Denis Dutton notes that we’re Hard-wired for the ups and downs of living in hierarchies:
Some general sense of fairness is intrinsic to hunter-gatherer hierarchies. Pure self-interest or the interest of your family is not all that counts. There is also fairness in, say, food distribution: the obligation of individuals to divide, rather than keep for themselves or their family, the kill from some successful hunting expedition. As far as status and opportunity are concerned, I think we’d learn a lot by looking at how hierarchies tend to be found in typical Pleistocene hunting bands.These bands seem to be adjusted to create maximal success in terms of mobility, flexibility, skill specialisation and stealth. They required co-operation. They were male units. Bands of brothers is perhaps going too far, but the standard hunter-gatherer societies were anywhere from 25 to 150 people in size and certainly included a lot of cousins and brothers. It’s interesting to note that the size of the hunter-gatherer hunting band drawn from these societies was about 10 to 12 men, which happens to be the size of the basic platoon in the British army, the squad in the US army and the basic unit in almost every army since the Romans.
It is also close to the default size — nine to 12 or so — of teams in many sports and boards of directors of corporations.
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These bands, as well as the larger hunter-gatherer groups that they fed and protected, were involved not only in hunting but in running raiding parties and defences against other human raiding parties.They were governed by what are called reverse dominance hierarchies. A pure dominance hierarchy is one in which the individual at the top of the heap dominates all those underneath him: likely a him, by the way, rather than a her. Such arrangements became practical on a large scale only in the modern age; that is to say, during the past 10,000 years, with the invention of agriculture and cities, which allow food to be stored and police forces and armies to be fed.
We do have pure dominance hierarchies in the modern world, and we have had them for the past 10,000 years. Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union was a pretty good example of a modern pure dominance hierarchy, from the boss on down. It makes me think of wolf hierarchies. I once observed a wolf hierarchy in a zoo and it was unbelievably brutal if you looked at the one or two animals at the very bottom of the pecking order. The final wolf, who’s the weakest of the group, is tormented night and day, attacked, howling, constantly in pain and terror. Dominance hierarchies are brutal.
Of course, I say that because I evolved as a member of a reverse dominance hierarchy.
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Attempts at dictatorial domination were likely to be responded to in the Pleistocene with exile, homicide, non-cooperation and, interestingly, ridicule. Ridicule is a standard way for all human societies to deal with people at the top.
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Well-structured societies today, including modern mass democracies, provide adequate outlets for our hunter-gatherer preferences to fit into hierarchies, to achieve relative dominance in them and to possess personal autonomy, all at the same time. The variety of independent spheres of life today opens greater possibilities than the Pleistocene did for individuals to fit in, to lead and to follow in organised groups.As for hierarchies and elitism, our intrinsic resentment of leaders, our Pleistocene anti-elitism, may partly be explained by the fact that small-scale tribal societies were zero-sum economies. Everything that was owned by one person was something that someone else could not enjoy. Some psychologists argue that the zero-sum nature of the Pleistocene gives us a psychology that has a lot of trouble grasping concepts of borrowing, interest and economic growth.