, and if we defy them they can set the Police onto us. Parliament are above laws. They can lie, they can slander, they can cheat, and no-one can touch them. This great power creates a great incentive for people to fight their way into Parliament, to the top of the social dominance hierarchy.
There are two ways to get to the top of any dominance hierarchy, whether it’s a family, tribe, country or empire: intimidation or inspiration.
In a state of Nature, there is only intimidation. The alpha chimpanzee is invariably the one with the greatest combination of strength and aggression. He rules by fear. Anyone who challenges him is liable to have his scrotum torn off or his eyes gouged out. A wide range of submissive behaviours evolved so that non-alphas could demonstrate their lack of threat, and thereby earn the alpha’s mercy.
Pre-civilisational human life was not much different to chimpanzee life today. The one at the top of the dominance hierarchy was also the one with the greatest combination of strength and aggression. But the advent of civilisation changed everything. Civilisation transformed the human being from a wild animal into something else.
In a state of civilisation, there is inspiration. It’s possible for individuals in possession of a divine spark to gain the allegiance of their fellows not through cruelty and fear, but through the promise of leading them to greatness. The greater the civilisation, the more inspirational the leaders are. The greatest of all civilisations give us leaders like Alexander, Marcus Aurelius and George Washington.
Inspiration is by far the best way to lead, because it provokes the least amount of blowback. Rule by intimidation makes people feel fear, which often calcifies into resentment. This resentment, as Machiavelli observed, is liable to spill over into unrest and violence. Much better, he concluded, to be loved than to be feared.
Intimidation is easy. It’s mostly a matter of what’s called social dominance orientation, or SDO. The will to dominate is the main quality that intimidates other people. Research has found that “higher SDO was associated with pursuit of hierarchy-enhancing jobs”. For the reasons mentioned above, politician is one of those jobs. So people who are naturally intimidating often strive to become politicians, creating a selection bias.
Inspiration is hard. No-one is really sure how to do it, or what’s necessary. A belief in God might be necessary in order to truly inspire, or fearlessness in the face of death, or high intelligence, great wealth or a favourable birth. No-one really knows. Good leaders don’t need to know the specifics, because they can intuit the way forwards.
It’s fair to say that good leaders rule by inspiration and bad leaders rule by intimidation.
Unfortunately, New Zealand is beset by bad leadership. Not only are we near the bottom of a historical nadir, but we are also crippled by democracy, the remnants of cultural Christianity and a peculiar resentment-fuelled anti-elitism, all of which combine to keep our best people down.
The end result is that there are no real leaders in Parliament. All they’ve been since the Third National Government is just a pack of scum-sucking grifters doing the bidding of international banking and finance interests. That doesn’t inspire anyone. So our Parliament is full of abusers because there are no good leaders to inspire people to follow them, leaving abusers to battle their way into the top positions.
Our political system selects for psychopaths because any dominance hierarchy without one or more psychopaths at the top of it is inherently unstable. If the person at the top of a dominance hierarchy is not a psychopath themselves, they are liable to get dislodged by more aggressive underlings. So, from the point of view of the Establishment, putting abusers into top positions promotes stability.
Almost everyone in Parliament is an abuser, and that goes triple for those at the top of Parliament. Can anyone listen to Jacinda Ardern or Andrew Little justify their continuation of cannabis prohibition, and not realise they are psychopaths? Can anyone listen to Christopher Luxon or Brooke van Velden bay for cutting the benefits of the poor, and not think likewise?
Given all this, it’s not hard to understand why National selected Sam Uffindell as a candidate despite his history of bullying: a history of bullying is a qualification for a job that requires grinding five million other people into submission. This is why National never disavowed Nick Smith, even though Smith regularly turned up to meetings drunk and abused his staff, or any of the countless other alcoholics, narcissists and sex pests that have floated through National’s ranks over the years.
In summary, our political system is full of abusers because we have no leaders good enough to inspire people to follow them.
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In chimpanzee societies it’s not necessarily the strongest and most aggressive who rules. Sometimes that is the case but as Jordan Peterson once put it, if the biggest chimp is too aggressive it has a good chance of being torn apart by two slightly smaller chimpanzees.
Chimp social hierarchies are actually managed largely through trust and relationships. The alpha is the one who’s best at resolving disputes and maintaining relationships. Often an alpha will keep around an older, deposed alpha as a trusted ally, giving him privileged access to a few females, so that he can benefit from his status.
Human society prior to civilisation was also less violent than you describe here. There’s no evidence of strict dominance hierarchies in hunter gatherer societies. There are more successful hunters and they tend to form a hierarchy, but it’s not social dominance. Instead it’s a hierarchy of access to females, but that takes the form of more extra-marital affairs.
Some of these societies exhibit a process of “reverse dominance” similar to tall-poppy syndrome, where if one male starts killing a lot of meat and thinking he’s a big man, he will be rejected by the group, ostracized and ridiculed. This is a way of maintaining order and avoiding dominance hierarchies. They will reject him and his meat, for the sake of long-term group coherence.
Now, when we take into account civilisation, that’s when you get strict hierarchies emerging. That’s when you get a surplus of grain that you can keep for yourself and distribute through control established by force. In hunting and gathering there is only a surplus generated by hunting, but meat rots without preservation technology and so is distributed fairly.
We like to think of our species as inherently violent and dominance driven, that our history is defined by warfare and domination and conquest. But these are features of recorded history, depending as it does on civilisation and systems of writing to keep track. Throughout most of our two hundred thousand years on this planet we were relatively peaceful and egalitarian.
The only reason I bring this up is because we like to think human nature is more violent and hierarchical than it really is. This is not to say we’re fundamental innocents; there’s this idea of “primitive communism,” that we’re naturally egalitarian. That’s not the case either, and nor are we tablua rasa or blank slates to simply be conditioned by our environment.
We must never forget that within us are both impulses, the hierarchical, violent impulse, the competitive one, and the peaceful, egalitarian, cooperative one. We are defined in many. ways by cooperation much more than competition. Even the sheer lethality of our wars is due to our capacity for essentially unlimited scales of cooperation.
We’re not all verticalists or horizontalists; we’re both. We’re not all blank slates and but our environment helps push us more in one direction than another. I’ve got a theory that there are epigenetic switches activated early in life as a response to exposure to trauma, uncertainty and violence which can potentially push an individual away from empathy towards violence and antisociality.
Brilliant post, cheers for that. You are right in that evoliution selected for co-operation just as much as violence.
You got it mixed up, Machiavelli knew the power of fear was more important than love when it came to ruling.
The balancing act was to be feared in such a way that hatred wouldn’t become stronger than the fear you banked on.
That’s true but only in a compromise situation. Machiavelli wrote: “It is best to be both feared and loved,” which is true, but the feared prince is harder to depose than the loved prince.