At a rally recently Trump called himself and his associates alpha males, and they played the song, It’s a Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World.
From the Nested Pathway perspective, this is exactly what went wrong with the world.
In our ancestral context, small-band hunter-gatherer civilization, big egos are not tolerated. The successful hunter, if the various ways of masking who gets credit for hunting success are not in play, is teased relentlessly, on and on, about how small the animal is, until he breaks into laughter. When the teasers are asked why they do this, they exclaim that he would ‘become dangerous and could kill us.’
We have psychological studies that demonstrate how a sense of superiority, leads to a sense of entitlement and decreased empathy towards others. But hierarchical and conquest civilization moved communities away from this awareness. The admiration of the strong or successful man took over.
Part of this, as I’ve said before, is rooted in the undercare and traumatization of boys which freezes them in pre-human, primate instincts for domination. Male rivalry can take precedence over other values.
In our ancestral context, there is another way that alpha male tendencies are curtailed explained by anthropologist, Chris Knight. Hunter-gatherers follow the lunar cycle instead of the solar cycle which agricultural societies follow more. Women collectively made sexuality sacred for the sake of the children who needed meat for children’s big social brain development. Synchronous with one another and the lunar cycle, women’s menstruation occurred together during dark moon. They went into seclusion together with their kin. No sexual relations (sex strike) were allowed, a taboo, until non-kin men brought back meat to be given over to the women for cooking, removing bloodiness. Hunting began when moonlight returned. Then with the full moon, feasting and sexual relations were enjoyed by all. In this way inclinations to be a sneaky, privileged alpha male were sublimated into hunting, but where big egos were resisted as noted earlier.
How about the angry men of today? In earlier posts, I explained factors contributing to men’s anger, the rising misogyny, the obstacles placed before boys and men, the dishonoring and disrespecting of young boys, including child humiliation. The combination of poor infrastructure for raising a child (lack of evolved nest provision by the community, which impairs males more) solidified inattentive structures that focus on labor and power. At the same time, rationalizations and cultural narratives are created to explain the impaired human nature and the system keeping it in place.
Impaired humans have dominated world culture for some time. Hence our multiple ecological and social crises. Impaired humans have lost the thread of what it means and what it takes to be human.
Today, we have a host of alpha male billionaire rivals who seek more and more power, despite their ignorance about how children develop, how government works and how to create a lasting culture of wellness. They don’t care about those things, just power and more and more for themselves.
Trump’s plans, supported by Project 2025 and the partisans that support him, are to essentially dismantle the federal government—remove the guardrails for food, communications, trade, etc., replacing expert civil servants with (mostly ignorant) loyalists and placing most power into the hands of the presidency and cronies. Trump has an enemies list and he tried during his presidency to harm those he perceived to be against his monarchical power. His administration had personnel loyal to the U.S. Constitution who stood in the way of his worst instincts, but this time they won’t be there. The monarchical Supreme Court of today will likely not stand in the way of whatever he wishes to do. Google ‘dangers of trump presidency’ to find lists and lists of the dangers from different outlets.
If Trump wins, we will have alpha males and angry men in charge of our lives and our children’s future.
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This shift is also why & how we’ve diminished our capacity to integrate the right hemisphere’s way of bringing the sense of our connection with the wholeness of our world resulting in experiencing only parts, & thereby diminishing our compassion (which is a combination of the sympathetic connection of the right hemisphere with the capacity for empathy as a result of the left hemisphere). Another critical factor is that without input from the right hemisphere, we are unable to grasp the meaning of our experience. We have millions of people who feel the lack of meaning in their lives.
Awesome!