The Lion King Debunked

There's so much "conventional wisdom" that really needs to be debunked, that I sometimes wonder if my life will be long enough to cover even half of them while producing just one article every day. Although this realization sometimes makes me tremble in despair, it also means, dear reader, that you won't get rid of me anytime soon... (imagine ominous music here ;-))

_{Image by Michael Warren - source: Pexels}

Wise men have for ages told us domination, systems of hierarchy and competition are simply "human nature". This deeply flawed narrative of the human experience has been used, and still is used to explain why we are member of the hierarchical class we find ourselves in. Jordan Peterson can rightly be called the most important modern "wise man" to perpetuate this ancient myth; Inequality and hierarchy give life its purpose, Why Hierarchies are Necessary and Competence Hierarchies Explained are just a few examples of YouTube clips where he explains how important and how natural hierarchies are. And it's all nonsense.

The way natural societies and human societies organize differ on a fundamental level. The organization of an ant-colony takes place on a natural and instinctual level, where humans organize in an institutional manner: human societies are the product of deliberate planning, they are organized with an intent, with specific goals in mind. Hierarchies in the animal kingdom live in human minds only. There is no hierarchical relationship between predator and prey, there's only a natural instinctual relationship; predators don't want to dominate, they are hungry. The prey is not oppressed, it's today's meal. When two males "fight" over the right to reproduce with a certain female, there's no actual fighting going on, but instinctual behavior that has evolved over countless generations, behavior that has proved to be successful in the specie's quest for reproduction and survival. It is us, humans, who stamp our institutional structures and hierarchies upon nature's behaviors, and that's why the Lion is labeled "King" and the ants are labeled "workers" and bees are always "busy", serving their "queen".

Our big-brained species has existed at least 200,000 years, probably longer, and only the last 12,000 years we've developed societies of more than a few hundred individuals that stay together in one place; institutionally organized human societies came into being during the Neolithic Revolution, when we discovered agriculture and started to produce more food than we needed to survive. Since then we really started to dominate nature, and since then we also started to dominate each other; with the production of surpluses, of riches, we started to develop the "cult of ownership" that has cemented the hierarchical structures of our societies. With the riches some farmers were able to create, came the need for protection of these riches through policing, and the divide between "producers" and "consumers" was born. The first city-states were modeled according to the libertarian dream of the night-watchman state, which is only concerned with the protection of the borders against external threats and the protection of personal property against internal envy. This is why it's senseless to try and separate politics from economy, or to even think that any economy, free market capitalism included, will suffice by itself to create any viable human society.

The hierarchical organization of modern society is a result of our cultural evolution, starting 12,000 years ago, not our biological evolution in which we are descendants, according to Peterson, of lobsters:

"The reason that I write about lobsters is because there's this idea that hierarchical structures are a sociological construct of the western patriarchy, and that is so untrue that it's almost unbelievable, and I use the lobster as an example."

Like I said: that's nonsense. And yes, hierarchy in human society today IS, to a great extent, a result of the western patriarchy, as it's based on the "Judeo-Christian values" you so proudly identify as being the philosophical basis for modern western thinking. The Old Testament teaches us all we need to know; we are created in the image of the one and only true God, and were given by Him "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth":

26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
_{source: Bible Gateway, Genesis 1:26-28}

The Bible is not part of our biological evolution. Yet we cannot suppress our urge to anthropomorphize everything, so we point at nature to explain our unhealthy class divisions, whether we're talking about the "pecking order" of birds or the lion as king over the animal kingdom. When we look at so called primitive societies, we see that they don't see themselves as having dominion or stewardship over the Earth and it's inhabitants, but as children of the Earth; they see themselves as they are, as being but one of the many wonderful creatures given life by this planet. Tribal societies were not yet infected with our cult of ownership, there was no concept of ownership but a deep sense of sharing, empathy and community. Peterson is exactly right when he asserts that the stories we tell each other are a great way, maybe the best way to understand humans, human society and our concepts of ethics and morality. He just misses the essence, namely that the predominant stories are only 10,000 to 15,000 years old and that they were told by the elite of those days; we know that writing was the privilege of the educated rich and religious elites only. These stories had the same goal then, as Peterson's myths have now: the protection of those elite's position at the top of the hierarchical ladder.

For a more detailed critique, one that delves into the logical fallacies and scientific inaccuracies (to put it mildly), I refer you to the short video linked below; Peterson uses the lobster in his bestselling book 12 Rules for Life, in many debates and YouTube videos to explain why hierarchies are natural... There is no lobster king, there's only Peterson's lobster myth.

_{Jordan Peterson & the Lobster}

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