Essay by George Sibley
Society – October 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
READING ABOUT the presidential race that the Rover Boys managed to foist off on us a year early (to distract us from their still unfolding dismantling of the American economy and polity), I find myself once more thinking about the people who used to live across the runway here in Gunnison, on the slopes of “W” Mountain just south of town.
The people across the runway were what we civilized people call primitives and archaics, and over whom we feel a vague superiority since we have airports, supermarkets, automobiles, et cetera, not to mention written records of all our triumphs here. But they did manage to do one thing that we might view with envy: they managed to survive here as a sustainable society for several thousand years. The way things are looking here today — our near-total dependence on a huge external petro-driven economy for practically everything we need, from economic income to all our essentials, at a time when the petroleum supply is getting squirrelly — we’ll be lucky if we make it to 200 years.
Which brings me back to the presidential race, where we are trying to pick someone who will lead our nation for just the next four or eight years. This in itself might expose a flaw in our democratic process: Can you actually work toward a sustainable society (5,000 years is pretty sustainable) if you are choosing leaders in increments of four or eight years? What incentive do they have to think beyond their term, and the “legacy” they will leave in their wake?
But that’s a relatively minor problem, which could be resolved by electing presidents for, say, a 20-year term; we might start taking the long term seriously if that were the case, and so might they. But there’s a larger problem not so easily solvable, and that’s the nature and character of the people who deem themselves fit for the job.
We have thousands of people in universities across the globe studying psychology and the human personality, and they have induced many interesting and consistent theories about the human personality that we probably ought to be applying in politics, but we seem to be too polite to impose such analyses on those who demand our respect and allegiance.
What I’m thinking about are what those who study humans and other large pack and herd mammals call the “alpha types.” They say that humans, along with many other large mammals, have genetic predispositions toward different types of social relationships: there are the alpha animals who become the leaders of the pack or the herd, and the beta types who are happy to follow the alphas wherever they lead. Most also posit a third personality type: gamma types who don’t compete with alphas for leadership but who are not very docile and malleable followers — the lone wolf, the “private eye,” or more commonly, the increasingly rare serious journalist.
Among other large mammals, this leads to the “top dog” situation in wolf packs (which apparently can have alpha females as well as males), and the herd bull situation in herbivores. Males and females with the alpha strain in their blood compete with claw, tooth, horn and hoof for acknowledgment by all the others of their superiority — an acknowledgment that always has sexual rewards for the alphas.
The competition among alphas is usually more subtle with humans, for the most part, although we do ritualize it consciously in sports. At the level of advanced civilization, sharp minds count for more than size and muscle. But it’s important to realize that the drive to compete — the alpha genetic — is not automatically paired with superior strength or intelligence. Just being an alpha type doesn’t make you smarter or stronger or more fit to lead; you’re just more likely to succeed over other alphas if you’ve got some smarts or strength, or both. A lot of dumb and scrawny alpha types, asserting themselves where they can, find their niches as low-level crooks, bar bullies, child molesters, and wife beaters. Very few of those alphas make it to the White House, and those few usually require a lot of help from inherited wealth and friends already in high places.
BUT BECAUSE WE HUMANS are still struggling to think of ourselves as something a little higher than animals, if lower than angels — we hate to allow this kind of analysis into anything so hallowed as the rituals of democracy — how can we possibly compare the selection of a president, leader of the free world, to the process a pack of dogs would go through to determine the top dog?
But there’s now a book that attempts to open up that very discussion at the relatively exalted level of what we’re accustomed to call “the captains of industry.” The Harvard Business Press last year published Alpha Male Syndrome: Curb the Belligerence, Channel the Brilliance, by Kate Ludeman and Eddie Erlandson — two self-diagnosed alpha types. Their purpose is to instruct us in ways to deal most constructively with alpha males in the business world whose assertions of alpha dominance are often an obstacle or burden to their employees or fellow executives. While we may have no choice but to attach our destiny to that of some hierarchy of alpha males, they suggest that there are ways to manipulate the alphas to our advantage (so long as they perceive it to be to their advantage too).
That still doesn’t focus on the political arena. But we can go back more than 150 years, to an 1838 speech by Abraham Lincoln to the Young Men’s Lyceum in his hometown of Springfield, Illinois, where he tried to warn us against what we would today recognize as alpha types:
“The family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle … disdains a beaten path. It sees no distinction in adding story to story upon the monuments of fame erected to the memory of others. It denies that it is glory enough to serve under any chief. It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen.”
If Lincoln himself was of “the tribe of the eagle,” he was at the very least an unusual alpha type. When elected to the presidency in 1860, rather than surrounding himself with cronies in his cabinet like the Current Occupant, he chose for his cabinet all of the other Republican candidates — including William Seward, who had won the first ballot at the convention but lacked strength away from the populous eastern seaboard. A victorious alpha type deliberately making himself part of a committee of his alpha competitors is a little unusual.
MENTION OF “TRIBE” brings me back to the band of people who used to live across the Gunnison airport runway: How did they select leadership for small societies that remained stable and sustainable for thousands of years? We of course know nothing about the political system of people who disappeared from this valley 3,000 years ago, but a look at similar primal societies still existing today indicates that humans have been wrestling, like Lincoln, Ludeman. and Erlandson, with how to control and direct alpha types into behaviors that are mostly socially productive.
The top dog of a tribe or band is referred to by many such social groups as “the Big Man,” and one can imagine that the fate of the 50 or 150 members of a band was somewhat wrapped up in the qualities of the alpha types who competed to be their Big Man. So in many places around the world, subtle rituals and traditions were created that sorted for certain qualities that worked best for the bands. Most of these were some variation on the “potlatch” of the primal peoples in the northwestern United States. The virtue that was cultivated and measured through the potlatch was generosity — a candidate for Big Man was measured by how much of what he had he shared with others.
Another valued quality in Big Men was a sense of humor — the ability to jolly people out of an argument and maintain peace in the band. A good relaxed sense of humor is not generally associated with hard-driving alpha types, and I’ve found no suggestion of rituals or tests on how primal peoples have selected for it.
At any rate — it is certainly not a new problem, this challenge of selecting the alpha type who is the least dangerous to the society. And our current Big Man from the tribe of the eagle suggests that we haven’t gained much on addressing that challenge over the past 10,000 or so years.
George Sibley writes from Gunnison, where there was frost on Sept. 7.
