Another Mammalian-Brain Contribution: Privilege hierarchies
We have yet another set of difficulties contributing to dysfunctional power that appears to arise from mammalian brain functions. To illustrate this, imagine you live in an ancient society and you have had an amazing harvest. You’ve got a lot of extra food. Who do you give the extra food to? Most people will start off saying, “to the most needy.” But then I say, "There are a lot of needy and only enough extra for some"—how do you decide which ones of the needy you’ll give your surplus to? Do you give it to your sister or a distant cousin three villages over? Let’s say you’ve taken care of your own immediate family—who gets some next? Your childhood friend and her 2 children or that family three villages over with the 8 children? Let’s say you’ve taken care of your village but there's still a little left over—do you give it to that other tribe with their funny ways, who usually eat different food anyway? Or do you give it to that distant village that is in your tribe and has similar ways?
The point of this exercise is to illustrate what appears to be a universal tendency to create privilege hierarchies. We find it very easy to develop what I call circles of care—people for whom we feel an obligation to give care and, by implication, those for whom we don’t. We humans (and other mammals) quite readily form perceptions of an “Us” group and a “Them” group. These groups are usually based on genetic ties, sometimes signaled by those who look and act more like us. Our Us group will receive extra help and resources from us just because they are in our group--they don’t have to do anything to earn it. This is a privilege hierarchy.
“Privilege” is defined here as “increased access to resources which is unearned and for which one is not held accountable.” In other words, I give you some of my surplus just because you’re in my “Us” group and I don’t ask you any questions about what you do with it—it is yours to do with as you please. No moral standards are placed on you. If I gave it to you, you can eat it all yourself, you can share with your best friend, you can use it to bargain for something else you want, whatever you please. Once a particular group controls the access to resources needed for survival, we have a group identity-based privilege hierarchy.[1]
In the U.S., the statuses that are over-privileged are easy to see when we consider what types of people are likely to hold the highest positions of power. Generally speaking, in the U.S., being male, white, wealthy, Christian, able-bodied, heterosexual, married, “attractive”, in “prime adult” years (generally 25-55), U.S. born, and having English as your first language infer privilege. The under-privileged include: women, people of color, poor, non-Christian, those with disabilities, LGBT individuals, nonmarried, “unattractive”, the young or the elderly, immigrants, and those whose first language was not English. (Barack Obama’s election as President of the United States shows us our privilege hierarchy is loosening somewhat. On the other hand, though he is underprivileged in racial/ethnic status, Obama held privilege in other ways. Also, in my opinion, he exercises some of the functional power practices I promote in this article, and functional power practices do confer immunity against privilege-based power dynamics, as I will discuss in later sections.)
Clearly we all hold various statuses—some that carry privilege and some that do not. Each interaction with another is imbued with very specific privilege-based power dynamics. Each of us is affected by these privilege dynamics and each of us is vulnerable to the dysfunctional power practices that come with the privileged or underprivileged position. I address dysfunctional power practices that come with privilege-based dynamics in the next section.
The Dominance Paradigm
Although privilege hierarchies are ugly, they are not, by themselves, the major problem in terms of dysfunctional power. It is when they are combined with the aggression Threat Response that the most damage occurs. As a person with a stockpile of extra food, what do you do when someone wants the food but he or she isn’t someone to whom you want to give it? That person might try to sneak in and take some or bust through your guards and take some by force--what might you do to protect your surplus? Generally, the tactics used in such a situation include various forms of direct physical, verbal or coercive manipulation aggression. Aggression added to privilege hierarchies creates the Dominance Paradigm.
At this point in my description of the Dominance Paradigm, someone will usually say, “But what other choice would you have but to protect by force if someone is after what’s yours?” I offer as an alternative the mindset of some indigenous peoples that all the harvest or food belongs to the entire community and is not in the control of any given subset. When we expand our circle of care to the whole community, there is no longer an issue of protecting surplus; the issue becomes how to distribute the community’s resources equitably.
The Dominance Paradigm is inherently and fundamentally dysfunctional and yet it is the reigning power paradigm—probably of all time and nearly all cultures. We can see the natural forces at work in our neurophysiology that gave rise to it and even what sustains it. But the Dominance Paradigm is ineffective and quite damaging for all, so we need an alternative. Our alternative will come from a deep understanding of the Dominance Paradigm and then developing power practices that are antithetical to those of the Dominance Paradigm.
To understand what I mean by the dysfunctional power practices of the Dominance Paradigm, we need to look more deeply into what it means to hold a particular status as overprivileged or underprivileged. Consider the statuses you hold that place you in the privileged group—which I will now call the Dominant group. What is life like for the wealthy white man for example? In workshops, when I ask this question, people respond with comments like these: “Life is easier on top,” “Things go your way,” “You don’t have to worry where your next meal is coming from,” “People treat you like you are important.” Then they will think a little more and say, “lonely,” “competitive,” “arrogant,” “not trusting because you don’t know who is after what you’ve got,” “kind of paranoid because you don’t know for sure what anyone’s motives are,” “not very aware of how you really impact people because few people are really going to tell you the truth,” and others.
Now consider the statuses you hold that would lead to underprivilege in U.S. culture--what I will now call the Oppressed group. What is life like from the Oppressed perspective? Workshop participants answer with comments like these: “You have to work harder than other people for the same things,” “Nothing comes easy,” “You learn to pull together with others in your group,” “It’s scary and depressing,” “It’s unfair.”
If we go on to consider what tactics and strategies people use to get their needs met in the Dominance Paradigm, we see tactics of aggression used to keep the Dominant status. The aggression might be direct, such as a highly privileged nation waging war on another nation that isn’t cooperating with the wishes of the privileged nation, or a husband/father using violence to gain compliance from his wife and children. The aggression might be coercive manipulation, such as a company’s leaders using workers’ need to earn money to survive as leverage to get them to accept dangerous working conditions in a town with few jobs; or, coercive manipulation as it shows up in the husband who won’t give money for groceries to the mother of his children unless she has sex with him that morning when she has already told him she doesn’t want to.
If we look at the strategies of Oppressed people for dealing with this state of things, we might see direct aggression rebellion. The teenager yells back or hits back when the parent attempts to use aggression to maintain dominance. The workers in the company riot in protest of their exploitation and attack managers. The underprivileged nation engages in terrorism against the privileged nation. In other cases, we see indirect rebellion in a variety of manifestations. The dominated teenager becomes a very good liar, avoiding challenge by telling his parents what they want to hear and behaving inauthentically with them. The exploited workers help each other steal from the plant or manipulate the time clock so they get paid for hours they don’t work. The underprivileged nation publicly befriends the overprivileged nation while working behind the scenes to undermine its economy.
The most common indirect rebellion strategy could generically be called “passing.” In this strategy, the Oppressed changes his or her appearance in various ways to look more like the Dominant, as a way to gain access to resources. If white people get the job more frequently than people of color, a person of color might try to look, speak, and act as much like white people as possible when applying. If men usually get the promotion, a woman might try to dress and act as much like a man as possible. If the prime-years adults usually get the pay raise, a candidate might dye the gray out of her hair. If the U.S. is the most privileged nation, another nation might mimic the U.S. as much as possible to avoid aggression and receive favor.
In still other cases with the Oppressed, we see submission as a strategy for getting needs met. If I believe that the natural order of things is that men should dominate women, then I might try to play my feminine role, as defined by the men in my life, as well as I can. If I believe U.S. Americans rightfully earned its powerful place in the world, as the leader of another country, I might yield to exploitive demands and in other ways work to serve the interest of the U.S. If I believe parents know best and have complete rights to raise their children as they wish, as a teenager of dominating parents, I might live by their rules until I become a self-supporting adult, and possibly continue even past adulthood to submit to their will. If I am a worker who believes the owners of the company are rightfully superior to me, I might offer my labor as a commodity to be valued at whatever the owners choose and accept that wage without protest, while maintaining company loyalty.
Finally, another strategy common among the Oppressed is avoidance and numbing. If I can’t fight the Dominant and win, if I can’t pass or otherwise find a way to manipulate the Dominant, if I have no commodity valuable enough to the Dominant group, I might find it difficult to get my needs met and to cope. I might find it most manageable not to be aware of my plight. So I might engage in various methods to stay unaware or tune out. I might try to remove myself as much as possible, through isolating geographically or withdrawing interpersonally. I might even use alcohol, drugs, food, gambling or anything else that helps me to be less aware and numb.
All these strategies—the aggression, both direct and indirect, of the Dominant and the Oppressed, the submission and the avoidance of the Oppressed--correspond to the repertoire of the reptilian and mammalian Threat Responses. The strategies of both the Dominant and the Oppressed who operate within the Dominance Paradigm are parallel to fighting, running, freezing, shutting down, or placating. Just as with the Threat Response programs, these strategies for living in the Dominance Paradigm are ineffective attempts to be powerful. In actuality, these strategies all maintain the Dominance Paradigm and they all lead to psychological symptoms and interpersonal dysfunction. They do not apply to every individual (some discover functional power practices) but they do appear to be extremely common. These very common symptoms and interpersonal dysfunctions are described next.
The Dominant tend to be self-centered in terms of thinking themselves more important and worthy, but also are other-focused in other ways. They tend to believe the Oppressed are inferior to them. They see the Oppressed as the source of their troubles and the source of their fix. The Dominant become mistrusting, which renders truly intimate connections with others very difficult. Without intimate connections, their lives feel empty and lose meaning. The Dominant’s privileged statuses also lead to a failure of accurate perception of cause and effect. When others provide us with unearned access to resources; when others provide inauthentic “grooming and soothing” of our psyches and moods; when others clean up our messes such that we never even know we made them--cause and effect get distorted. Things stop adding up correctly; one and one do not equal two. When we are using aggression in our Dominance, we can even become bullies that feel like victims. We might truly not understand why those we have mistreated don't like us or trust us.
The Oppressed also tend to have inaccurate self-regard, many coming to believe they must be inferior after receiving such messages so many times. Just as often, the Oppressed think badly of the Dominant. They too are other-focused, seeing the Dominant as the source of their troubles and the source of their fix. The Oppressed also develop mistrust of the Dominant, though often find truly intimate connections with other Oppressed. The Oppressed also frequently have distortions in cause and effect, from being burdened by the consequences of the choices made by the Dominant and the extra effort it takes to get their needs met. As Oppressed, we can even become victims that feel guilty. We might try to make sense of our helplessness or relative difficulty in getting what we need by believing that if we just figure out the right choice next time, we won't be helpless anymore. In this way, we might come to feel guilty or at fault for being mistreated and underprivileged.
Both the Dominant and the Oppressed dehumanize the other. Both the Dominant and the Oppressed think of the other in blaming and shaming terms, as the source of their problems and believe that the other needs to change in order for life to get better. These shared qualities among all operating in the Dominance Paradigm give us some clues as to what the alternate paradigm for true empowerment should include.
See Part 3 for a description of the alternative, the True Power Paradigm and functional, true-power practices
[1] See J. Diamond’s (2005) book, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies, for a discussion of how certain resources and conditions created significant differences in the privilege-base among groups.
We have yet another set of difficulties contributing to dysfunctional power that appears to arise from mammalian brain functions. To illustrate this, imagine you live in an ancient society and you have had an amazing harvest. You’ve got a lot of extra food. Who do you give the extra food to? Most people will start off saying, “to the most needy.” But then I say, "There are a lot of needy and only enough extra for some"—how do you decide which ones of the needy you’ll give your surplus to? Do you give it to your sister or a distant cousin three villages over? Let’s say you’ve taken care of your own immediate family—who gets some next? Your childhood friend and her 2 children or that family three villages over with the 8 children? Let’s say you’ve taken care of your village but there's still a little left over—do you give it to that other tribe with their funny ways, who usually eat different food anyway? Or do you give it to that distant village that is in your tribe and has similar ways?
The point of this exercise is to illustrate what appears to be a universal tendency to create privilege hierarchies. We find it very easy to develop what I call circles of care—people for whom we feel an obligation to give care and, by implication, those for whom we don’t. We humans (and other mammals) quite readily form perceptions of an “Us” group and a “Them” group. These groups are usually based on genetic ties, sometimes signaled by those who look and act more like us. Our Us group will receive extra help and resources from us just because they are in our group--they don’t have to do anything to earn it. This is a privilege hierarchy.
“Privilege” is defined here as “increased access to resources which is unearned and for which one is not held accountable.” In other words, I give you some of my surplus just because you’re in my “Us” group and I don’t ask you any questions about what you do with it—it is yours to do with as you please. No moral standards are placed on you. If I gave it to you, you can eat it all yourself, you can share with your best friend, you can use it to bargain for something else you want, whatever you please. Once a particular group controls the access to resources needed for survival, we have a group identity-based privilege hierarchy.[1]
In the U.S., the statuses that are over-privileged are easy to see when we consider what types of people are likely to hold the highest positions of power. Generally speaking, in the U.S., being male, white, wealthy, Christian, able-bodied, heterosexual, married, “attractive”, in “prime adult” years (generally 25-55), U.S. born, and having English as your first language infer privilege. The under-privileged include: women, people of color, poor, non-Christian, those with disabilities, LGBT individuals, nonmarried, “unattractive”, the young or the elderly, immigrants, and those whose first language was not English. (Barack Obama’s election as President of the United States shows us our privilege hierarchy is loosening somewhat. On the other hand, though he is underprivileged in racial/ethnic status, Obama held privilege in other ways. Also, in my opinion, he exercises some of the functional power practices I promote in this article, and functional power practices do confer immunity against privilege-based power dynamics, as I will discuss in later sections.)
Clearly we all hold various statuses—some that carry privilege and some that do not. Each interaction with another is imbued with very specific privilege-based power dynamics. Each of us is affected by these privilege dynamics and each of us is vulnerable to the dysfunctional power practices that come with the privileged or underprivileged position. I address dysfunctional power practices that come with privilege-based dynamics in the next section.
The Dominance Paradigm
Although privilege hierarchies are ugly, they are not, by themselves, the major problem in terms of dysfunctional power. It is when they are combined with the aggression Threat Response that the most damage occurs. As a person with a stockpile of extra food, what do you do when someone wants the food but he or she isn’t someone to whom you want to give it? That person might try to sneak in and take some or bust through your guards and take some by force--what might you do to protect your surplus? Generally, the tactics used in such a situation include various forms of direct physical, verbal or coercive manipulation aggression. Aggression added to privilege hierarchies creates the Dominance Paradigm.
At this point in my description of the Dominance Paradigm, someone will usually say, “But what other choice would you have but to protect by force if someone is after what’s yours?” I offer as an alternative the mindset of some indigenous peoples that all the harvest or food belongs to the entire community and is not in the control of any given subset. When we expand our circle of care to the whole community, there is no longer an issue of protecting surplus; the issue becomes how to distribute the community’s resources equitably.
The Dominance Paradigm is inherently and fundamentally dysfunctional and yet it is the reigning power paradigm—probably of all time and nearly all cultures. We can see the natural forces at work in our neurophysiology that gave rise to it and even what sustains it. But the Dominance Paradigm is ineffective and quite damaging for all, so we need an alternative. Our alternative will come from a deep understanding of the Dominance Paradigm and then developing power practices that are antithetical to those of the Dominance Paradigm.
To understand what I mean by the dysfunctional power practices of the Dominance Paradigm, we need to look more deeply into what it means to hold a particular status as overprivileged or underprivileged. Consider the statuses you hold that place you in the privileged group—which I will now call the Dominant group. What is life like for the wealthy white man for example? In workshops, when I ask this question, people respond with comments like these: “Life is easier on top,” “Things go your way,” “You don’t have to worry where your next meal is coming from,” “People treat you like you are important.” Then they will think a little more and say, “lonely,” “competitive,” “arrogant,” “not trusting because you don’t know who is after what you’ve got,” “kind of paranoid because you don’t know for sure what anyone’s motives are,” “not very aware of how you really impact people because few people are really going to tell you the truth,” and others.
Now consider the statuses you hold that would lead to underprivilege in U.S. culture--what I will now call the Oppressed group. What is life like from the Oppressed perspective? Workshop participants answer with comments like these: “You have to work harder than other people for the same things,” “Nothing comes easy,” “You learn to pull together with others in your group,” “It’s scary and depressing,” “It’s unfair.”
If we go on to consider what tactics and strategies people use to get their needs met in the Dominance Paradigm, we see tactics of aggression used to keep the Dominant status. The aggression might be direct, such as a highly privileged nation waging war on another nation that isn’t cooperating with the wishes of the privileged nation, or a husband/father using violence to gain compliance from his wife and children. The aggression might be coercive manipulation, such as a company’s leaders using workers’ need to earn money to survive as leverage to get them to accept dangerous working conditions in a town with few jobs; or, coercive manipulation as it shows up in the husband who won’t give money for groceries to the mother of his children unless she has sex with him that morning when she has already told him she doesn’t want to.
If we look at the strategies of Oppressed people for dealing with this state of things, we might see direct aggression rebellion. The teenager yells back or hits back when the parent attempts to use aggression to maintain dominance. The workers in the company riot in protest of their exploitation and attack managers. The underprivileged nation engages in terrorism against the privileged nation. In other cases, we see indirect rebellion in a variety of manifestations. The dominated teenager becomes a very good liar, avoiding challenge by telling his parents what they want to hear and behaving inauthentically with them. The exploited workers help each other steal from the plant or manipulate the time clock so they get paid for hours they don’t work. The underprivileged nation publicly befriends the overprivileged nation while working behind the scenes to undermine its economy.
The most common indirect rebellion strategy could generically be called “passing.” In this strategy, the Oppressed changes his or her appearance in various ways to look more like the Dominant, as a way to gain access to resources. If white people get the job more frequently than people of color, a person of color might try to look, speak, and act as much like white people as possible when applying. If men usually get the promotion, a woman might try to dress and act as much like a man as possible. If the prime-years adults usually get the pay raise, a candidate might dye the gray out of her hair. If the U.S. is the most privileged nation, another nation might mimic the U.S. as much as possible to avoid aggression and receive favor.
In still other cases with the Oppressed, we see submission as a strategy for getting needs met. If I believe that the natural order of things is that men should dominate women, then I might try to play my feminine role, as defined by the men in my life, as well as I can. If I believe U.S. Americans rightfully earned its powerful place in the world, as the leader of another country, I might yield to exploitive demands and in other ways work to serve the interest of the U.S. If I believe parents know best and have complete rights to raise their children as they wish, as a teenager of dominating parents, I might live by their rules until I become a self-supporting adult, and possibly continue even past adulthood to submit to their will. If I am a worker who believes the owners of the company are rightfully superior to me, I might offer my labor as a commodity to be valued at whatever the owners choose and accept that wage without protest, while maintaining company loyalty.
Finally, another strategy common among the Oppressed is avoidance and numbing. If I can’t fight the Dominant and win, if I can’t pass or otherwise find a way to manipulate the Dominant, if I have no commodity valuable enough to the Dominant group, I might find it difficult to get my needs met and to cope. I might find it most manageable not to be aware of my plight. So I might engage in various methods to stay unaware or tune out. I might try to remove myself as much as possible, through isolating geographically or withdrawing interpersonally. I might even use alcohol, drugs, food, gambling or anything else that helps me to be less aware and numb.
All these strategies—the aggression, both direct and indirect, of the Dominant and the Oppressed, the submission and the avoidance of the Oppressed--correspond to the repertoire of the reptilian and mammalian Threat Responses. The strategies of both the Dominant and the Oppressed who operate within the Dominance Paradigm are parallel to fighting, running, freezing, shutting down, or placating. Just as with the Threat Response programs, these strategies for living in the Dominance Paradigm are ineffective attempts to be powerful. In actuality, these strategies all maintain the Dominance Paradigm and they all lead to psychological symptoms and interpersonal dysfunction. They do not apply to every individual (some discover functional power practices) but they do appear to be extremely common. These very common symptoms and interpersonal dysfunctions are described next.
The Dominant tend to be self-centered in terms of thinking themselves more important and worthy, but also are other-focused in other ways. They tend to believe the Oppressed are inferior to them. They see the Oppressed as the source of their troubles and the source of their fix. The Dominant become mistrusting, which renders truly intimate connections with others very difficult. Without intimate connections, their lives feel empty and lose meaning. The Dominant’s privileged statuses also lead to a failure of accurate perception of cause and effect. When others provide us with unearned access to resources; when others provide inauthentic “grooming and soothing” of our psyches and moods; when others clean up our messes such that we never even know we made them--cause and effect get distorted. Things stop adding up correctly; one and one do not equal two. When we are using aggression in our Dominance, we can even become bullies that feel like victims. We might truly not understand why those we have mistreated don't like us or trust us.
The Oppressed also tend to have inaccurate self-regard, many coming to believe they must be inferior after receiving such messages so many times. Just as often, the Oppressed think badly of the Dominant. They too are other-focused, seeing the Dominant as the source of their troubles and the source of their fix. The Oppressed also develop mistrust of the Dominant, though often find truly intimate connections with other Oppressed. The Oppressed also frequently have distortions in cause and effect, from being burdened by the consequences of the choices made by the Dominant and the extra effort it takes to get their needs met. As Oppressed, we can even become victims that feel guilty. We might try to make sense of our helplessness or relative difficulty in getting what we need by believing that if we just figure out the right choice next time, we won't be helpless anymore. In this way, we might come to feel guilty or at fault for being mistreated and underprivileged.
Both the Dominant and the Oppressed dehumanize the other. Both the Dominant and the Oppressed think of the other in blaming and shaming terms, as the source of their problems and believe that the other needs to change in order for life to get better. These shared qualities among all operating in the Dominance Paradigm give us some clues as to what the alternate paradigm for true empowerment should include.
See Part 3 for a description of the alternative, the True Power Paradigm and functional, true-power practices
[1] See J. Diamond’s (2005) book, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies, for a discussion of how certain resources and conditions created significant differences in the privilege-base among groups.
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