Dead or in Jail

Boyhood and manhood in a (tournament or pair-bonding) society.

Billionaires - they’re everywhere these days, offering to impregnate pop stars, getting suspiciously fit, suggesting we take shallower breaths, strap computers to our faces, and they’re going to space, or at least planning to, loudly.

It’s an oversized portion of the news. I doubt the stories make anyone feel particularly good, except maybe the billionaires’ parents. But people can’t seem to look away. The reasons seem to be:

• Shit rolls downhill. These are the people whose shit we’ll have to dodge or be flattened by.

• In our advanced global civilization, it’s amazing what’s possible for people who have access to everything - spaceships, possibly elongated lifespans and Epstein Island.

• Despite our pretensions, we actually live in a tournament species and not a pair-bonding one.

Tournament vs. pair-bonding

Most animal species can be described as having children and forming families according to the dynamics of a tournament or according to pair bonding. In a tournament species, only the strongest males breed, and everyone else is out of luck. This is the case with lions and gorillas. In pair-bonding species, two individual creatures get together, have families and stay together. This is the case with singing gibbons, and most birds.

There are two quick ways to distinguish a tournament species from one that pair bonds. In tournament species, females vastly outnumber males, as the men tend to murder each other to climb the pyramid. In pair-bonding species, the populations of the sexes tend to be similar in size. In tournament species, the males tend to be physically much larger than the females, while in pair-bonding species, males and females to be similar in size.

As with any category, the lines get blurred in all kinds of unexpected ways. In a wolfpack, the strongest male and female bond for life, mostly as a way of making sure the other members of the pack don’t have any surviving children. With lions and other tournament species, murdering another male’s children is the state of play.

The king

Killing children is the unmentionable stuff of nightmares. But it is a staple activity of a usurper in a tournament species, and in courtly politics. When taking over a pride, the new lion in charge will usually slaughter the existing offspring of his predecessor.

The same is true of a new king, who must kill anyone with a plausible claim to the throne, no matter how tender their years. This awkwardness is the subject of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Among humans, this zero-sum mortal tournament is typically limited to royal succession and dysfunctional families. But it sure does take up a lot of our attention. In terms of entertainment and news, it’s at least equal to the doings of the collegial, live-and-let-live people we’d like to think we are.

Insistence on pair-bonding

The last twenty years have seen the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States. But polygamy remains illegal. It was a major concession demanded of the Mormons when Utah was admitted to the United States. It’s prosecuted actively, and still flares up as a political issue in Utah, which quietly downgraded polygamy to a misdemeanor a few years back.

Quietly is the word to note. There’s not much of a popular uprising afoot to ease the laws around polygamy. It doesn’t take much imagination to see why it’s a domestic arrangement that’s been consistently and historically suppressed in our republic.

Polygamy is the condition of a tournament species. In it, women become property to be accumulated. In it, all other men become at best disposable lieutenants, but always threats to the women that a top-echelon man has accumulated. This highly tenuous status applies to all men (aside from the eunuchs), even the boss-man’s own sons.

Disposable males

I was born a few years after a change to one of the most significant gender laws in the United States. This was, in terms of gender relations, as big as the 1919 law that gave women the right to vote. It was the end of conscription in 1973.

The government gave up its ability to take young men against their wills and send them to war. This is a major change, and its effects upon society continue to echo. When my father was drafted, society as he knew it consisted of WW2 vets, and there was no question that he’d go.

A military draft is a legal extension of a larger ethos, or archetype that extends deep into our hearts. It says women and children first to the lifeboats from a singing ship. It’s women love a man in uniform. It’s the common prediction that a lively, noncompliant teenage boy will end up dead or in jail. It’s the way that a murdered young woman can spark weeks and months of public outrage and fascination, while a murdered young man gets ten seconds on the TV news, maybe a minute if they have a good shot of the mother weeping.

After 9/11, there was tremendous grief, but also an odd sense that it was right and good that so many firefighters and police had sacrificed themselves, trying to help others. I rushed down to ground zero from midtown to help out and possibly get myself sacrificed. When I got home after midnight that day, there was a message on my answering machine from my father, telling me not to join the army, and to call him in the morning.

Unemployment numbers and being extra

Disposability is an undercurrent of life today for most adults. Becoming disposable is a constant anxiety, the source of desperate boasts of the supposedly optimized, and an unconquerable possibility over which professionals of every stripe shake their heads over drinks. There’s regular news of layoffs, and the regularly updated unemployment rolls. In the crabwalk toward a fuzzy notion of equality between the sexes, it’s the rare burden to be equally shared.

Have you been hit in the face?

As I grew older, I began to encounter something I’d never seen before - men who had never been in a fistfight. This isn’t some veiled boasting about my rough-and-tumble youth. It’s not some rich versus poor thing, but generational.

Many younger men I met had never been in a fight. And what’s more, some of them didn’t have any male friends who had ever been in a fight. This was completely new to me.

And it made me wonder about that year, 1973. Because the draft ended, men born in 1955 had vastly different personal outlook on their life chances, on what would be expected of them, and their place in American civilization than men born five years earlier, and thirty years earlier. It was less clear, but less grim.

When those men had kids in 1980s, those children would be a step farther from the notion of being disposable soldiers in the service of the nation. They might be less angry, less prone to violence.

The third option

If we’re looking to our primate cousins, the tournament and pair-bonding approaches to sex aren’t the only ones. There’s also promiscuity. Alongside the tournament hierarchies of the gorillas and the pair-bonding gibbon are the anything-goes bonobos.

Some people argue that no-strings promiscuity is just a cover for a tournament-shaped distribution of sexual opportunities, where a statistically small slice of hotties have all the sex, while the vast majority live lives of quiet frustration. Others say all’s fair in love and war.

Scapegoats and suntan oil

Sex and violence are distributed very differently in a pair-bonding society than a tournament one. But the lines are rarely so clear. Conventional pair-bonding societies have a bad reputation. They’ve been known to sublimate their tournament mentality into other regions by zealously dominating and demeaning neighboring nations, or in-country minorities.

At the same time, in deeply hierarchical scenarios throughout history, the gardener regularly finds his way into the breeches of the dutchess, and the lowly pool boy is often taken advantage of by the CEO’s wife.

Up the bracket

The problem with an untrammeled hierarchy based on power, violence and sexual attractiveness is that it’s damned exciting.

Our idle fantasies and unguarded thoughts draw us toward a tournament approach to sex, money and power. One example is the international obsession with sports, billionaires and royalty. A slightly darker example is the medium on which you read these words.

The internet was supposed to be a massive, free repository of information for a curious planet. But in the last decade, relentlessly optimized social-media design and corporate consolidation has made it into a million nested hierarchies of climbers, incessantly chasing status, attacking the status of others, signaling status, protecting status, with status meticulously tracked in real time. It is a vision of hell that we must endure to find out the weather forecast.

The fifteen percent

When I was in high school, there was a football coach who taught history. He showed the team Patton’s speech to the Third Army (“when you put your hand into a pile of goo that used to be your best friend’s face…”) before the Thanksgiving Day game against Saint Peter Marian. He was a brute who smacked players with wood broken off the bleachers and once deliberately gave me a concussion during a pickup basketball game.

I had him as a coach but never a teacher. They wouldn’t let him near the Honors students at St. Johns’. But my friend Joe did, and he told me that coach would expound on his theories about society to the class. Among his theories was the iron law that in all ages and all societies that fifteen percent of all people were irredeemable failures, and couldn’t be saved from their fates at the base of the pyramid. They had always filled the jails and the homeless shelters, and always would.

Joe got mononucleosis sophomore year, missed a month of classes, and never quite got back into the swing of that very-competitive high school. He was making other friends, too. When he departed St. John’s, Joe sought out the coach to shake his hand and say “I’m off to join the fifteen percent.” It was a fuck-you, a teenage triumph.

Fifteen years later, on Joe’s 30th birthday, some kid stole a woman’s purse at the bar where he was celebrating. Joe gave chase, trying to be a hero, to help a woman in distress. But so was another drunk, an off-duty cop. They got the purse back from the thief, then got into it over who’d done the good deed better. He shot my friend Joe dead.

Taxes

The question of whether we’re a tournament species or a pair-bonding one has to do with sex and violence, can be hard to talk about without some risk. So it finds a home in politics, which no one can shut up about.

The primary determining factor of status in the American hierarchy is money. And one great dampener that prevents a pure financial hierarchy from seizing what we still possess of our lives and liberties is democracy. One stroke of genius is the privacy of a person’s vote. That means that it might be promised, bought and sold, but never with certainty.

Taxes are another dampener, intended to fund the state, but also to protect us from an absolute financial tournament scenario. Some say the financial hierarchy needs to be dampened more than it is to protect and encourage the people lower on the pyramid, who are just trying to live tolerable lives and raise their children. Others say that the tournament of billionaires and their properties is the engine that keeps us alive, fed, entertained and motivated.

Every so often we take those positions with their streamers and bunting of rhetoric and data and emotion to the altar of the ballot box, and await the results.

Which are we?

So are we from a tournament or a pair-bonding species? This seems to be an area where we’re right on the razor’s edge. Most societies favor monogamy. But the apex hotties of either sex play the field and regularly remarry in a way that looks like a tournament species. And there’s a cross-cultural tendency to see men as disposable, and women as property.

This question of tournament or pair-bonding is one of a few deeply undecided, important questions about human beings. Others include: Are we good or evil? Are we smart or dumb? Are we doomed or destined for greatness? Are we holy or bestial? Are we self-determined or preprogrammed?

The last incredible indeterminacy applies to all the others: Is it up to us at all? It’s something we’re still discovering or deciding, together.

Selected biography

Robert Sapolsky’s secretly subversive A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons

John Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven