How to Tell If Someone Is Hitting You

A dominance hierarchy is a social structure where some people are allowed to hit you, and you're not allowed to hit back. It is defined by a sustained, institutionalized asymmetry of aggressive-submissive interactions. This skewed distribution of aggression enables a skewed distribution of resources and opportunities. Modern history has ostensibly been an epic conflict between different political ideas, but from this biological perspective, it has been awfully monolithic: mostly a conflict between dominance hierarchies that are justified with different language. Moreover, because reasoning is embodied, and subordination generates a distinct embodied state, we often have trouble seeing how coercion pervades our everyday life, or conceiving of other ways of being. 

In this episode, we see how biological parsimony is the most fundamental counter to the justifications of the state that academics and laypeople alike tend to employ: dominance hierarchies do not exist in any other species for the reasons they are claimed to exist in humans. Species occupy a wide despotic-egalitarian continuum, and this continuum is not also one of social complexity or social order. We also sketch how a robust parallelism of social formations capable of exercising violence is necessary to prevent any one of them from gaining despotic power. Relying on the same logic of fluid alliance formation and fission that states have long employed, we describe a society in which each individual is the epicenter of a unique configuration of armed force, each of which must act as a counter-power to every other.