This somewhat rambling and not quite complete essay (1/x) explores the herd dynamics of goats and applies it to human notions of leadership and “Alpha” (males in particular). These musings, spurred by experience in the pasture, led me to examine human group dynamics and leadership in a different light.
The tendency to equate “alpha” with dominance or extroverted leadership obscures a more basic truth: alphas in nature, and in history, are not always the ones who speak the loudest or command from the front. They are the ones willing to take risks at the boundary, to remain aloof from the herd until danger calls them in. As societies grow larger and more complex, these primordial roles fracture into bureaucracies, ideologies, and symbolic politics. But selection pressures on sociobiological entities don’t just disappear because we define natural behavior as toxic masculinity, fascist ideology, or whatever. Our current hyperfixation on equality and our suspicion of deep masculinity all reflect an imbalance in how these roles are expressed today. The question is not whether leadership or protectorship is superior, but whether we can recognize their distinct functions — and recover a healthier balance between them.
Leadership vs Protectorship
In nature as well with humans (a subset of nature that is completely natural), leadership in herd animals manifests itself differently. That is, there are different types of leaders who inherit different leadership roles within the herd.
In wild horse, goat, and other herds, an alpha female consistently leads group movement to food and water. The rest of the females and the beta males generally stay with the herd and follow her lead.
In cattle, goats and other herd animals, some individuals are much quicker to approach humans, or novel objects. This is usually the alpha male, who seems to have instinctively inherited the job of checking potentially dangerous things out. Due to their ascribed curiosity, they become bolder and even more intelligent than the others who consistently hang back.
So, the alpha, who is generally the most physically dominant, does not necessarily lead the herd. He protects the herd – often from the rear or the exposed flank. Leadership in moving the herd falls to the one that others have learned to trust in finding food or avoiding danger.
Personality
Nature ascribes roles to individuals whose engagement in the world triggers behaviors – and vice versa. As is the case with almost all traits, the dna provides the initial parameters but experiences in the environment direct what gets activated, suppressed, and so on. And so, for humans as well as other animals, there are persistent personality traits that accompany the roles of leader and protector. Alpha females leaders, for example, tend to be bold, decisive, extrovert-like in movement and social cohesion. Alpha male protectors, on the other hand manifest different qualities: curiosity, risk-prone, quicker to fight than flight, and they are often less gregarious, taking on something like introvert-warrior role, staying at the margins rather than mingling. The other members of the herd might one day have to step up to become a leader or a protector. But until environmental triggers move them in this direction, they remain more passive and dependent on the leaders for cues. They also have their own distinct characteristics – as nature naturally hedges her bets – and in the same way that sex is distributed for the benefit of the herd (and population and species…) so too are other genetically given traits (i.e., some goats are from birth instinctively more cautious, while others seem to be born more curious, some are bigger and other are smaller). This makes sense within an evolutionary framework.
Leadership
We often think of alphas and leadership as being the same thing, but “even in nature” leadership is domain-specific.
The matriarch of the herd is usually not dominant in other contexts, such as interacting with potentially threatening beings and objects that are external to the herd. Her leadership is tied to the differentiated skills provided to her by nature and experience. These are usually tied to her knowledge and initiative, and not to physical dominance. Before being an alpha, she is a female – and her first job in the herd is to carry, deliver, and nurture babies. Even as the matriarch, her initiative is guided by a healthy form of risk aversion that, when possible, leaves the risk taking, interaction with external threats, and exploration of new places to the larger males on the perimeter – who have been genetically programmed to do just this.
The role of the alpha male is more about protecting the herd – at the perimeter. This makes him less concerned with the micro-decisions of the daily foraging of the herd. He seems to do his own thing. The matriarch may lead the herd back to water or to a familiar place. The other females, youngsters, and beta males generally follow her, but the alpha male does not. He hangs back and moves on when he feels like it. His biosocial role in the herd causes him to be more independent. He can afford to be aloof and independent because he can take care of himself better than anyone else in the herd. Moreover, the herd will not actually leave him too far behind, because they are feel like they need him – this instinct is programmed into their dna.
It makes sense that juveniles of both sexes follow the alpha female: they are still nursing, learning survival skills and the lay of the land, and the alpha female is the reliable risk-averse model that allows the rest to find some safety of the herd.
How this relates to humans
In personal observations of goats and in reading about other herd animals, I have noticed that female leaders guide foraging, daily movement, and cohesion while male leaders patrol boundaries, defend, and interact more directly with externals.
In humans, the same split often exists but in more complex form, especially in societies where there is a hyper division of labor. In more traditional, less atomized societies, women often historically oversaw domestic life, food distribution, care of the young, and the cohesion of kin groups. Men more often took roles of external defense, hunting, and conflict with outsiders.
The sociobiological leadership roles in herd animals are context-dependent and type-dependent. In humans, this division of roles has increasingly scaled up. Since the bronze age and likely earlier, the leader in realm of religion was not the same as the leader in war. Many seem to suppose that this difference signals a clear distinction between human culture and animal nature. But this view is mistaken. The division of labor in contemporary human societies is a catalyzed extension of leadership roles in herd animals (which is in turn an extension of division of labor amongst organs, cells, and so on).
In goats, the young ones are nurtured and learn how to survive by spending most of their time around females and risk-averse males – who in turn follow the alpha female. The same has almost always been true for humans: children largely learn subsistence, language, and culture from women (mothers, grandmothers, older sisters), while male models become more important in adolescence, as they become big and strong enough to engage in risky behaviors without threatening the survival of the herd itself. Adult males are less important to the survival of the herd, and so as they get older, it makes evolutionary sense that they engage in risky and violent behavior as they mature. This also helps eliminate the weak and dumb males so that only fitter males remain for breeding.
Many people, especially females and beta males, have expressed their concern about toxic masculinity. I suspect no one who has ever held this position has raised goats or other herd animals on pasture. As such, they fail to understand the biosocial roots of masculinity.
Alpha Male Autonomy and Aloofness
The alpha male who does his own thing and doesn’t mind if others follow him but is not concerned about equality, fairness, or group cohesiveness is found in human and nonhuman animals alike. They instinctively do their own thing until there is an external threat or some curiosity to investigate. Females, and beta males, on the other hand, are instinctively more concerned with the group dynamic. Their role is more internally focused than externally focused and, being physically weaker, their survival is more dependent on the well being of the herd.
As the sociobiological entity grows in size and complexity from small family tribal groups to nation states and the economic system becomes more complex, available roles within that system increases as well. Leadership roles fracture into hundreds of bureaucratically organized micro-domains. But if we are able to look behind the thin veil of contemporary complexity, we can see these as manifestations of a more primordial instinct that is encoded in our dna and manifest differently in this new environment.
Ideologies are created to help rationalize the changes – and these ideologies often overshoot – with the most pervasive of these in recent history being “equality.” It is common today for people to violently bristle at the notion of gendered roles in society – at the fact that men are more likely to take risks to become a leader. We say it is sexist to suggest that women are more likely to gossip and be risk averse – and we believe that sexism is a bad thing. But what we have forgotten is that these things are deeply embedded in our dna – and have been there long before we even became humans. They are far deeper than and more significant than our current faddish obsession with democracy, equality, equity, and the like.
Why are we so fixated with equality?
In Jung’s 1936 essay “Wotan”, he used the word Ergiffenheit (being seized, possessed, enraptured) to describe how it seemed to him that the German people had become so taken up with Hitler. He argued that it was Hitler who was first seized – by Wotan – and then this possession spread across Germany as Hitler served as the vehicle for the remanifestation of Odin.
I would argue that we have become possessed by the spirit of equality: an idea born of the cosmopolitanism slowly and dialectically derived from the universalism of the Roman empire.
Jung said that the Nazis were seized by Wotan. Who are we seized by today that leads us to give lip service to the obviously false ideas that everyone is equal and that men and women are essentially the same and that any differences can be ascribed to cultural biases and oppression? There really are no ancient gods of equality. The closest is probably Jesus.
I have argued elsewhere that the concept of equality became officially sanctioned policy because it was a way for rulers to gain support from hoi polloi while simultaneously castrating aristocratic nobles who might threaten the hegemon’s power. By equally enfranchising impotent peasants the aristocratic nobles lose much of their relative power and the gulf between the hegemon and “the people” expands.
Another, naturalistic way, to look at this is through the function of a feedback loop. In herd animals, the alpha female’s role is cohesion: she gets the group fed, keeps the young learning, makes sure the herd moves together. Translated into human morality, this maps to values of fairness and equality (i.e., everyone eats and no one is left behind). As more females move into positions of authority, these values become more prevalent at systems levels. In contrast, the more traditional Protector value system, which is more natural for alpha males is diminished. It seems to follow that physically weaker males with low testosterone who have been socialized by women even beyond reaching puberty are more likely to adopt equality-related values than to feel comfortable with hierarchy and aloofness. They are more likely to gossip, play in-group / out-group politics, engage in constant image management and so on. Because of their physical weakness and low testosterone, they instinctively feel like their place is in the herd rather than aloof from it while physically protecting it.
Moral and political differences in humans are extensions of sex-based roles in herd survival. Women and weaker men gravitate to fairness and inclusion (the “feeding and cohesion” ethic), while strong, confident men gravitate to independence, hierarchy, and defense (the “perimeter” ethic). For example, a 12 sample meta-study from 2019 (Peterson & Lauston, Political Psychology, 40(2)) showed “that for males, but no females, upper-body strength correlates positively with support for inequality.”
Sexual dimorphism is a natural phenomenon that occurs especially when selection pressures are strong. This is the case in humans where, on average, males have a 90% stronger upper body than females. Because humans evolved in a world wherein males were able to physically dominate females, women developed alternative strategies for navigating conflict with men, and men have taken the lead in conflict with external entities. Those strategies include building coalitions (cliques), using soft power, and appeals to being good and moral.
Alpha males often tend toward libertarianism and see themselves as being above day to day policing of morality. They concern themselves more with existential threats than with herd maintenance. Meanwhile, women are biological predisposed to attend and monitor herd dynamics. They are far more concerned about fairness and bullying and the like. The difference can also be seen in alpha males and beta males. Strong men project and value independence; weak men enforce the rules of the herd.
Again, it is not that one of these is bad and the other is good. These tendencies have evolved over millions of years and have been central to our survival. One could easily argue – as I do – that females are far more important biologically than males and by extension that their practice of social cohesion is at least as important as that of the aloof alpha male who guards the perimeter from external threats. The question is whether we have drifted out of a healthy balance.
Confusions about Alpha Males
For some reason, the common conception of the alpha male is that he is an extrovert who has a strong desire to lead the herd. I am not sure where this idea came from, but it does not seem to be true historically. Rome comes to mind first – and perhaps late Athens – when men began to rise to political power by giving speeches and persuading rather being the one who was best able to protect the herd from external threats. But given what has been said above, this form of power is actually more feminine and beta male than it is alpha male. Perhaps once the herd reaches a certain size, internal maintenance and politicking becomes more important than external defense – and beta male transactionalists (merchants, priests, legalistic bureaucrats) become more important for the system.
But maybe it has always been this way. In herds, the alpha male doesn’t necessarily have the highest status in every sense. He may even appear detached from the daily life of the group. What marks him is his independence and his willingness to stand between the herd and danger. But as the herd becomes larger and more heterogeneous (cosmopolitan), the internal threats come to outweigh the external threats and there is more money to be made by fleecing those within the herd than there is in protecting the herd from external threats.
As societies scale up, power tends to be captured by non-alpha types — men who succeed through networking and deal-making. This should not be understood via some sort of Hegelian like teleological evolution. As external threats grow, the instinctive desire for the perimeter defense alpha increases, as was the case with Alexander the Great, Frederick the Great, and Hitler. At other times, people prefer the Great Levelers who are Great Communicators who feel their pain and lead by having convincing the people that he is one of them and rise through party apparatuses.
We have favored the former type of leader in the West for a long time. Certainly at least since universal suffrage. And it should only take a moment of reflection to understand why that is the case.
The Disappearing Alpha
In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner wrote one of the most influential historical essays in American history when he lamented the disappearance of the American Western frontier. According to Turner, the frontier honed the American people because the could not readily rely on a centralized government or standing armies. People had to more or less fend for themselves in terms of defense against the Indians and extracting a living from the land. It was feared by many that losing the frontier would cause the US to eventually lose their identity as a people known for self-sufficiency, independence, and aloofness from centralized religion and politics.
In the last few decades, it has become fashionable to be critical of Turner’s Thesis. Below is a selection I pulled from WIkipedia:
Criticisms of the thesis include the lack of information regarding how the thesis applies to indigenous Americans, African Americans, and Women. It has been argued that the Frontier Thesis is Eurocentric and offers nothing to nonwhites. … Other scholars and contemporary individuals postulate that the equality, unity and liberty promoted by western expansion was illusory and does not account for the Chinese Exclusion Act, or the expansion of poverty and during the Gilded Age, or the spread of slavery westward and disenfranchisement of Mexican-Americans as a result of the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
As you can see, the criticisms are often that Turner focused too much on the broad American culture characterized by aloofness from petty politics, risk-taking (in hunting, land clearing, and defense) and on independence and self-sufficiency; and he did not focus enough on equality, fairness, and those who might have been left behind.
But the fact is that the American frontier consistently called for the appearance of men who exemplified the natural alpha male role. And it did so at a time when many urban elites gained prominence by coalition-building, rule enforcement, and symbolic moral authority — traits more naturally aligned with beta males.
Temporary Conclusion
I am tired and have other things to do. At some point I will return to this and tie in other aspects of human organizational dynamics …
Pagan Renaissance Farm 