Before the Holocene, our immediate-return egalitarian ancestors lived in environments in which each person could access their material needs. People who were hungry could, on their own, climb a tree, dig up a root, or hunt an animal. For needs like safety from predators, they’d have to cooperate with others, but they had the freedom and responsibility to make those relationships work.

By contrast, living in dominance hierarchies mean that some people control access to what others need. By definition, if you have rank, you control something others need.

When we say people need jobs, we imply that if they work hard they can provide for themselves, but today, to the extent our societies are based in dominance hierarchy, that work differs from then. Then, work may have been hard, but you were free. Nobody else controlled you or what you had to do. If you didn’t gather the food or relate with someone who helped you, you’d die, so you’d work, but no one forced you to.

Today, jobs aren’t to do something for yourself or some abstract good. In a dominance hierarchy, work must please people with rank. If you have access to food, safety, education, and other resources they lack, they have to serve you.

In summary, today:

Our culture has transformed our environment from where people who lacked a resource had to work against nature to where they have to please people with rank.

The responsibility of those of us with rank

Does that change then mean people with rank take on some responsibility to make sure people who lack, say, food or shelter, who can no longer possibly create it for themselves, have some way of accessing them without serving their arbitrary whim?

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