Normally proud and not particularly affectionate to people, Luit now wanted to be touched. He was sitting in a pool of blood, his head leaning against the bars of the night cage. When I gently stroked him, he let out the deepest sigh. Bonding at last, but at the saddest moment of my career as a primatologist. It was immediately obvious that Luit's condition was life threatening. He still moved about but lost enormous amounts of blood. He had deep puncture holes all over his body and had lost fingers and toes. We soon discovered that he was missing even more vital parts.
I have come to think of this moment in which Luit looked to me for comfort as an allegory of modern humanity: like violent apes, covered in own our blood, we long for reassurance. Despite our tendency to maim and kill, we want to hear that everything will be all right. At the time, however, I was focused only on trying to save Luit's life. As soon as the vet arrived, we tranquilized Luit and took him into surgery, where we sewed literally hundreds of stitches. It was during this desperate operation that we discovered Luit's testicles were gone. They had disappeared from the scrotal sac even though the holes in the skin seemed smaller than the testicles themselves, which the keepers had found lying in the straw on the cage floor. "Squeezed out," the vet concluded impassively.
Luit never came out of anesthesia. He had paid dearly for having stood up to two other males, frustrating them by his steep ascent. Those two had been plotting against him in order to take back the power they had lost. The shocking way they did so opened my eyes to how deadly seriously chimpanzees take their politics.
Two-against-one maneuvering is what lends chimpanzee power struggles both their richness and their danger. Coalitions are key. No male can rule by himself, at least not for long, because the group as a whole can overthrow anybody. Chimpanzees are so clever about banding together that a leader needs allies to fortify his position as well as the greater community's acceptance. Staying on top is a balancing act between forcefully asserting dominance, keeping supporters happy, and avoiding mass revolt. If this sounds familiar, it's because human politics works exactly the same.
Before Luit's death, the Arnhem colony was ruled jointly by Nikkie, a young upstart, and Yeroen, and over-the-hill conniver. Barely adult at seventeen, Nikkie was a brawny character with a dopey expression. He was very determined, but not the sharpest knife in the drawer. He was supported by Yeroen, who was physically not up to the task of being a leader anymore, yet who wielded enormous influence behind the scenes. Yeroen had a habit of watching disputes unfold from a distance, stepping in only when emotions were flaring to calmly support one side or the other, thus forcing everybody to pay attention to his decisions. Yeroen shrewdly exploited the rivalries among younger and stronger males.
Without going into the complex history of this group, it was clear that Yeroen hated Luit, who had wrested power from him years before. Luit had defeated Yeroen in a struggle that had taken three hot summer months of daily tensions involving the entire colony. The next year, Yeroen had gotten even by helping Nikkie dethrone Luit. Ever since, Nikkie had been the alpha male with Yeroen as his right-hand man. The two became inseparable. Luit was unafraid of either one of them alone. In one-on-one encounters in the night cages, Luit dominated every other male in the colony, taking away their food or chasing them around. No single one of them could possibly have kept him in his place.
This meant that Yeroen and Nikkie ruled as a team, and only as a team. They did so for four long years. But their coalition eventually began to unravel, and as is not uncommon among men, the divisive issue was sex. Being the kingmaker, Yeroen had enjoyed extraordinary sexual privileges. Nikkie would not let any other males get near the most attractive females, but for Yeroen he had always made an exception. This was part of the deal: Nikkie had the power, and Yeroen got a slice of the sexual pie. This happy arrangement ended only when Nikkie tried to renegotiate its terms. In the four years of his rule, he had grown increasingly self-confident. Had he forgotten who had helped him get to the top? When the young leader began to throw his weight around, interfering with the sexual adventures not only of other males but also of Yeroen himself, things got ugly.
Infighting within the ruling coalition went on for months, until one day Yeroen and Nikkie failed to reconcile after a spat. With Nikkie following him around, screaming and begging for their customary embrace, the old fox finally walked away without looking back. He'd had it. Luit filled the power vacuum overnight. The most magnificent chimpanzee male I have known, both in body and spirit, quickly grew in stature as the alpha male. Luit was popular with females, a mighty arbiter of disputes, protector of the downtrodden, and effective at disrupting bonding among rivals in the divide-and-rule tactic typical of both chimp and man. As soon as Luit saw other males together he would either join them or perform a charging display to disband them.
Nikkie and Yeroen both looked awfully depressed about their sudden loss of status. They seemed to have shrunk in size. But at times they seemed ready to resurrect their old coalition. That this actually happened in the night quarters, where Luit had no escape, was probably no accident. The horrible scene the keepers the keepers discovered told us that Nikkie and Yeroen had not only repaired their differences, but had acted together in highly coordinated fashion. They themselves were almost free of injuries. Nikkie did have a few superficial scratches and bites, but Yeroen had none at all, suggesting that he had held Luit down while letting the younger male inflict all the harm.
We will never know exactly what transpired, and unfortunately no females had been present to stop the fight. It is not unusual for them to collectively interrupt out-of-control male altercations. On the night of the assault, however, the females had been in separate night cages within the same building. They must have followed the entire commotion, but were helpless to intervene.
The colony was eerily silent that morning while Luit sat in his own blood. It was the first time in the zoo's history that none of the apes ate their breakfast. After Luit was carried off and the rest of the colony let outside - onto a two-acre island with grass and trees - the first thing that happened was an unusually fierce attack on Nikkie by a female named Puist. She was so persistently aggressive that the young male, normally very impressive, fled up into a tree. On her own, Puist kept him there for at least ten minutes by screaming and charging every time he tried to come down. Puist had always been Luit's main ally among the females. Her night quarters offered a view into the males', and it seemed clear she was expressing her opinion about the deadly assault.
And so our chimpanzees had demonstrated all the elements of two-against-one politics, from the need for unity to the fate of a ruler who becomes too cocky. Power is the prime mover of the male chimpanzee. It's a constant obsession, offering great benefits if obtained and intense bitterness if lost.
Political murder is no more rare in our own species: John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Salvador Allende, Yizhak Rabin, Gandhi. The list goes on. Even the Netherlands -normally politically sedate (or "civilized," as the Dutch would say)- was shocked a few years ago by the assassination of Pim Fortuyn, a political candidate. Further back in history, my country saw one of the most gruesome political murders of all. Whipped into a frenzy by the adversaries of Johan de Witt, a man of people got its hands on the statesman and his brother, Cornelius. They finished both men of with swords and muskets, hung their bodies upside down, and cut them open like pigs in a slaughterhouse. Hearts and innards were removed, grilled over a fire, and eaten by a festive mob! This ghastly event, which took place in 1672, resulted from profound frustration at a a time when the country had lost a string of wars. The murder was commemorated in poems and paintings, and the Historical Museum of the Hague still exhibits a toe and the ripped-out tongue of one of the victims.
For man or beast, death is the ultimate price of trying to reach the top. There is a chimp named Goblin from Gombe National Park in Tanzania. After many years as the group's bully, Goblin was set upon by a mass of angry chimpanzees. First, he lost a fight against a challenger who was supported by four younger males. As so often in the field, the actual fight was barely visible since it occurred in the dense overgrowth. But Goblin emerged screaming, and fled with injuries on his wrist, feet, hands, and, worst of all, scrotum. His wounds were strikingly similar to Luit's. Goblin nearly died as his scrotum became infected and started to swell, and he developed a fever. Days afterward, he was moving slowly resting often, and eating little. But he was tranquilized with a dart by a veterinarian and given antibiotics. After a period of convalescence, during which he stayed out of sight of his own community, he tried to stage a comeback, directing intimidating charges at the new alpha male. This was a grave misjudgement, because it provoked a pursuit by the other males in the group. Seriously injured again, he was once more saved by the field veterinarian. Eventually, Goblin was accepted back into the community, but in a low-ranking position.
The fates that may befall those at the top are an inevitable part of the power drive. Apart from the risk of injury or death, being in a position of power is stressful. This can be demonstrated by measuring cortisol, a stress hormone in the blood. It is no easy task to do so in wild animals, but Robert Sapolsky has been darting male baboons on the African plains for years. Among these highly competitive primates, cortisol levels depend on how good an individual is at managing social tensions. As in humans, this turns out to be a matter of personality. Some dominant males have high stress levels simply because they cannot tell the difference between a serious challenge by another male and neutral behavior that they shouldn't worry about. They are jumpy and paranoid. After all, if a rival walks by, it could be just because he needs to go from A to B, not because he wants to be a nuisance. When the hierarchy is in flux, misunderstandings accumulate, wrecking the nerves of males near the top. Since stress compromises the immune system, it's not unusual fro high-ranking primates to develop the ulcers and heart attacks also common in corporate CEOs.
The advantages of high rank must be pretty enormous, otherwise evolution would never have installed such foolhardy ambitions. They are ubiquitous in the animal kingdom, from frogs and rats to chickens and elephants. High rank generally translates into food for females and mates for males. I say "generally," because males also compete for food, and females for mates, even though the latter is most restricted to species, like ours, in which males help out with child rearing. Everything in evolution boils down to reproductive success, which means that the different orientations of males and females make perfect sense. A male can increase his progeny by mating with many females while keeping rivals away. For the female, such a strategy makes no sense: mating with multiple males generally does not do her any good.
The female goes for quality rather than quantity. Most female animals do not live with their mates, hence all they need to do is pick the most vigorous and healthy sex partner. This way, their offspring will be blessed with good genes. But females of species in which the mates stay around are in a different situation, which makes them favor males who are gentle, protective, and good providers. Females further enhance reproduction by what they eat, especially if they are pregnant or lactating, when caloric intake increases fivefold. Since dominant females can claim the best food, they raise the healthiest offspring. In some species, like rhesus macaques, the hierarchy is so strict that a dominant female will simply stop a subordinate walking by with bulging cheek pouches. These pouches help the monkeys carry food to a safe spot. The dominant will hold the head of the subordinate and open her mouth, essentially picking her pocket. Her intrusion meets with no resistance because for the subordinate it's either this or get bitten.
Do the benefits of being on top explain the dominance drive? Looking at the outsized canine teeth of a male baboon or the bulk and muscle of a male gorilla, one sees fighting machines evolved to defeat rivals in pursuit of the one currency recognized by natural selection: offspring produced. For males, this is an all-or-nothing game; rank determines who will sow his seed far and wide and who will sow no seed at all. Consequently, males are built to fight, with a tendency to probe rivals for weak spots, and a certain blindness to danger. Risk-taking is a male characteristic, as is the hiding of vulnerabilities. In the male primate world, you don't want to look weak. So it's no wonder that in modern society men go to the doctor less often than women and have trouble revealing their emotions even with an entire support group egging them on. The popular wisdom is that men have been socialized into hiding emotions, but it seems more likely that these attitudes are the product of being surrounded by others ready to seize any opportunity to bring them down. Our ancestors must have noticed the slightest limp or loss of stamina in others. A high-ranking male would do well to camouflage impairments, a tendency that may have become ingrained. Among chimpanzees it's not unusual for an injured leader to double the energy he puts into his charging displays, thus creating the illusion of being in perfect shape.
Genetic traits that help males lay claim to fertile females will be passed on. Animals don't think in terms of procreation, but they do act in ways that help spread their genes. The human male has inherited the same tendency. There are plenty of reminders of the connection between power and sex. Sometimes, like during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, this connection is exposed with great fanfare and hypocrisy, but most people are realistic about the sex appeal of leaders and ignore their philandering. That said, this applies to male leaders only. Since men don't fancy powerful mates, high status fails to benefit women in the sexual domain. A prominent French politician once compared power to pastry - she loved it, but she knew it wasn't good for her.
These differences between the sexes emerge early on. A Canadian study invited boys and girls aged nine and ten to play games that measured competitiveness. Girls were reluctant to take toys away from each other unless it was the only way to win, but boys claimed toys regardless of how this affected the game's outcome. Girls compared only if necessary, but boys seemed to do so just for the sake of it.
Similarly, upon meeting for the first time, men check each other out by picking something - anything - to fight over, often getting worked up about a topic they normally don't care about. They adopt threatening postures - legs apart and chests pushed out - make expansive gestures, speak with booming voices, utter veiled insults, make risque jokes, and so on. They desperately want to find out where they stand relative to one another. They hope to impress the others sufficiently that the outcome will be in their favor.
This is predictable event on the first day of an academic gathering when egos from the far corners of the globe face each other in a seminar room or, for that matter, at a bar. Unlike the women, who tend to stay on the sidelines, the men get so involved in the ensuing intellectual jostle that they sometimes turn red or white. What chimpanzees do with charging displays - with their hair on end, drumming on anything that amplifies sound, uprooting little trees as they go -- the human male does in the more civilized manner of making mincemeat of someone else's arguments or, more primitively, giving others no time to open their mouths. Clarification of the hierarchy is a top priority. Invariably, the next encounter among the same men will be calmer, meaning that something has been settled, though it's hard to know what exactly that is.
For males, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, and an addictive one at that. The violent reaction of Nikkie and Yeroen to their loss of power fits the frustration-aggression hypothesis to the letter: the deeper the bitterness, the greater the anger. Males jealously guard their power, and lose all inhibition if anyone challenges it. And this hadn't been the first time for Yeroen. The ferocity of the attack on Luit may have been due to the fact that it was the second time he had come out on top.
The first time Luit gained the upper hand - marking the end of Yeroen's ancient regime - I was perplexed by the way the established leader reacted. Normally a dignified character, Yeroen became unrecognizable. In the midst of a confrontation, he would drop out of a tree like a rotten apple, writhing on the ground, screaming pitifully, and waiting to be comforted by the rest of the group. He acted much like a juvenile ape being pushed away from his mother's teats. And like a juvenile who during tantrums keeps an eye on mom for signs of softening, Yeroen always noted who approached him. If the group around him was big and powerful enough, and especially if it included the alpha female, he would gain instant courage. With his supporters in tow, he would rekindle the confrontation with his rival. Clearly, Yeroen's tantrums were yet another example of deft manipulation. What fascinated me most, however, were the parallels with infantile attachment, nicely captured in expressions like "clinging to power" and "being weaned from power." Knocking a male off his pedestal gets the same reaction as yanking the security blanket away from a baby.
When Yeroen finally lost his top spot, he would often sit staring into the distance after a fight, an empty expression on his face. He was oblivious to the social activity around him and refused food for weeks. We thought he was sick, but the veterinarian found nothing wrong. Yeroen seemed a mere ghost of the impressive big shot he had been. I've never forgotten this image of a beaten and dejected Yeroen. When power was lost, the lights in him went out.
I've witnessed only one other such drastic transformation, this time in my own species. A senior professor, a colleague of mine on a university faculty with extraordinary prestige and ego, had failed to notice a budding conspiracy. Some young faculty members disagreed with him on a politically sensitive issue and successfully rallied a vote against him. Until then, I don't think anyone had ever had the guts to go head-to-head with him. Support for the alternative proposal had been cultivated behind his back by some of his own proteges. Following the fatal vote, which must have come out of the blue, given his expression of disbelief, all color drained from the professor's face. Looking ten years older, he had the same empty, ghostlike appearance Yeroen had after he had lost his top spot. For the professor, this was about much more than the issue at hand; it was about who ran the department. In the weeks and months following the meeting, his entire demeanor changed as he strode the corridors. Instead of saying "I am in charge," his body language now said "Leave me alone."
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's The Final Days describes Persident Richard Nixon's breakdown after it became obvious that he would have to resign: "Between sobs, Nixon was plaintive. How had a simple burglary...done all this?...Nixon got down on his knees...[He] leaned over and struck his fist on the carpet, crying, 'What have I done? What has happened?" Henry Kissinger, his secretary of state, reportedly comforted the dethroned leader like a child. He consoled him, literally holding Nixon in his arms, reciting all of his great accomplishments over and over until the president finally calmed down.
Given the obvious "will to power" (as Friedrich Nietzsche called it) of the human race, the enormous energy put into expression, the early emergence of hierarchies among children, and the childlike devastation of grown men who tumble from the top, I'm puzzled by the taboo with which our society surrounds this issue. Most psychology textbooks do not even mention power and dominance, except in relation to abusive relationships. Everyone seems in denial. In one study on the power motive, corporate managers were asked about their relationship with power. They did acknowledge the existence of a lust for power, but never applied to it themselves. They rather enjoyed responsibility prestige, and authority. The power grabbers were other men.
Political candidates are equally reluctant. They sell themselves as public servants, only in it to fix the economy or improve education. Have you ever heard a candidate admit he wants power? Obviously, the word "servant" is doublespeak: does anyone believe that it's only for our sake that they join the mudslinging of modern democracy? Do the candidates themselves believe this? What an unusual sacrifice that would be. It's refreshing to work with chimpanzees: they are the honest politicians we all long for. When political philosopher Thomas Hobbes postulated an in suppressible power drive, he was right on target for both humans and apes. Observing how blatantly chimpanzees jockey for position, one will look in vain for ulterior motives and expedient promises.
I was not prepared for this when, as a young student, I began to follow the dramas among the Arnhem chimpanzees from an observation window overlooking their island. In those days, students were supposed to be anti-establishment, and my shoulder-long hair proved it. We considered power evil and ambition ridiculous. Yet my observation of the apes forced me to open my mind to seeing power relations not as something bad but as something ingrained. Perhaps inequality was not to be dismissed as simply the product of capitalism. It seemed to go deeper than that. Nowadays, this may seem banal, but in the 1970s human behavior was seen as totally flexible; not natural but cultural. If we really wanted to, people believed, we could rid ourselves of archaic tendencies like sexual jealousy, gender roles, material ownership, and, yes, the desire to dominate.
Unaware of this revolutionary call, my chimpanzees demonstrated the same archaic tendencies, but without a trace of cognitive dissonance. They were jealous, sexist, and possessive, plain and simple. I didn't know then that I'd be working with them for the rest of my life or that I would never again have the luxury of sitting on a wooden stool and watching them for thousands of hours. It was the most revelatory time of my life. I became so engrossed that I began trying to imagine what made apes decide on this or that action. I started dreaming of them at night and, most significant, I started seeing the people around me in a different light.
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| "Chimpanzee Pimpin' Drivin' Hoes Into Bars (Monkey Bars)" - Showt Dogg |
My observations helped me see human behavior in an evolutionary light. By this, I mean not just the Darwinian light one hears so much about, but also the apelike way we scratch our heads if conflicted, or the dejected look we get if a friend pays too much attention to someone else. At the same time, I began to question what I'd been taught about animals: they just follow instinct; they have no inkling of the future, everything they do is selfish. I couldn't square this with what I was seeing. I lost the ability to generalize about "the chimpanzee" in the same way that no one ever speaks about "the human." The more I watched, the more my judgements began to resemble those we make about other people, such as this person is kind and friendly, and that one is self-centered. No two chimpanzees are the same.
It's impossible to follow what's going on in a chimp community without distinguishing between the actors and trying to understand their goals. Chimpanzee politics, like human politics, is a matter of individual strategies clashing to see who comes out ahead. The literature of biology proved of no help in understanding the social maneuvering, due to its aversion to the language of motives. Biologists don't talk about intentions and emotions. So I turned to Niccolo Machiavelli. During quiet moments of observation, I read from a book published four centuries earlier. The Prince put me in the right frame of mind to interpret what I was seeing on the island, though I'm pretty sure that the philosopher himself never envisioned this particular application of his work.
Among chimpanzees, hierarchy permeates everything. When we bring two females inside the building - as we often do for testing - and have them work on the same task, one will be ready to go while the other hangs back. The second female barely dares to take rewards and won't touch the puzzle box, computer, or whatever else we're using in the experiment. She may be just as eager as the other, but defers to her "superior." There is no tension or hostility, and out in the group they may be the best of friends. One female simply dominates the other.
In the Arnhem colony, the alpha female, Mama, did occasionally underline her position with fierce attacks on other females, but she was generally respected without contest. Mama's best friend, Kuif, shared her power, but this was nothing like a male coalition. Females rise to the top because everyone recognizes them as leaders, which means there is little to fight over. Inasmuch as status is largely an issue of personality and age, Mama did not need Kuif. Kuif shared in, but did not contribute to, Mama's power.
Among the males, in contrast, power is always up for grabs. It's not conferred on the basis of age or any other trait, but has to be fought for and jealously defended in the face of contenders. If males form coalitions, it's because they need each other. Status is determined by who can beat whom, not just on an individual basis but in the group as a whole. It does not do a male any good if he can physically defeat his rival if each time he tries to do so the whole group jumps on top of him. In order to rule, a male needs both physical strength and buddies who will help him out when a fight gets too hot. When Nikkie was alpha, Yereon's assistance was crucial. Not only did Nikkie need the old male's help to keep Luit in check, but he was also unpopular with the females. It was not unusual for females to band together against him. Yeroen being highly respected, could stop such mass discontent by positioning himself between Nikkie and the screaming females. Nikkie's dependence makes it all the more surprising that he ended up biting the hand that fed him.
But with complex strategies come miscalculations. This is why we speak of political "skills": it's not so much who you are, but what you do. We are exquisitely attuned to power, responding quickly to any new configuration. If a businessman tries to get a contract with a large corporation, he will be in meeting after meeting with all sorts of people from which a picture emerges of rivalries, loyalties, and jealousies within the corporation he is visiting, such as who wants whose position, who feels excluded by whom, and who is on his way down or out. This picture is at least as valuable as the organizational chart of the company. We simply could not survive without our sensitivity to power dynamics.
Power is all around us, continuously confirmed and contested, and perceived with great accuracy. But social scientists, politicians, and even laypeople treat it like a hot potato. We prefer to cover up underlying motives. Anyone who, like Machiavelli, breaks the spell by calling it like it is, risks his reputation. No one wants to be called "Machiavellian," even though most of us are.
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When tensions rise, male chimpanzees stay close together. This is why Yeroen, Luit, and Nikkie shared a cage on that fatal night. The caretakers and I wanted each male to sleep alone, but it's hard to control animals as strong as chimps. As soon as two of them entered a night cage together, the third absolutely wanted to join them. He simply could not afford to be left out. How could Luit prevent a hostile axis if he was not around to keep the other two from grooming each other? The evening before his death, we spent hours trying to separate the three males, but to no avail. It was as if they were glued together, sneaking as a team through open doors, holding on to each other's hips, so that no one was ever left behind. We resigned ourselves to leaving them together for the night.
Two-against-one dynamics are a familiar problem in human families with triplets, where one triplet is often left out of games by the other two. The lore among hunting peoples says that men should never set off in a party of three since only two of them may return alive (meaning that two will turn against the third). We easily grasp triadic configurations. In chess, a rook and a bishop can hold their own against a queen, and in real life we ask a friend to put in a good word for us so that we do not stand alone.
Male chimps are intimately familiar with this dynamic and seem to realize the importance of their own coalitions. Infighting among coalition partners is so threatening that they desperately try to reconcile, especially the who who stands to lose the most, which often times is the one at the top. Yeroen and Nikkie were always in a hurry to make up after a fight: they needed to preserve a united front. One moment they'd be running around screaming at each other, usually in competition over a female, and the next they'd fling their arms around each other and make up with a kiss. This signaled to everyone else that they intended to stay in power. The day they failed to reconcile was the day both of them dropped in rank.
The same phenomenon occurs between battling candidates in a political party. After one has emerged as the party's candidate, the loser rushes to endorse him. No one wants the opposition to think that the party is in tatters. They pat each other on the back, two former enemies now smiling at the cameras together. After George W. bush had won the bitterly contested 2000 Republican nomination, his rival, John McCain, with a forced smile, faced reporters who expressed doubt that he was ready to forgive and forget. McCain got a big laugh saying over and over "I endorse Governor Bush, I endorse Governor Bush, I endorse Governor Bush."
Coalition politics take place at the international level as well. I was once invited to a think tank in Washington D.C. Our group was an interesting mix of policy-makers, anthropologists, psychologists, Pentagon types, political scientists, and one primatologist (me!). It was shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The historic event had meant a lot to me. When I lived in the Netherlands, the Soviet occupiers of East Germany could have been at my doorstep in two hours, something I was reminded of every time heavy NATO military vehicles rumbled down a nearby highway.
The underlying assumption at the meeting was that we were going to be living in a safer world now that one of the world's two largest military powers was fading into the past. Our task was to discuss what to expect: how would the new world order work out and what kinds of good things could the United States do with its newfound status as the sole superpower. I had problems with the underlying premise, however, since the demise of one power does not necessarily give the other free rein. This might be true in a simpler world, but Americans sometimes forget that their country is home to less than 4 percent of the planet's population. My evaluation of the international situation would have been easy to ignore, based as it was on animal behavior, had one of the political scientists not made the same points, but based on military history. Our message could be summarized in three deceptively simple words from coalition theory: strength is weakness.
This theory is nicely illustrated by Yeroen's choice of partner after he lost his position. For a brief while, Luit was alpha. Since Luit was physically the strongest male, he could handle most situations by himself. Furthermore, soon after his rise, the females one by one switched over to his side - most important, Mama. Mama was pregnant at the time, and it's natural that females under such circumstances do everything to stabilize the hierarchy. Despite his cushy position, Luit was keen on disrupting get-togethers among other males, especially between Yeroen and the only male who could pose a threat, Nikkie. Sometimes these scenes escalated into fighting. Noticing that both males wanted to be his buddy, Yeroen grew in importance by day.
At this point, Yeroen had two choices: He could attach himself to the most powerful player, Luit, and derive a few benefits in return - what kind of benefits would be up to Luit. Or, he could help Nikkie challenge Luit and in effect create a new alpha male who would owe his position to him. We have seen that Yeroen took the second route. This is consistent with the "strength is a weakness" paradox, which says that the most powerful player is often the least attractive political ally. Luit was too strong for his own good. Joining him, Yeroen added little. As the colony's superpower, Luit really did not need more that the male's neutrality. Throwing his weight behind Nikkie was a logical choice for Yeroen. He would be the puppet master, having far more leverage than he could ever have dreamt of having under Luit. His choice also translated into increased prestige and access to females. So if Luit demonstrated the "strength is weakness" principle, Yeroen illustrated the corresponding "weakness is strength" principle according to which minor players can position themselves at an intersection that offers great advantage.
The same paradoxes operate in the international political arena. Ever since Thucydides wrote about the Peloponnesian War more than two millennia ago, it has been known that nations seek allies against nations perceived as a common threat. Fear and resentment drive weaker parties into each other's arms, making them weigh in on the lighter side of the balance. The result is a power balance in which all nations hold influential positions. Sometimes a single country is the main "balancer," as Great Britain was in Europe before World War I. Having a strong navy and being virtually immune to invasion, Britain was in the perfect position to prevent any continental power from gaining the upper hand.
Counterintuitive outcomes are not unusual. Think about a parliamentary system in which a majority vote out of one hundred is needed and in which there are three parties, two with forty-nine seats each and one tiny party with only two seats. Which party do you think is the most powerful? Under such circumstances (which, in fact, existed in Germany during the 1980s), the party with two votes will be in the driver's seat. Coalitions are rarely larger than they need to be to win, hence the largest two parties have no desire to govern together. Both will court the smaller party, giving it disproportionate power.
Coalition theory also considers "minimally winning coalitions," in which players prefer to be part of a coalition that is large enough to be victorious yet small enough for them to make a difference within it. Inasmuch as siding with the strongest party dilutes payoffs, it's rarely the first choice. Even if in the foreseeable future the United States will be the most powerful player on the global stage, both economically and militarily, this by no means guarantees its inclusion in winning coalitions. On the contrary, resentment will build automatically, leading to counterbalancing coalitions among the remaining powers. It was coalition theory that I talked about at the think tank meeting, believing it was a widely accepted idea, but my comments were met with distinctly unhappy faces. The Pentagon clearly was not planning according to any "strength is weakness" scenario.
It did not take long, though, for precisely such a scenario to play out. One morning in the spring of 2003, I woke up to the unexpected sight in my newspaper of three smiling foreign ministers walking side by side toward the United Nations Security Council chambers. The ministers of France, Russia, and Germany had proclaimed their opposition to the planned United States led invasion of Iraq, noting that China, too, was on their side. There is no abundance of love between the French and Germans not between the Chinese and Russians, but these strange bedfellows had come together after the U.S. government had abandoned consensus-building, which until then had permitted it to act as the world's most powerful player without upsetting international alliances. Isolation was setting in. The end of U.S. diplomacy had called forth a counter alignment that ten years earlier would have been unimaginable.
Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are. Waal, p. 43-58, 72-77.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7QidqBmTN0
BOUNCERS Are NOBODIES. They're Typically Low Status, Low Income Males Who Are Unintelligent, Uneducated, Non-Athletic, And Unattractive. Why Do You Think They Get Into Bouncing? Because It Gives Them The Status, Power And Dominance That They've Never Had And Don't Have In The Real World. (Low Status NOBODIES Who've Never Had Power Are The People Most Likely To Misuse Their Power Once They Get It.(GETTIN' IT NIGGA!)) Hopefully The White Boy Sued The Animal Or At Least Reported Him To The Authorities (The Po-Lease). TEllE
Listen Intently At The 2:00 Minute Mark!
Every society has its scapegoats, but the most extreme cases I have known concerned newly established groups of macaques. These monkeys have strict hierarchies, and while the higher-ups were working out their rank positions, a process that tends to get nasty, nothing was easier for them than to turn en masse against a poor bottom-ranker. One female, named Black, got attacked so often that we called the corner she used to flee to "Black's corner." Black would crouch there while the rest of the group gathered around her, mostly grunting and threatening, but sometimes biting or pulling out fistfuls of hair.
In my experience of managing primates, there's no point in giving in to the temptation of removing the scapegoat: the next day another individual will take its place. There is an obvious need for a receptacle of tensions. But when Black gave birth to her first offspring everything changed, because the alpha male protected this infant. The rest of the group generalized their animosity to Black's family, hence they directed threats and grunts at this little monkey baby, too, but having high-level protection, he had nothing to fear and seemed rather puzzled by all the fuss. Black soon learned to keep her son close at times of trouble, because then no one would touch her either.
What makes scapegoating so effective is that it's a double-edge sword. First, it releases tension among the dominants. Attacking an innocent harmless bystander is obviously less risky than attacking each other. Second, it rallies the higher-ups around a common cause. While threatening the scapegoat, they bond with each other, sometimes mounting and embracing, indicating that they stand united. It's a total charade, of course: primates often pick enemies that hardly matter. In one monkey group, all the members would run to their water basin and threaten their own reflections. Unlike humans and apes, monkeys don't recognize their reflections as themselves, so they'd found an enemy group that conveniently didn't fight back. The Arnhem chimps had a different outlet. If tensions escalated to the breaking point, one of them would start barking at the lion and cheetah safari park next door. The big cats were perfect enemies. The entire colony would soon be wraah-barking at the top of its lungs at those awful beasts safely separated from them by a moat, a fence, and a strip of forest. Tensions would be forgotten.
A well-established group usually does not have a particular individual who is always chased into the corner. In fact, the absence of a whipping boy is a sure sign that things have settled down. But displacement of aggression, as it's known among specialists, does not necessarily end up at the bottom of the social ladder. Alpha threatens Beta, who immediately starts looking around for Gamma. Beta then threatens Gamma while glancing around at Alpha, because the ideal outcome is that Alpha takes Beta's side. Displacement aggression can trickle down four or five steps before it peters out. It's often of low intensity - the equivalent of name-calling or door-slamming - but still permits the higher-ups to let off steam. And everyone in the group knows what's going on: subordinates go into hiding at the first sign of tensions near the top.
The term "scapegoat" derives from the Old Testament, where it refers to one of two goats used in a ceremony of the Day of Atonement. The first goat was sacrificed, and the second was allowed to escape with its life (the "escape goat"). This goat received all inequities and transgressions of the people on its head before being sent out to a solitary land, which was literally the wilderness and symbolically a spiritual wilderness. This was the way people freed themselves from evil. Similarly, the New Testament describes Jesus as the "Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world" (John 1:29)
For modern man, scapegoating refers to inappropriate demonization, vilification, accusation, and persecution. Humanity's most horrific scapegoating was the Holocaust, but letting off steam at the expense of others covers a far wider range of behavior, including witch-hunting in the Middle Ages, vandalism by the fans of losing sports teams, and spousal abuse after conflicts at work. And the mainstays of this behavior - the innocence of the victim and a violent release of tensions - are strikingly similar among humans and other animals. The quintessential example is pain-induced aggression in rats. Place two rats on an iron grid through which they are given an electric shock, and the moment they feel the pain they attack each other. Like people who hit their thumb with a hammer, the rats never hesitate to "fault" somebody else.
We surround this process with symbolism and pick victims based on things like skin color, religion, or a foreign accent. We also take care never to admit to the sham that scapegoating actually is. In this regard, we're more sophisticated than other animals. But it's undeniable that scapegoating is one of the most basic, most powerful, least conscious psychological reflexes of the human species, one shared with so many other animals that it may well be hardwired.
The mythical Oedipus died a scapegoat during social upheaval in his city, Thebes. Blamed for an enduring drought, he was the perfect victim, given that he was an outsider raised in Corinth. The same applies to Marie Antoinette. Political instability combined with her Austrian heritage made her an ideal target. Today, Microsoft is a scapegoat for the lack of internet security; illegal immigrants are held responsible for rising unemployment; and the Central Intelligence Agency took the fall for the never-found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The Iraq war itself is another good example. Like all Americans, I was shocked and stunned by the terrorist attack on New York. In addition to my initial horror and grief, anger soon became part of the mix. I could feel it all around me, and I felt it percolating within myself as well. I'm not sure this feeling was shared by people in other parts of the world: horror and grief, yes, but anger, perhaps not. This might explain why what happened next put the United States at such monumental odds with other nations. Overnight, the world had to contend with a furious wounded bear, startled out its slumber by someone who had stepped on its tail. As one popular song put it, a sucker punch had made the country light up like the Fourth of July.
After a swipe at Afghanistan, the angry bear kept looking for another, more substantial target, and there was Saddam Hussein, hated by everybody, most of all his own people, thumbing his nose at the world. No matter the lack of any proven connection to 9/11, the bombing of Baghdad was a great tension release for the American people greeted by cheerleading media and flag-waving in the streets. Immediately following this catharsis, though, doubts began to surface. Eighteen months later, polls indicated that the majority of Americans considered the war a mistake.
Reallocation of blame fails to address the situation that triggered it, but it works. It serves to calm frayed nerves and restore sanity. As Yogi Berra put it, "I never blame myself when I'm not hitting. I just blame the bat." It's a good way of keeping yourself out of the equation, but how it exactly works is little understood. Only one study has measured it in a most innovative way: not in people, but in baboons. Primatologists have come up with "guidelines" for what makes for a successful male baboon. The measure of success is the amount of glucocorticoid (a stress hormone that reflects how one is doing psychologically) in the blood. Low levels mean that one copes well with the ups and downs of social life, which for male baboons is full of status striving, slights, and challenges. It was found that displacement of aggression is an excellent personality trait for a baboon to have. As soon as a male has lost a confrontation, he takes it all out on a smaller guy. Males who tend to do so enjoy relatively stress-free lives. Rather than withdrawing and sulking after a defeat, they're quick to shift their problems to others.
I've heard women say that this is a male thing, that women tend to internalize blame, whereas men have no compunction about finding others at fault. Men prefer to give rather than get ulcers. It's depressing to learn that we share this tendency - which creates so many innocent victims - with rats, monkeys, and apes. It's a deeply ingrained tactic to keep stress at bay at the expense of fairness and justice.
Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are. Waal, p.167-171
