What is Counter-Dominance?

On the Importance of Imagination, Empathy, Mythos, Cultural Levelling Mechanisms and Projectile Weapons in Human Evolution

Hey Gang,

Lately, I’ve been on a big anthropology kick.

In a recent piece, I announced my intention to introduce some interesting concepts I’ve come across by in my studies.

In that piece, I picked ten political terms that I think are valuable and polled my readers about whether they were familiar with them.

Those terms were Anarcho-perennialism, Ethnogenesis, Imaginary Counterpower, Schismogenesis (a.k.a. Cultural Inversion), Exodus, Counter-dominance (a.k.a. Reverse Dominance), Voluntarism, Agorism, Counter-economics, and Decolonization.

It turns out that most of my readers are unfamiliar with most of the terms, which means that I have my work cut out for me.

The first such word was ethnogenesis, which refers to how distinct human cultures emerge in the first place.

The concept of ethnogenesis has been taken up by Italian Autonomists who want to create a permanent counterculture, and who see the project of revolutionary political struggle as one of “becoming a people”.

I see this as much more intelligent and strategic than the Marxist goal of seizing state power in order to destroy it.

Given that any revolutionary political movement is necessarily also countercultural, the goal of creating a permanent counterculture seems very logical to me.

The next concept that I would like to introduce is that of counter-dominance.

Before I do, I’d like to give a big shout-out to the What is Politics? YouTube channel, which has had a major influence on my thinking over the course of the last year.

I’d particularly like to recommend the following video, which I will quote from at length in this post.

What is Politics? is an absolutely amazing YouTube channel, and its host Scrotes is honestly one of the most brilliant political theorists that I’ve encountered in recent years.

The mission of Nevermore Media is to engage is a process of political reorientation, which involves a return to first principles. Scrotes has also been engaged in exactly such a project, and in many ways we have come to similar conclusions.

Because he gives his name only as Scrotes (or “Scrote’n’Tote” when he’s trying to sell you a scrotum-shaped backpack), I’ll refer to him as Dr. Scrotes or Professor Scrotes to let you know that I regard this guy as no ordinary scrotum-toting huckster, but as a bona fide super-genius extremely deserving of your attention.

Seriously, welcome to 2023. One of the top political thinkers on the internet calls himself Scrotes and includes this photo on the About Me section of his website. Awesome.

Anyway, I don’t know a lot about this guy, other than that he lives in Montreal, he’s really into political anthropology and he’s just fucking brilliant.

If you’ve never heard of Dr. Scrotes before, I guess I’ll suggest starting here:

After that, I would recommend watching all of his political anthropology videos, starting with his critiques of David Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything, which I’ll be drawing on heavily in coming weeks.

If you have read The Dawn of Everything, or are planning on reading it, I would highly recommend also watching Professor Scrotes’s critiques, because the book unfortunately does contain a lot of errors, omissions, and bad theory.

Anyway, one of the most useful things that I have gotten from Dr. Scrotes is the idea of counter-dominance, which is an EXTREMELY IMPORTANT concept in understanding not only human behaviour, but the behaviour of other species as well.

Seriously, this concept is basically key to understanding anarchism, and I think anarchists do understand the concept, but I have not seen actual term used in anarchist theory ever.

Now, I am a big believer that language alters our perception, and I think that this concept is somewhat of a linguistic breakthrough.

Having a word to describe this concept will make it MUCH EASIER to explain anarchist ideas to skeptics.

I really hope that the term counter-dominance catches on, because I think that it would make anarchism much more intuitive to people who conceive of politics as essentially a matter of problem-solving.

I would also like to tip my hat to you, Professor Scrotes, for producing such brilliant work over the course of the past few years.

You are doing a valuable service to humanity and I look forward to seeing what you come up with in coming years. For what it’s worth, I recognize you as one of the leading political theorists on the planet right now.

Keep up the great work!

WHAT IS COUNTER-DOMINANCE?

Statists believe that human beings need to be controlled for their own good.

Anarchists do not, reasoning that human beings have lived in stateless societies for over 99% of our existence as a species, and that nature provided us with the instincts that we need to cooperate, survive and thrive.

Statists believe that human beings are nasty and brutish creatures and that life in a state of nature is characterized by a constant “war of all against all”.

Anarchists believe in spontaneous order, whereas statists believe in centralized control.

What this all boils down to is a question of whether you think that humans are essentially driven by selfish urges or by altruistic ones.

As Graeber and Wengrow write in The Dawn of Everything:

It is basically a theological debate. Essentially the question is: are humans innately good or innately evil? But if you think about it, the question, framed in these terms, makes very little sense. ‘Good’ and ‘evil’ are purely human concepts. It would never occur to anyone to argue about whether a fish, or a tree, were good or evil, because ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are concepts humans made up in order to compare ourselves with one another.

Personally, I find this debate is quite annoying, because I happen to believe that human beings have free will and are able to choose to do good or to do evil.

The question of how to create a better world is largely a matter of creating a culture which encourages individuals to do good. It’s worth repeating that only individuals are capable of moral actions, because only individuals are possessed of free will and therefore capable of conscious choice.

Because I believe that human beings are born with consciences, I believe that human beings can indeed agree on universal moral principles of right and wrong.

The basis for this is moral reasoning, which is based in two things: imagination and empathy.

Because I can imagine my own pain if my house was burned down, I can imagine the pain that my neighbour would experience if I were to burn down his house. Because I have empathy for him, I won’t want to cause him that pain. Therefore, I’m not going to burn down his house.

Therefore, both imagination and empathy are key to moral reasoning. The role of a culture's mythology should be to stimulate the imagination of children so that they have a mental reservoir of different situations they might experience in their lives, which in turn tell them give them some clues about what behaviour is socially desired.

Anarchists believe that most human beings naturally will naturally adapt themselves to the group they are a part of, but that human beings are not a tabula rasa, or blank slate, which transhumanists, Marxists, and behaviourists seemingly want to believe.

I personally believe that human psychology is largely a matter of “Monkey See, Monkey Do”. Basically, human children learn by copying the actions of others. This means that individual members of a given society will be, on average, about as good as that society. Some will be better, and some will be worse, but most people will accept and reflect the values of the culture that they are born into. The question of creating a better society is therefore a matter of changing the culture of that society.

Human beings are programmable, to an extent, but there are limits. We are social creatures, for instance, and human infants are hard-wired to bond to a mother. The bond between mother and infant then forms the basis of all other social relations.

Although anarchists are often portrayed as romantics and idealists, we maintain that that human nature predisposes us towards cooperation with others for very logical reasons - survival, group cohesion, fun, pleasure, and comfort.

Most people dislike conflict, and therefore wish to get along with their friends, family, neighbours, and coworkers for the simple reason that life is more pleasant that way.

This is so obvious to me that I struggle to articulate it. Imagine yourself at a party where everyone’s having fun. Now imagine yourself at a party where everyone is tense and anxious. Where would you rather be?

As David Graeber put in his classic essay Are You an Anarchist? The Answer may Surprise You!:

Many people seem to think that anarchists are proponents of violence, chaos, and destruction, that they are against all forms of order and organization, or that they are crazed nihilists who just want to blow everything up.

In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion. But it’s one that the rich and powerful have always found extremely dangerous.

At their very simplest, anarchist beliefs turn on to two elementary assumptions. The first is that human beings are, under ordinary circumstances, about as reasonable and decent as they are allowed to be, and can organize themselves and their communities without needing to be told how. The second is that power corrupts.

Paul Cudenec, writing in his classic essay What is (Real) Anarchism?, put it simply:

If you believe that humans are naturally selfish, greedy and violent, then you will argue that they need the structure of a state to control them.

But what if you believe that humans have a natural tendency for co-operation rather than for competition, for mutual aid rather than for mutual robbery?

This is the anarchist point of view, most famously set out by the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin in his 1902 masterpiece Mutual Aid.

It is worth noting that Kropotkin, who was a scientist, wrote Mutual Aid in response to eugenicists, who interpreted Darwin’s Theory of Evolution as proof that nature really was a battle of war against all, and that science had at last proven that Might does indeed make Right.

“Not so fast,” said Kropotkin. Sure, humans have competitive urges, he argued, but humans are social creatures and survival is not merely an individual matter, not a social one. He pointed out that people also have deeply-ingrained instincts to cooperate.

Indeed, human cultures are also subject to evolutionary pressures. If an arctic people failed to adequately for the Winter, for instance, they would die. Arguably, nature does not select just for genes, but for cultural traits.

You aren’t likely to hear this from academics, but the anarchists won the debate. Contemporary anthropologists regard Kropotkin’s findings as received wisdom, whereas eugenics today is seen as pseudo-science. Evolutionary theorists even created the field of sociobiology in order to investigate Kropotkin’s claims.

Despite this, mainstream political science continues to basically hold the Hobbesian view that nature is a state of war of all against all, and this assumption tends to be regarded as the ground of political reality, meaning that all people who do not accept its premise tend not to be taken seriously.

The exception, perhaps, is amongst those who have a non-Western worldview. In India, for instance, Mohatma Gandhi was able to inspire millions with an ideology that was very anarchistic. Anarchism is also much more resonant with certain cultures than others.

As Cudenec explains:

This difference between the statist and anarchist outlooks is fundamental. It is the point where anarchism diverges from all other political philosophies. So it is crucial to understand why Kropotkin and other anarchists have this particular view of human nature. Kropotkin made it quite clear in Mutual Aid, and elsewhere, that it is not just human nature he is describing. All animals show the same tendency to co-operate, simply because it makes sense. That is how species, including the human species, survive and flourish – by working together and looking out for each others’ interests. He makes it clear that this is only a tendency he is describing. There are plenty of instances of competition in nature, as well in human society. Anarchists do not suggest that a future anarchist society would never involve any conflict between individuals or groups. But the overall pattern remains one of co-operation.

Okay, great, you’re thinking. So if we’re naturally geared towards cooperation, then why is there constant conflict in the world? Why aren’t we chilling like Smurfs in the primeval smurf village then?

The anarchist position is that the state, by usurping the rights of individuals, deliberately creates situations in which individuals are dependent among bureaucratic institutions.

This is crucial, so I’ll say it again - THE STATE DELIBERATELY TURNS ITS SUBJECTS INTO DEPENDENTS. Think about that next time you’re waiting in line at the welfare office.

Most people are understandably reluctant to bite the hand that feeds them, not to mention pissing off armed goons.

Paul Cudenec explains:

For most people today, the existence of a state is accepted as something necessary for the general welfare of humanity. But what does the state represent for anarchists? If human society naturally functions well on its own, and then something comes along which interferes with that natural functioning, then that thing is a problem. Yes, the state is unnecessary, but it’s even worse than that. It is actually stopping us from living how we should be living. The state is a positive menace to human well-being.

Comparisons are sometimes made between anarchism and the ancient Chinese philosophy of Taoism.

Taoism describes a natural flow to the world which can be blocked and disrupted by any attempts to control it, even well-meaning ones.

For those who see anarchy as being a natural and desirable condition of humankind, all kinds of authority are regarded as both unnatural and undesirable. This is the basis of the anarchist position. While those in power regard anarchists as wanting to turn their world upside down, anarchists regard the current world as already being upside down and want to put it back the right way again, how it’s meant to be.

“All this is kind and good”, you may be thinking, “but I’m pretty sure that some people are just fucking assholes and will attempt to seize control of a given group in order to dominate it.”

Ah, good point. You’re not wrong.

The truth is that anarchist theory is actually kind of quiet on this subject, because anarchists don’t generally want to admit that violence would exist in an anarchist society, at least as a solution to certain kinds of problem.

Anarchist societies tend to deal with the problem of dominance through something called counter-dominance or “reverse dominance”.

Counter-dominance consists of cultural level mechanisms, which are meant to discourage people from becoming bullies, as well as exile and murder.

Basically, in anarchist societies, when someone starts causing problems, it is the responsibility of people to come together and do something about it.

THE CULTURE OF EGALITARIAN SOCIETIES PRODUCES EGALITARIANISM THROUGH ENCOURAGING CERTAIN TYPES OF BEHAVIOUR AND DISCOURAGING OTHERS

Anarchists do not deny that human beings are prone to antisocial behaviour, which, left unchecked, could lead to dominance hierarchies, war, slavery, oppression, and statecraft.

It’s self-evident that humans often behave selfishly, and egalitarian societies often have complex cultural levelling mechanisms in deal with such problems.

Dr. Scrotes notes:

The fact that these sorts of mechanisms exist in the first place suggests that dominance behaviour is a potential problem, that there is a human tendency to dominate which must be countered with culture. 

And that’s what much of culture is – finding ways to counter disruptive impulses, and to encourage ones that maintain the smooth continuity of the existing social order.

Scrotes gives an example of one such levelling mechanism that is so good that I’m going to quote it at length. Feel free to skip ahead if you want, but you’ll be missing out if you do!

Anthropologist Richard Lee famously discovered one of these mechanisms when he tried to impress the band of kalihari ju hoansi that he had been living with by buying them what he thought would be an amazing present: a seemingly enormous giant meat ox to be shared and eaten at an upcoming Christmas feast.

But to his shock when he showed off the ox to his hosts, instead of them thanking him for it, everyone in the band took turns insulting it, making jokes about it and laughing at him and his failure of a gift.  One woman exclaimed “Do you expect us to eat that bag of bones?  What did you expect us to eat off it, the horns?”.  

Later on, a young man sat him down one on one and asked him “Are you too blind to tell the difference between a proper cow and an old wreck?”.  And another time an old man came up to him and asked him angrily “Do you honestly think you can serve meat like that to people and avoid a fight? With such a small quantity of meat to distribute, how can you give everybody a fair share?”  

Lee realized this could be a big problem as he’d seen very tense moments and occasional arguments break out over meat distribution before, especially when there wasn’t enough to go around to everyone’s satisfaction. 

Over the course of the next few days Lee dealt with incessant interventions like this,  people telling him he got ripped off, people complaining out loud that the feast was ruined because of him, that people will be fighting for the scraps, that no one will have enough energy to dance, and that everyone will go to bed hungry.  

But Lee was confused – this was a really huge ass meat ox, how could everyone be so dissatisfied with it?  One of his informants, an excellent hunter Tomazo explained to him that although the ox was big, what Bushmen really love is fat, and that most of the size of that ox was just giant bones, and that he should have bought a smaller fatter ox, but that now it was too late and they would just have to make due with ox soup.  

All of this made Lee feel like he had screwed up so badly that it might be a good idea for him to just leave the camp permanently and start over somewhere else. 

But then, when they finally slaughtered and started cutting the animal, Lee saw that contrary to what everyone had been telling him, the ox was actually full of layers and layers of fat.  

When he frantically tried to point this out to one of the band, the man yelled back at him “you call that fat? This wreck is thin, sick, dead!” after which he busted out laughing, as did everyone else, like literal rolling around on the ground laughing. 

Lee stood there totally confused as the hunters whose faces seemed totally delighted and who were packing up huge pieces of meat with big satisfied smiles on their faces, were all the while were commenting about how scrawny and useless the meat was and how bad Lee’s judgment was. 

A few days later he finally worked up the guts to ask some of his more trusted informants what the hell was going on, and he was told that the way that he had proudly announced his gift to everyone was considered to be an extremely arrogant faux pas, and they were responding in the appropriate manner by taking him down a few notches and putting him in his place.  

He was then educated on the socially appropriate way that a good hunter is supposed to announce a big kill – basically by apologizing for having done a really bad job – and on how the ju hoansi constantly tease eachother and take eachother down in this way, in order to keep everyone level headed.  

As Tomazo the skilled young hunter put it to him “when a young man kills much meat he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can’t accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle.”

And when Lee irately asked him why he hadn’t told him this before, Tomazo replied “you never asked me!”

Oh man, how great was that? Can you imagine? I doubt that anyone reading this will ever be as confused in their entire lives as Lee must have been that Christmas. I love it!

Anyway, that’s one example of a cultural levelling mechanism, but there are countless.

The Wet’suwet’en, for instance, practice something called a “shame feast”, in which someone who has done something shameful is forced to pay for a feast in order to regain their status in the feast hall.

In addition to these cultural levelling mechanism, there is also violence.

In many societies, the traditional way to do with someone who is always causing problems is to kill them.

I don’t think that we are losing very much if we admit that anarchist societies are unlikely to be completely violence-free. After all, what society doesn’t involve some degree of violence?

As Dr. Scrotes puts it:

If someone really gets out of hand and starts doing things that disrupts the harmony of band life or just pisses anyone off beyond a certain point, the disruptive person can be  relatively easily murdered thanks to the existence and ubiquity of lethal weapons and poisons available to men and women alike. 

Even the skinniest scrawniest person can kill the biggest most belligerent maniac from a safe distance with a spear, or an arrow or a poisoned dart. 

According to David Graeber, in highland Madagascar, it was customary to approach a bully’s parents and request their permission to kill their son, which would apparently be granted if the offender’s crimes were serious enough.

Even the famously peaceful Kalahari bushmen do apparently kill people who get too far out of line.

According to Scrotes:

[W]hen we look at immediate return hunter gatherers today, we still see this exact same dynamic at work.  Men who are aggressive, domineering, and who repeatedly cause too many fights and too much disruption will sometimes get murdered by an enemy, or their relatives will passively fail to defend them when they’re ambushed by their enemies, or else in extreme cases they will suffer capital punishment at the hands of the entire community.

Richard Lee describes a rare occurrence where the entire community ambushed and killed a disruptive three-time murderer in broad daylight.

“As he lay dying, all the men fired at him with poisoned arrows until … he looked like a porcupine.” Then, after he was dead, all the women as well as the men approached his body and stabbed him with spears, symbolically sharing the responsibility for his death.

It’s interesting to me that we also see a cultural levelling mechanism at work here - presumably the reason that everyone participates in the murder is to prevent the possibility of a blood feud.

Anyway, this is of what I call Counter-dominance, but which anthropologists also call reverse dominance.

If you don’t like the idea of egalitarianism, by the way, you could also call indigenous societies without obvious hierarchies as “reverse dominance hierarchies”. For some reason, some people seem to dislike the very idea that human societies could be egalitarian, even in the face of overwhelming evidence.

It even turns out that counter-dominance plays a major part in the evolution of the human species.

THE IMPORTANCE OF PROJECTILE WEAPONS IN HUMAN EVOLUTION

Here’s where things get really interesting, and I’ve got to give a big shout-out to his His Eminence Lord Scrotes, because I have to admit that I was totally ignorant of this.

After talking about cultural levelling mechanisms, Dr. Scrotes goes on to note the importance of murder in counter-dominance, pointing out that:

If someone really gets out of hand and starts doing things that disrupts the harmony of band life or just pisses anyone off beyond a certain point, the disruptive person can be  relatively easily murdered thanks to the existence and ubiquity of lethal weapons and poisons available to men and women alike.  Even the skinniest scrawniest person can kill the biggest most belligerent maniac from a safe distance with a spear, or an arrow or a poisoned dart. 

It even turns out that the invention of projectile weapons had a huge influence on human evolution!

After all, amongst chimpanzees and gorillas, dominance hierarchies really do exist, and alpha males do basically rule through brute force.

Apparently, our distant ancestors probably did likewise, up until the point where projectile weapons changed the name of the game!

According to anthropologists, once our homo ancestors developed some of these kinds of weapons starting with either homo erectus or homo habilis as far back as 2 million years ago, obnoxious alpha bullies would slowly get killed off on a regular basis, thereby weeding out aggressive physical and behavioural dominance traits that previously made alpha male chads the cock of the walk and which made social dominance hierarchy the order of the day. 

And we can see the results of this in clearly in the archaeological record in the evolution of male bodies.  You can think of evolution as an ongoing sculpture session with the grim reaper as the sculptor and his scythe of death as the chisel, and successive generations as his material.

Around the time that projectile weapons develop, all of the traits that make macho man chad alpha bullies successful in great apes and other animals – like giant canines to scare off or attack competitors, thick brow ridges to protect your face from blows from your competitors fists, large male body size vs the size of females to help you fight off male sex competitors – these traits start phasing out continually until we get to our modern form with our tiny weak girly canines, and wimpy pee wee-herman brow ridges and pathetic 15% larger males than females on average compared to over 50% larger male to female size of our real man chad gorilla and orangutan cousin kings.  

Basically the alpha bullies repeatedly got killed off by their peers and those traits got progressively weeded out until we reached our current form 300,000 years ago or so.  

Wow! I didn’t know that! Did you?

Dr. Scrotes goes on to note:

[W]hen we look at immediate return hunter gatherers today, we still see this exact same dynamic at work.  Men who are aggressive, domineering, and who repeatedly cause too many fights and too much disruption will sometimes get murdered by an enemy, or their relatives will passively fail to defend them when they’re ambushed by their enemies, or else in extreme cases they will suffer capital punishment at the hands of the entire community.

There you have it, folks. Counter-dominance.

Personally, I think that this concept is absolutely key to understanding politics, whether you’re an anarchist or not. Liberals and conservatives should be able to agree that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and that politics is largely a matter of preventing too much power from accumulating in too few hands. In other words, counter-dominance.

The U.S. constitution, which was partly inspired by the Haudenosaunee constitution, which is known as the Great Law of Peace, aims to prevent tyranny by breaking power up into three branches - legislative, judicial, and executive - with a series of “checks and balances”. This might be thought of as a form of institutional counter-dominance.

What anarchist propose is counter-dominance as a practice of daily life at every level of society.

Personally, I believe that leadership is a natural feature of human social behaviour, and that people who think that anarchists shouldn’t have leaders simply doesn’t understand anarchism. Leaders and rulers are not the same thing.

A leader need not dominate his or her followers, but there is always a risk that a leader starts acting in ways that are contrary to the wishes of the group they are leading.

In such cases, people must stand up for themselves, refusing the authority of their leader and collectively asserting their right to refuse to be led.

There you have it, folks - counter-dominance.

It’s a very simple concept, but a very useful one. I really think that this term will make explaining anarchism much easier! I’m really hoping that it catches on.

If you agree with me, please spread the word!

And STAY TUNED! SOON I’M GOING TO GET AROUND TO EXPLAINING DAVID GRAEBER’S THEORY OF IMAGINARY COUNTERPOWER!!!