Why I don't trust Alpha Males

[danieldwilliam]

Inter alia this emerged in a fascinating conversation with star_tourmaline  last night. It’s primarily directed at her but, obviously, anyone can play.

 

We were talking about alpha males and pack behaviour, me from an improv status games point of view. Neither of us wanted to divert the conversation but here is the cul-de-sac that I was strolling up.

 

Pack behaviour is an evolved behaviour. As social animals it’s a behaviour we fall back into. People often behave as if they lived in a pack or a troop and not in a city. (Civilisation is the art of living in cities where you don’t know everyone). Through the application of reason and wisdom we can learn to live and work together better. I don’t mean we only tap into our reason and only deal with thoughts not feelings. I mean we consciously go about designing the society or organisation that we want to live in and set about encouraging the behaviours that support best living, rather than revert to instinctive behaviour.

 

Instinctive behaviour is often not your friend. Your instincts are largely designed for a small number of environments and a limited set of emergencies where your personal survival is only required on average.

 

 Here is why I think it might not serve us well to rely on pack instincts. Firstly, pack behaviour is about the strength of groups directed against other groups and individuals. It’s  about structured co-operation. Nothing wrong here. Mainly, it is about rationing access to sex and breeding opportunities.  Your position in the hierarchy determines how many breeding opportunities you have and how much group resource is put into supporting your breeding success.

 

I put forward the testable hypothesis that the closer the kinship relationships between group members the more curtailed access to breeding opportunities for non-alphas will be and the more rigid the hierarchy will be. If we are all related there is no need for all of us to breed.

 

I also think that the more opportunities there are for either functional specialism or different ways to make a living the less rigid the hierarchy and the more open access to breeding opportunities.

 

So in a pack where members are distant cousins rather than siblings and where there is more than one way to make a living there will be more individual freedom. I offer a comparison of mole rats and chimps.

 

 

I am wary of a placing reliance on a system which is mainly evolved for preventing fraternal bloodshed over access to sex for anything more complex than stopping us killing each other all the time. Constitutional democracies are a designed system for a reason (and with reason).

 

This is my second issue with relying on pack behaviour. It is an evolved system. So it has emerged from what has come before, which was not perfect. It hasn’t been designed from scratch to suit the current situation. It is cobbled together out of the bits left over from the last attempt to do something new. Evolution is also brutally indifferent to the wants of the individual. It follows a satisficing strategy (good enough with the resources we have) to get as many genes as possible into the next generation. It cares not a jot if you are happy, or even if you die. So long as on average some genes are passed on, the individual is not important.

 

I think pack behaviour is therefore unsuited for the large communities we live in with their rich and complex abundance of ways to get by and with our self-aware focus on the wants of the individual.

 

It’s why I am wary of any one who tries to lead by being an alpha male. As a way of leading a group it rather went out with the stone age.