The concept of superiority sounds awful to modern humans, but animals one-up their group-mates whenever they can. Serotonin is released when they prevail. Serotonin is not aggression but the nice, calm sense that it’s safe to act on your impulses. The good feeling is quickly metabolized, however, so the mammal brain is soon looking for a way to gain another advantage. Serotonin paves a neural pathway that helps a mammal figure out how to stimulate more of the good feeling in the future. Brains that rewarded social dominance with a good feeling made more copies of themselves, so natural selection built a brain that seeks social dominance.
Humans look for ways to trigger serotonin without conflict. That’s hard to do, so anything that stimulates serotonin is valued. Cynicism is a safe, convenient serotonin booster. When you put down “the fat cats,” you can enjoy the feeling of being above them. Sneering at “the idiots in power” triggers a sense of social dominance. It feels good for a few moments, and then the serotonin is metabolized.
“I don’t want to be superior,” you may say. But when you see others put themselves ahead, it bugs you. Your mammal brain is always comparing your position to others and falling behind feels like a threat. When your serotonin droops, you feel like something is wrong with the world, even if you’re sure you don’t care about being one-upped. To your inner mammal, the one-down position is a survival threat. It avoids that threat as if your life depends on it because in the state of nature, it does. Seeking the one-up position promotes the survival of a mammal’s genes.
“Why can’t we all be equal?” you may say. Equality is an abstraction and the mammal brain doesn’t do abstractions. It focuses on the concrete. If it sees a banana, it wants the banana. If it sees a bigger, stronger monkey next to the banana, it wants to avoid pain. The mammal brain is always weighing expected pain and gain. It seeks the advantage in ways that worked before.
“I don’t want the banana,” you may say. “I want the less fortunate to have it.” Saying that gives you the one-up position in a life where you already have enough bananas. If you live among people who respect sharing, you learn to get social rewards by sharing. Insisting that you don’t care about your own needs triggers a one-up feeling.
When a mammal approaches a weaker individual, it displays dominance signals understood by members of that species. The weaker individual responds with submission signals that are likewise understood. This is how social animals avoid conflict. The weaker individual protects itself from aggression by conveying its lack of competitive intent. The dominant individual’s serotonin rises when it gets respect in this way. If its dominance display is not rewarded by a submission gesture, its serotonin droops and it becomes agitated.
Humans work hard to restrain the urge to dominate. That’s why we feel so threatened when we think others get rewarded for dominating. We strive for fairness, but no individual is a good judge of fairness. Each brain sees it through the lens of its own neurochemistry. When you lack a sense of social importance, something seems wrong with the world. You look for ways to feel better, but it’s hard to figure out what works. Sometimes, cynicism works.
We all experience social dominance with circuits built from our past. Anything that stimulated your serotonin in your youth built neural superhighways that shape your expectations about how to feel good today. You learned behaviors that got respect in the niche you lived in, and you learned to avoid behaviors that lost respect. Sometimes, you saw people seeking the dominant position and enjoying it. Sometimes you saw people losing social dominance and suffering for it. Your mirror neurons stored information about what feels good and what feels bad. You may insist that you only care about the greater good. You may take pride in your humility. But your brain wants serotonin and keeps looking for it whether you think that consciously or not. Hostility toward those you see as more dominant is one way. You can get the one-up spot in your mind every time you remind yourself that they are “jerks.” But the serotonin is soon gone and you need to hate the jerks again to get more.
No matter how you stimulate your serotonin, your brain will soon habituate. An old familiar one-up position will not excite you forever. Your brain will seek bigger and better social advantages. If you rely on cynicism, you will find bigger flaws in “the jerks” in order to feel good.
The animal urge for the one-up position goes by many names in the human world, such as ego, assertiveness, competitiveness, self-confidence, status-seeking, snobbery. We seek respect, attention, importance, advantage. We call people bossy, controlling, domineering, manipulative. We want to be special. No matter what you call it, it’s hard to see cute, furry creatures this way, but when we understand nature we can better understand ourselves.
Respect is not just a verbal abstraction. In the animal world, respect brings real survival advantages. In the human world, we say everyone deserves respect. But you cannot mate with everyone. You cannot share your banana with everyone. You can’t give everyone respect at the same time, and everyone is not going to respect you when you want them to. Your mammal brain will seek respect, and it will get disappointed sometimes. These disappointments feel like urgent survival threats to a brain that evolved to spread its genes.
By the time a mammal is an adult, experience has built circuits that tell it when to dominate and when to defer. Each mammal knows which group-mates to submit to, and which individuals will allow it to go ahead and meet its needs. Even if you respect everyone, you cannot give everyone your attention. Everyone cannot give you attention. Mammals compete for social rewards as well as physical rewards because serotonin makes it feel good. You may dislike people who seek social dominance and enjoy it. You may dislike your own urge for this pleasure. But you feel good when you have the one-up position and you feel bad when you lose it. The problem is not with you or the world. In fact, there isn’t a problem at all once you recognize the nature of being a mammal.
You may think animals are compassionate and nurturing. You may hate the idea of animals struggling for social dominance. But research shows a clear link between status-seeking and serotonin in animals. A landmark study put a one-way mirror between an alpha monkey and his troop-mates. The alpha had much higher serotonin than the others at first. He made dominance gestures typical of his species, but his troop-mates did not respond with the expected submission gestures because the one-way mirror blocked their view of him. The alpha’s serotonin fell each day of the experiment, and he got extremely agitated. He apparently needed their continual submission to keep stimulating serotonin. He needed to get respect to keep his cool.
Serotonin is a complex chemical found in reptiles, fish, mollusks, and amoeba, as well as mammals. We mammals have ten times more of it in our stomachs than in our brains. Serotonin stimulates digestion, which makes sense because social assertion is a precursor to getting food in the state of nature. Our brains evolved to seek serotonin while avoiding pain, but there is no sure-fire way to do this. You may have dreams of winning a Nobel Prize or a Grammy or just a promotion, but your best efforts may not succeed. And even when you get the social dominance you seek, it only feels good for a short time. Then your brain looks for more social dominance. You might blame “our society” for this thought habit, but mammals of every species seek status with any energy they have left after their immediate needs are met. It’s equivalent to saving for a rainy day. Animals can’t put money in the bank or preserve food for the future. They may starve tomorrow even if they have plenty today. So an animal invests today’s extra energy in raising its status. That improves its prospects for meeting its needs in the future. When others seek status, it seems annoying. But when you do it, you just want to feel good.
I can’t control what will happen tomorrow, so if I have any extra energy today, I invest it in raising my social dominance. Who knows when it may help?
Any threat to your social status feels like a survival threat to your mammal brain. When someone else gains an advantage, your mammal brain sees the disadvantage for you. You can end up feeling threatened a lot because the world is full of people gaining advantages.
A gazelle’s prospects are threatened when dominant herd-mates monopolize the good grass and the good mating opportunities. But the gazelle focuses on finding more grass and more mates, and avoids conflicts it’s likely to lose. Small brains survive by focusing on real needs rather than abstract scorekeeping. Big brains can keep score, making give and take possible by remembering prior encounters. Keeping score sounds harsh but it can prevent conflict by evening things out over time. We humans can tally our advantages and disadvantages for a very long time.
Imagine a mother pig with eight nipples and ten babies. Each piglet engages in life-or-death competition from its moment of birth. When a little piggy gets access to a nipple, it hangs on and keeps others away. As its strength grows, it tries to seize a better nipple near the top, since the top spots provide more fat and warmth. Mother pig does not referee, so each piglet learns from experience. After a few weeks, conflict among them subsides because each piglet has wired-in expectations about which choices get rewards and which choices lead to pain. Each time a piglet wins a conflict, serotonin flows and neurons connect. That helps its serotonin turn on in similar future circumstances. A little pig feels safe to assert itself when its serotonin is flowing. But each time it loses a conflict, cortisol flows. Soon, each piglet has a neural network for seeking rewards and avoiding pain. A weak piglet learns to submit to avoid injury. A strong piglet learns to assert to get more rewards. You may think this is wrong. You may be uncomfortable with the porcine facts of life. You are lucky to live in a world where enforced rules mediate conflict. But when you see pigs—literal or figurative—get resources that you are not getting, you probably have a strong reaction. Even if you don’t need the milk, you may hate to see that pig get it.
You don’t want to be a bully, but you don’t want to be bullied either. You want to feel good but you also want to see yourself as a good person. We all build a variety of serotonin circuits and look for ways to reconcile them.
Serotonin gives you a safe feeling, not a hostile feeling. It’s the mammalian sense that you have what it takes to prevail in your quest for a feeding or mating opportunity. If your judgment is accurate, asserting yourself will lead to a good feeling. But you could be wrong. You could get hurt when you assert yourself. Pain builds new connections to the circuits that control your serotonin.
Farmers and field biologists know that the weakest animals in a herd are found around the edges, where predator risk is highest. You may think the weaker ones are sacrificing themselves for the good of the herd. But that is not how the mammal brain works. Herd animals continually push toward the center. When they get too weak to prevail, they end up around the edges. If they’re lucky, they have already reared their young in the center, so their genes survive after they get picked off.
You do not want to push the weak to the edges. But you don’t want to be at the edges yourself either. It seems like you’ll end up there if you stop pushing. You wish there weren’t so many pushy beasts around. Something seems wrong with the world. When others push ahead, we don’t like it. But when we push ourselves ahead, it feels like we are just doing what it takes to survive.
When others want special treatment, it may grate on you. But when you get to be special, it seems like justice. You’re just catching up. Your mammal brain often holds back to avoid conflict so it seems like your moment is overdue. Social animals notice what others are getting. We’ve inherited a brain that tunes in to that channel.
The mammal brain doesn’t do math. It doesn’t say, “There are twelve bananas and four of us, so let’s take three bananas each.” It just keeps grabbing bananas while scanning for the risk of another monkey’s teeth. Of course you don’t do this. You restrain the impulse, so you expect others to restrain it, too. When others don’t act as you expect, it triggers your cortisol. More is at stake than a banana. Your trust in your own rewards-predictor is at stake.
You have spent a lifetime building the circuits that guide you toward rewards and away from pain. When you fail and others succeed, it’s hard to know what to do next. You need reliable predictions to know where to invest your effort. You don’t want to be a jerk over a silly banana, but you want to know how the world works. It’s hard to feel good when you conclude that the jerks get all the bananas. It’s even harder to notice yourself picking and choosing the facts to support this unhappy view.
It’s just a banana, but when someone else gets it, you may feel like something is wrong with the world. Your verbal brain may justify your bad feeling by saying “It’s the principle of it!”
Imagine standing in front of an ice cream shop all day. You could get the impression that other people constantly eat ice cream. You might think it’s unfair that you gain weight from an occasional ice cream, while other people eat it “all the time” and do not gain weight. Of course, they do not eat it all the time. Your information is biased because you are collecting it by standing in front of an ice cream shop. Our social comparisons depend on our choice of facts, but we often choose wordlessly by letting electricity flow down the pathways we have. Once you wire yourself to feel wronged, you will easily find facts that fit.
Mammals are preoccupied by social comparison because it’s so relevant to the survival of their genes. The more you know about the mating game in animals, the better you can understand your own sense of urgency about social dominance. There is no free love in the state of nature. Animals work hard for their reproductive opportunities and both females and males struggle to gain an advantage.
Female mammals do not want to waste their limited reproductive capacity on bad paternal genes. They don’t think this consciously, but they act in ways that favor males with good genes. How they judge their males varies across species, but social status is usually involved. In small-brained species, males win status in the moment through physical combat. In big-brained primates, males can win status over time with actions that include a range of good deeds as well as physical combat. In bonobos, the ape known for its sexuality, females strive to mate with the sons of high-status females of their troop. Bonobo ladies work hard to raise their status in the female hierarchy so they can get access to the “better” males.
Mammalian groups often have “alphas” that try to dominate mating opportunity in various ways. Stronger males chase other males away from fertile females and thus father more than their share of the next generation. Stronger females have more children and manage to keep more of them alive until their genes are passed on. Animals aren’t motivated by dynastic ambitions. They just do what feels good. Anything that stimulates serotonin is expected to feel good. This is separate from the dopamine “go for it” feeling, which rests on action. Serotonin creates the calm feeling that something is yours for the taking.
To get this nice feeling, a mammal compares itself to rivals and makes a decision. When it sees that it is bigger or stronger or higher ranking than its rival, the urge to assert feels safe. When it sees that it is smaller or weaker or lower ranking, the urge to assert triggers cortisol. Strong and weak mammals can live side by side because the mammal brain is skilled at making social comparisons. Humans crave the good feeling of serotonin, but we don’t want a life of “might makes right” social rivalry. Fortunately, this “might makes right” mentality is now curbed by laws, rules, and social norms limiting aggression. But we still have a mammal brain that is always seeking advantage, comparing itself to others, and keeping score. It’s not surprising that cynical notions get produced by such a brain.
In civilized society, you are expected to trigger your serotonin by putting yourself up without putting others down. This is hard to do in practice so your brain looks for guidance in what worked before. As far as your brain in concerned, anything that got you respect in your past seems like it should work. But the world does not always respond the way you expect, so your efforts to stimulate serotonin sometimes get disappointed.
We build expectations about how to get respect when we are young. Many of us learn to get respect by deferring to others. In the modern world, deferring actually helps you get bananas and mating opportunities. But it’s not really deferring if you do it with the assumption that the other person will defer back to you. Let’s say you bump into someone in a doorway. You may say, “After you,” and expect them to respond, “After you.” What if they just forge ahead instead? Maybe your cortisol will spurt and you will think they have wrongfully one-upped you. Every time you reach a threshold, your brain generates an expectation. People do not always fit your expectations and you can end up with a lot of cortisol.
After you. After you. After you. Why do they make me go last?
A mammal’s day is full of decisions about when to assert and when to hold back. If you assert all the time, you end up with pain because you will not have the strength to win every conflict. But if you hold back all the time, you will end up with pain as you watch others get all the bananas and the reproductive success. Your only choice is to analyze every option, which is the job your brain has evolved to do.
You may say you don’t compare yourself to others, but when you see someone with better hair or better abs, you notice. Your brain evolved to make social comparisons. You can end up feeling bad about your hair or your abs, despite your best intentions.
In today’s world, we expect ourselves to feel on top at all times without actually feeling better than anyone. This idealized state is called “pride” and “confidence.” It’s hard to create this illusion because our brain evolved to make concrete comparisons. Our brain notices its own weaknesses because that promotes survival in nature. You can easily end up thinking “everyone else” is enjoying serotonin all the time and you’re missing out. You look for ways to stimulate serotonin, but you notice they have unpleasant side effects of one sort or another. Every time you put yourself above others, you risk being shot down. You might drive yourself to make a bigger impact on the world in one way or another but there’s always a cost, and even if you succeed, the feeling doesn’t last and your brain looks for more. It’s easier to just ridicule the person ahead of you instead.
Cynicism is a nonviolent, non-narcotic, nonfattening way to stimulate serotonin. You can feel superior without going to the gym, studying for the bar exam, or tolerating the indignities hurled at politicians and entrepreneurs. Cynicism makes you superior instantly because “they” are “jerks.”
We hate the feeling of living in a popularity contest and long for a world that doesn’t feel that way. It helps to know that every monkey and ape troop has a popularity contest. In a famous chimpanzee study, animals voluntarily exchanged food for the opportunity to look at pictures of their alpha male (and fertile females).
In a baboon field study, animals were found to gaze significantly more at their alpha than at other troop-mates. If you feel like some people get more attention, you are right. If you find that frustrating, you are a mammal. You are not thinking about spreading your genes, but attention equals reproductive success in the brain that natural selection built. Losing out on attention feels like a survival threat to this brain.
If you feel like some people get more attention, you are right. If you find that frustrating, you are a mammal. You are not thinking about spreading your genes, but attention equals reproductive success in the brain that natural selection built. Losing out on attention feels like a survival threat to this brain.
Social comparison is more primal than food in the mammal world. A mammal doesn’t grab food until it looks around to see who’s watching, because avoiding injury promotes survival more than any one morsel. Social comparison is more primal than sex for the same reason. Your brain keeps comparing you to others and reacting, as much as you wish it wouldn’t.
In today’s world we can choose which social comparisons we care about. You decide how much you care about your nails, your car, and your children’s grades. You could just focus on your cats and ignore everything else if you want. But whatever you learned to care about, your cortisol gets triggered when somebody one-ups you. Your mammal brain keeps noticing the advantages of others and wondering what is wrong. In order to survive, it thinks you must be special, too. No one thinks this in words, but our neurochemical ups and downs make us feel it deeply.
Your mammal brain thinks you must be special to survive. No one thinks this in words, but our neurochemical ups and downs make us feel it deeply.
A young male monkey will not find a mate until he raises his status in the troop. A young female must raise her status or she will watch her babies die from one threat or another. Status in the primate world has life-or-death significance. This brain we’ve inherited cares intensely about status. Each of us expresses it in our own way. You may deride the status markers that others care about while feeling intensely about a different status marker. When we’re frustrated by the status seeking of our fellow mammal, it helps to remember that it’s driven by the energy that drives reproduction. You might blame society for this feeling of urgency if you don’t know your inner mammal is causing it.
No one is special all the time. And even when you get respect, you risk losing it. Frustration and disappointment are always part of the mammalian quest for respect. In the past, people fought duels, wore corsets, and ironed their underwear in their quest to trigger serotonin. Cynicism is a less painful way to do this. You don’t like to judge, but when you tell yourself, “They’re all a bunch of crooks,” you feel superior. Cynicism helps us feel on top in a world full of mammals who are all trying to feel on top.
You may insist that you only care about the welfare of others. But your brain responds to whatever affects you. If you constantly deny your brain, it will fight back by producing bad feelings. It will tell you that something is wrong and you will try to make sense of that message. You may conclude that everyone else is wrong for putting themselves above you. And while you are chastising everyone in your mind, you might continue to believe that you don’t care about yourself but only about others.
When your quest for serotonin is disappointed, your inner mammal thinks the guy above you is the problem. Opposing the guy above you seems like a good way to relieve that do-something feeling. The guy could be the little old lady who presides over your knitting club or the sibling who taunts you or the political leader you see on television or all of the above. Opposing someone you perceive to be above you in a social hierarchy can relieve a bad feeling. If you oppose them in your mind, you can feel better without the risks of open conflict. If the bad feeling comes back, you can oppose them in your mind again. You can end up with a mind full of opposition in your quest for the nice calm feeling of serotonin.
When you feel dominated, joining with others troubled by the same adversary feels good. Social dominance is more easily won with the support of a group. You may hate seeing other people form cliques and herds and go around acting superior. But when your social group seeks advancement, it seems only right. It’s not one-upping, in your mind, but a necessary response to other people’s one-upping.
A group makes it easier to believe in the superiority of your cause, and the superiority of your strength. Your group-mates reinforce the feeling that you are dominated, and your shared circuits weed out alternative views of the situation. You start expecting to take down the big kahunas someday, and it feels good today. Cynicism loves company.
Imagine you’re in a knitting club run by an idiot who doesn’t know what she’s talking about, in your opinion, yet she’s getting the respect that might well go to someone else you can think of. Some of your fellow club members agree, and you see a way to do something. You lead them to overthrow her, and you become the leader yourself. You did it for them, but it feels good. You start running things the way things should be run. But the good feeling soon fades. “It’s just a knitting club,” you tell yourself. You start focusing on the idiots one-upping you in other areas of your life. You find allies and decide to do something.
Opposing a hierarchy stimulates the good feeling of social dominance when you win. You may get hurt, of course. You may lose your top spot in the knitting club while your attention is elsewhere. If you can find a way to enjoy social dominance with less risk, it’s attractive. Cynicism is a way to do that. When you denounce “the idiots who have ruined things for all of us,” it feels like your stature rises. You may imagine yourself a cooperative person who detests conflict and only battles the strong for the sake of the weak. But it feels good.
I only battle for the sake of others.
Monkeys and apes often cooperate to overthrow their leader. But when they succeed, that cooperation dissolves in the rush to be the new big kahuna. A new hierarchy is soon established and endures until a new opposition replaces it. Human history is full of opposition movements whose cooperation disintegrates when the common adversary is toppled, and then erstwhile allies compete for dominance. We can rejoice when this happens with words instead of violence. But we don’t, because social rivalry is so frustrating.
It’s hard to imagine innocent animals striving to “get ahead.” We are taught that the urge to get ahead is caused by modern civilization, and people tend to accept this without question. But conflict over social dominance has pervaded human civilization in every historical era. People have always blamed their society. Each brain sees the world through the lens of its own life experience, and so it’s hard to see the mammal brain’s overarching fingerprint on each society. To illuminate the pattern, following is a brief review of common behaviors caused by the mammal brain’s quest for serotonin and social dominance.
The quest for a “good body” is the core of modern social rivalry. Today we associate it with eating less, but in the state of nature, food was so hard to find that a “good body” was evidence of a mate’s stamina and intelligence. Food is the key to strength in the animal world. A huge amount of foraging, chewing, and digesting is needed to survive in the state of nature. Bulking up was a rare achievement. We no longer bulk up to intimidate rivals, but our brains still connect food, status, and survival in many ways.
Animals usually follow the dominant alpha when they go out seeking food. Today, we choose leaders with the expectation that they will lead us to resources. Animal alphas control who eats what. In the human world, offering food is a way to get respect. This works even when food is abundant. Our seeking system evolved to find food. Today, it’s so easy to find food that our foraging brain needs stimulation. The quest for the best table at a local hot spot, the best fried chicken recipe, or the best bottle of Chateau Margaux triggers the feeling of successful foraging.
Sex is the reward for social dominance in the animal world. Stronger animals work hard to keep rivals away from desirable mates. “Mate guarding” happens in different ways in different species. Wolves and meerkats have an alpha pair that dominates reproduction by biting and clawing all group-mates. In female-dominated species, like bonobos and hyenas, females bite and claw each other to keep the best guys for themselves. Sexual rivalry typically consumes a lot of animals’ energy. For example, when female lemurs go into their synchronized period of hormonal receptivity, male lemurs fight until the last man is standing, and he becomes the proud father of the next generation. Male lemurs lose so much of their body weight in these conflicts that they are busy building back up the whole time females are pregnant and lactating. In the modern human world, sexual rivalry is deemed adolescent, but our conflicts often link back to mating opportunity in one way or another.
Animals get ahead by doing favors for others. An alpha baboon risks its life to defend troop-mates who just run up a tree when a lion approaches. Chimpanzees are known to babysit, share meat, defend, and groom their social allies. A mammal does not get ahead by putting itself first all the time, but putting itself last doesn’t work either. Favors are bestowed where it promotes reproductive success, though an animal is not conscious of the mechanics. The mammal brain evolved to weigh opportunities to advantage its unique individual essence.
A mammal weakens if it tries to dominate constantly; but if it submits constantly, it will weaken, too. A brain good at picking its battles has the best prospects. A primate gradually gains respect by avoiding conflicts except those it can win. This is what the mammal brain evolved to do.
A mammal’s genes only survive if its children have children. Parents teach young mammals how to get respect and thus mate and keep their genes alive. Without conscious intent, young mammals learn the status-seeking game by watching their mother. They wire themselves to assert when she asserts and hold back when she holds back. Researchers also find mamma mammals intervening in conflicts on the side of their children, and those children become better status-seekers. Each young mammal learns to avoid conflicts it will lose, but also to recognize conflicts it can win.
You may wish for a world without conflict or sexual rivalry or food temptation. You can refuse to get out of bed until a world without conflict arrives. But mammalian social rivalry has been around for millions of years, so the chance of it disappearing in your lifetime is poor. You are better off celebrating your brain’s capacity to cope with it.
Children often imagine themselves in positions of respect, like a ballerina or a superhero. Such dreams stimulate serotonin and feel good. When you were a child, you may have won an athletic event or a talent contest or a math game. You may have stolen a cookie and gotten away with it. Whatever gave you that “I’m on top” feeling wired your brain to do more of whatever made it feel good.
But happy chemicals are quickly metabolized, so your brain kept looking for more. You realized painfully that your status as a top athlete or math whiz or cookie snatcher could be lost at any time. You didn’t like the pressure to keep seeking, but it felt essential for survival.
Bad ways of seeking social dominance have existed throughout human history. Some people have dominated others in cruel ways because it felt good to them. Even people who don’t see themselves as dominant have sought respect by brawling in bars, embezzling from companies, or belittling children. Cynicism looks good if you compare it to the many bad ways of seeking dominance.
Good ways to stimulate serotonin are hard to find, so imagining greatness is very appealing. You can imagine yourself an artiste fameuse, a rescuer, or righter of wrongs. You can imagine yourself living in a place that appreciates your greatness. Seeking dominance in this way helps us stimulate serotonin without the violent conflict of our ancestors.
Many people think the primitive world was free of social hierarchy and conflict. But interviews with preindustrial people show pervasive aggression beneath the rhetoric of equality. There’s aggression among males, among females, between males and females, between adults and children, and between in-groups and out-groups. Anthropologists who document the unpleasant side of tribal life tend to be less popular than the ones who feed our longing for a happy world. But it’s useful to understand the rigid controls of tribal societies. Children learn to obey and follow. You may think they’re free because they swim naked and don’t have to wear church clothes, but the expectations imposed on them are typically more severe than the ones you grew up with. They submit to the customs and power structure of their tribe, or else.
We mammals can get on each other’s nerves. Over the centuries, we built social arrangements that manage the tension of two mammals in one space. A cocktail party full of verbal sparring is a successful arrangement because it removes violence from the quest for social position. Feelings may get hurt, but if you expect a world with no hurt feelings, your expectations are not realistic.
Many people say that money is the cause of all problems. But before there was money, hereditary hierarchies were pervasive. The chance to earn money gave people an alternative way of seeking respect. If you get upset about other people’s money, the cause is not money but your inner mammal’s longing for social dominance. Those who disdain money seek social dominance in other ways. Many people feel superior about their ethics and condemn others for being “unethical” or “insensitive.” This feel-good strategy is easily available, and when the good feeling passes, you can find fault with the ethics of others again. You don’t consider it status-seeking, but it stimulates your serotonin. Neurons connect and your brain learns to seek good feelings in this way.
No matter where you seek that one-up feeling, the world will frustrate you some of the time. Your dreams of glory may not come true. And if they do, your brain will habituate to the respect you are getting and you will need even more. When you get respect, you will worry about losing it. No matter where you are, you are a mammal. But you can use your knowledge of the mammal brain to wire yourself to feel good in the world you actually live in.
Animals create status without formal structures or conscious intent. It emerges organically from individual efforts to stimulate serotonin. In this chapter, you’ve learned: