🎓 Excellence vs. egalitarianism in human societies

How gossip and murder were critical to the domestication of Homo sapiens sapiens, but can interfere with civilization.

In Time Enough for Love, Robert Heinlein wrote, “Freedom begins when you tell Mrs. Grundy¹ to go fly a kite.”

Rejecting societal norms to assert personal liberty is in many ways the essence of freedom, and from what I can tell Heinlein leaned toward libertarian philosophy and politics, at least later in life. There's an open question about whether freedom is the ultimate value for people living in a society, tho. While freedom may begin when people ignore their local priggish gossips, a maximally free society is not necessarily a maximally stable one… at least depending on your definition of freedom.

To focus on one tiny aspect of ‘giving up freedom in exchange for stability’, take ‘getting married and having kids.’ For most of human history, family ties and inter-clan social obligations offered critically important risk mitigation — which is to say, farming is unpredictable and a failure in yields means starvation, so agrarian societies in particular are shaped mostly² by the risk-mitigation strategies of small farmers. The homesteader ideal of a single, small family heading out into the wilderness alone³ — or even freer still, a single young man heading off into the woods to make his way — wasn’t really viable, which is one reason why exile could be such a harsh punishment.

It was not, of course, the harshest punishment on offer.

In his article about the distinctiveness of human aggressiveness,

Rob Henderson

reviewed The Goodness Paradox, and touches on how “early humans united to inflict penalties (including death) on impulsive and domineering members of their communities.” The self-domestication of humans — bonobos, the darling of social media as the ideal of peaceful, matriarchal primates, are way more aggressive with each other than humans — involved reducing aggression, but it also involved a lot of Mrs. Grundy wielding her power like a cudgel.

In the ancestral environment, being thought of as a bad person could get you killed. And being thought of as a good person increased the likelihood of obtaining social allies, romantic partners, social status, and access to crucial resources.

This is, thus, an article about the importance of gossip to human civilization.

Mrs. Grundy comes in many flavors

Chimpanzees use aggression to establish dominance and secure mates. That’s the nice, sanitized, anthropologist-voice version. The harsher reality is: young males chimpanzees beat female chimpanzees; females mate most often with the male who beats them most often. Their mating strategy seems optimized for lowering the likelihood of infanticide — the goal seems to be ensuring the most powerful, violent males father the offspring and are thus motivated to keep them alive.

Some women — the ones who write to serial killers in prison, or get involved with known abusers — seem attracted to violent criminals, which baffles guys like Scott Alexander, who back in his Slate Star Codex days wrote,

I had a patient, let’s call him ‘Henry’ for reasons that are to become clear, who came to hospital after being picked up for police for beating up his fifth wife.

So I asked the obvious question: “What happened to your first four wives?”

“Oh,” said the patient, “Domestic violence issues. Two of them left me. One of them I got put in jail, and she’d moved on once I got out. One I just grew tired of.”

Humans — like the dragons of Pern⁴, and the real-life lizards they seem based on — are a diverse species, with a multitude of strategies for everything from mate selection to child-rearing to diet. We are omnivorous, adaptive, and seem to have tried everything from polyandry to polyfidelity to good ole-fashioned pure monogamy. It is not that difficult to believe that if you — or, say, an elder human genetically driven to protect its relatives after being metamorphized by exposure to a virus that requires thallium oxide — put a bunch of humans on a sterile fake planet with only the bare minimum food sources necessary for survival, we would eventually start to occupy various ecological niches — herbivores, carnivores, corpse-eating ghouls, sanguophages, whatever.

How long it would take to develop into species — which is to say, genetically incompatible — is beyond the scope of my speculation, but if you don’t recognize this reference to the Pak of Larry Niven’s Known Space series, get thee to the science fiction section of a bookstore and brush up on the classics. Ringworld is fantastic, the sequel has one of the best ‘origin stories’ in all science fiction, and the fact that Niven was self-aware enough to outsource writing the Man-Kzin wars to fellow authors who actually had something insightful to say about war should be lauded.

Niven did have something insightful to say about mating, though. The various Pak descendants inhabiting the Ringworld developed the concept of rishathra, sex acts practiced outside one's own species but with an intelligent hominoid.

The point I’m trying to make here is that, as a species, we’re flexible — even leaving aside the surprisingly large chunk of the population down to copulate with animals. We’ve tried monarchy, democracy, anarchy, tyranny, oligarchy, and near as I can tell everything in between. Economic systems vary so wildly between human societies that the game theorists struggle to make predictions between cultures. Being insufficiently repressive of sexual abnormalities in many cultures is cause for scandal; in other cultures the opposite can be the case.

But the thing that fundamentally separates us from other primates seems to be the overwhelming degree to which we cooperate, and the complexity with which we cooperate.

Which is to say, language.

Words protect the weak from the strong

It is an unfortunate fact that the vast majority of human violence (including, unsurprisingly, political violence) is committed by young men. One of the things that helps control young men is older, calmer men with families to protect.

Successful hunters who are also fathers wind up with more testosterone after the hunt. This is similar to what's experienced by men who win games, sports competitions, or promotions at work. This happens even if they weren't personally involved in the sporting event or making the kill. The elevated testosterone might help reinforce the desire to hunt, but mostly this indicates that human hunting behaviors are motivated by a desire to feed one's family, rather than gaining status.

There’s a related — and really stark — phenomenon in elephants. The males in their 20s get flooded with reproductive hormones; they enter a ‘unique’ state called “musth.” They swagger, make themselves look taller, and dribble strongly smelling liquid from temporal glands on either side of their heads, and pee basically constantly. They get super aggressive, are willing to fight each other to the death, and under normal circumstances all of this is basically fine because young male elephants drop out of musth basically instantly when they run into a bigger, older male.

Trouble is, big bull males are increasingly rare in places elephants hang out, due to a combination of big bull males being harder to transport. I assume that, as with deer with big antler racks, they’re also more satisfying to poach.

Now, I am not a guy, and I would never claim to understand how adult males in any society — including my own — police and civilize the next generation. I barely understand the ways in which I personally am helping influence the teenaged girls who help me with childcare. But regardless, I found this passage fascinating:

“For the first time, coalitions of males became effective at deliberately killing any member of their social group who was prepared to use violence on his own behalf and simply did not care what others thought about him. In the end, execution was the only way to stop such a male from being a tyrant…The killing of aggressive males is an alarmingly potent form of social control and a human universal.” (— Richard Wrangham)

If a man repeatedly irritated his companions in the group with aggressive and selfish behavior, then gradually, a whispered consensus emerged against him. A conspiracy formed among the other men, and the aggressor was killed. Throughout thousands of prehistorical generations, those with a high propensity for reactive aggression were targets of execution. Killing these individuals gradually led humans to have a calmer, less overtly hostile temperament. (— Rob Henderson)

It’s the “whispered consensus” part that drew my attention, because so often in modern life whisper campaigns are criticized. Gossip is widely synonymous with bullying — and it’s generally associated with women. Mrs. Grundy does not, after all, evoke the image of a man intent on murder. But in my experience, dominant women don’t need gossip; they pretty openly display their derision. It’s the non-dominant women — and historically that may indeed have been all women — who ‘gossip’ helps, granting an opportunity to quietly challenge the dominant social narrative and build consensus against those in power.

Communication builds consensus

When you take gender and snark out of it, gossip is not so very different from ‘back-channel communication’ — something I found particularly valuable back when I was teaching. After a principal makes an announcement, teachers often test the waters by sharing their unfiltered opinions in a safer, more private context. ‘Gossipy’ conversations serve a purpose; they let teachers align, strategize, and build consensus on which new mandates make sense and which are worth pushing back on, without burning valuable political capital on things there’s no collective will to accomplish.

Gossip is, I think, fundamentally very important to human groups, whether they are small hunter-gatherer communities or the large countries.

Platforms like Twitter allow the operation of social phenomenon that I bet work in a really similar way to ancient whisper campaigns. Wikipedia lists six different ‘Twitter Revolutions,’ although the one I was thinking of as I wrote this article was the 2011 Egyptian revolution, which unseated Hosni Mubarak's presidency. Social media has played a pivotal role in political movements, enabling collective action against elite figures. This modern form of gossip mirrors how hunter-gatherer societies managed dominance and maintained stability. Entire political movements have arisen from consensus-building through complaints about dominant figures in Western society, from influential academics, appointed experts, and powerful businessmen.

The Founding Fathers of America recognized the importance of allowing ‘free speech’ and ‘freedom of assembly.’ The role of gossip and back-channel communication is enshrined into American law — these mechanisms are what enabled people to voice concerns and organize against elites — namely King George III and members of Parliament — during the American Revolution.

Egalitarian societies don’t compound wealth

The thing is, though, modern societies aren’t egalitarian. Twitter revolutions, and tax legislation aimed at knocking silicon valley down a peg, and cancel culture aside, modern western capitalism is basically the opposite of what you find in hunter-gatherer communities that go out of their way to ensure egalitarianism by belittling and mocking anyone they percieved as domineering or too successful.

And our quality of life, in terms of material wealth and health, is higher than at any other point or place in history. To the best of my knowledge, socialism and communism did not solve the allocation problems inherent to large civilization, and egalitarian impulses may be actively dragging down efforts in some cultures grow economically. Retired physician Theodore Dalrymple offers this anecdote:

The young black doctors who earned the same salary as we whites could not achieve the same standard of living for a very simple reason: they had an immense number of social obligations to fulfill. They were expected to provide for an ever expanding circle of family members (some of whom may have invested in their education) and people from their village, tribe, and province. An income that allowed a white to live like a lord because of a lack of such obligations scarcely raised a black above the level of his family. Mere equality of salary, therefore, was quite insufficient to procure for them the standard of living that they saw the whites had and that it was only human nature for them to desire—and believe themselves entitled to, on account of the superior talent that had allowed them to raise themselves above their fellows. In fact, a salary a thousand times as great would hardly have been sufficient to procure it: for their social obligations increased pari passu with their incomes.

My understanding (based on a Matt Lakeman article I can’t currently pinpoint) is that you see something really similar with business owners in many African communities, which makes it difficult for folks to start small businesses because they aren’t able to reinvest their profits. Risk is not personally rewarded when gains are allocated to the group, which works great when groups are relatively small and cooperative — as in a clan or a startup or social network bounded by speed-of-foot communication. But when the rewards become too diluted, it becomes really hard to capitalize on them.

It reminded me of my favorite example of gender-based division of labor. Although people often think of hunting as an activity for male hunter-gatherers (with females doing the gathering), Martu (part-time Aboriginal foragers from Australia's Western Desert) women do most of the monitor lizard hunting, which accounts for about a third of their diet⁵. The women spend most of their ‘foraging’ time hunting lizards. First they burn away vegetation to find the lizard dens, then dig them out of the dens and chase them into places they can't burrow. It’s a very reliable food source.

The men, by contrast, mostly hunt kangaroo, which requires traveling to a different region and are a less reliable source of food. Kangaroo are significantly more difficult to hunt — but also bigger. They provide a great deal more meat overall, but if the hunt fails, you get nothing. There’s a certain tension that comes into play when debating what the Martu should hunt — the risky strategy of kangaroo, or the lizards that provide fewer, but reliable, resources.

Having the safety net of family obligation to catch you if you fail is critical for being willing to take risks — the cooperation between resource hunters, the willingness (nay, obligation!) to share, is what has allowed humanity to gather enough resources to fuel our big brains, build our complex cities, and dream of putting members of our species on other planets.

Elon Musk is the richest man in the world, and claims there’s no satisfactory answer to solving the problem of world hunger. There’s a moral — and practical — question in whether letting men like Musk amass so much wealth is worth it for the rest of us; whether abandoning our ancestral sense of ‘share and share alike’ has gained us more than we’ve lost. But gossiping about Musk, hauling him to account for himself in front of the elders of our society, sanctioning him… it’s not the powerful tool it was once was.

In countries like Tajikistan, corrupt elites have remarkably little trouble siphoning off billions of dollars for personal gain, which depresses the economy and leaves people quite badly off — so it’s not like allowing huge amounts of social stratification is an unalloyed good.

Still, the ways in which western society might have to change in order to punish the tech elite for insufficient sharing would, I believe, have very real implications for the project of progress — which Mrs. Grundy has never been terribly fond of anyway.

Further Reading

• After I wrote and scheduled this article I stumbled across this brief review of Hierarchy in the Forest from

  Brian Chau
  — it’s more about envy than gossip per se, but deeply relevant to the questions I’m noodling on this topic. Apparently “Boehm finds compelling evidence that egalitarianism is a evolved behavior long predating modern social structures” and “proceeds to a compromise between Hobbes and Rousseau” although I’ll note that modern hunter-gatherers are not a pristine source of truth about ancient societies.

• I also stumbled across this article about strategic altruism by

  Dan Williams
  which is a much deeper dive into how “much of our social behaviour is rooted in reputation management and that the subtle incentives of reputation management explain why human altruism is both sincere and strategic.”

1. To the best of my knowledge, Heinlein novels (which I am… glad? I read too young to truly understand the weirdest bits) are the only place I’ve ever come across the term ‘Mrs. Grundy.’ Wikipedia helpfully informs me that Mrs. Grundy is a figurative name for an extremely conventional or priggish person, a personification of the tyranny of conventional propriety. The term originated in 1798 and therefore predates Queen Victoria, but “Victorian busybody” is a pretty good synonym, I think.

2. For more about how this tradeoff worked in Roman-era Gaul in particular, check out Bret Devereaux’ excellent collections focused on how to raise a tribal army in Pre-Roman Europe and how farming worked in the pre-modern world. Or, if you’d rather something a little more accessible, this deep dive analysis of the patron-client relationships underpinning Tolkien’s Shire is stupendously interesting.

3. Heinlein’s short story The Tale of the Adopted Daughter — tucked away in Time Enough for Love, here’s a decent review if you’ve never read it— is one of several examples where Heinlein idealizes this sort of thing, and while the bit where Lazarus literally marries his adopted daughter and runs off into the wilderness with her is just one more example of Heinlein’s weird hobbyhorse about how “incest is fine as long as the kids have good genes”, it’s at least less weird than the bit at the end where Heinlein marries the female clones he raises from infancy! And The Tale of the Adopted Daughter is also less weird than his other solo-homesteading advneture, Farnham’s Freehold, which… ugh just skip it, it’s probably his worst book on multiple levels.

4. If you are somehow not familiar with Anne McCaffrey’s Pern, I personally recommend starting with Dragonsdawn, which is a lovely and hopeful scifi colonization story. It manages to avoid some of the more awkward and uncomfortable elements of the books that come later in the chronology.

5. For other examples and evidence of female hunters in history, check out the research roundup I put together about hunting.