The act of raising his voice, or raging, is only a weak sign in a leader when it occurs as a reaction to an immediate threat. It may also be used spontaneously or deliberately by a strong ruler as a general device for reaffirming his position. A dominant baboon may behave in the same way, suddenly charging at his subordinates and terrorizing them, reminding them of his powers. It enables him to chalk up a few points, and after that he can more easily get his own way with the merest nod of his head. Human leaders perform in this manner from time to time, issuing stem edicts, making lightning inspections, or haranguing the group with vigorous speeches. If you are a leader, it is dangerous to remain silent, unseen or unfelt for too long. If natural circumstances do not prompt a show of power, the circumstances must be invented that do. It is not enough to have power, one must be observed to have power. Therein lies the value of spontaneous threat displays.
3. In moments of physical challenge you (or your delegates) must be able forcibly to overpower your subordinates.
If a threat display fails, then a physical attack must follow. If you are a baboon boss this is a dangerous step to take, for two reasons. Firstly, in a physical fight even the winner may be damaged, and injury is more serious for a dominant animal than for a subordinate. It makes him less daunting for a subsequent attacker. Secondly, he is always outnumbered by his subordinates, and if they are driven too far they may gang up on him and overpower him in a combined effort. It is these two facts that make threat rather than actual attack the preferred method for dominant individuals.
The human leader overcomes this to some extent by employing a special class of ‘suppressors’. They, the military or police, are so specialized and professional at their task that only a general uprising of the whole populace would be strong enough to beat them. In extreme cases, a despot will employ a further, even more specialized class of suppressors (such as secret police), whose job it is to suppress the ordinary suppressors if they happen to get out of line. By clever manipulation and administration it is possible to run an aggressive system of this kind in such a way that only the leader knows enough of what is happening to be able to control it. Everyone else is in a state of confusion unless they have orders from above and, in this way, the modern despot can hold the reigns and dominate effectively.
4. If a challenge involves brain rather than brawn you must be able to outwit your subordinates.
The baboon boss must be cunning, quick and intelligent as well as strong and aggressive. This is obviously even more important for a human leader. In cases where there is a system of inherited leadership, the stupid individual is quickly deposed or becomes the mere figurehead and pawn of the true leaders.
Today the problems are so complex that the modern leader is forced to surround himself with intellectual specialists, but despite this he cannot escape the need for quickwittedness. It is he who must make the final decisions, and make them sharply and clearly, without faltering. This is such a vital quality in leadership that it is more important to make a firm, unhesitating decision than it is to make the ‘right’ one. Many a powerful leader has survived occasional wrong decisions, made with style and forcefulness, but few have survived hesitant indecisiveness. The golden rule of leadership here, which in a rational age is an unpleasant one to accept, is that it is the manner in which you do something that really counts, rather than what you do. It is a sad truth that a leader who does the wrong things in the right way will, up to a certain point, gain greater allegiance and enjoy more success than one who does the right things in the wrong way. The progress of civilization has repeatedly suffered as a result of this. Lucky indeed is the society whose leader does the right things and at the same time obeys the ten golden rules of dominance; lucky— and rare, too. There appears to be a sinister, more-than-chance relationship between great leadership and aberrant policies.
It seems as if one of the curses of the immense complexity of the super-tribal condition is that it is almost impossible to make sharp, clear-cut decisions, concerning major issues, on a rational basis. The evidence available is so complicated, so diverse and frequently so contradictory, that any reasonable, rational decision is bound to involve undue hesitancy. The great super-tribal leader cannot enjoy the luxury of ponderous restraint and ‘further examination of the facts’ so typical of the great academic. The biological nature of his role as a dominant animal forces him to make a snap decision or lose face.
The danger is obvious: the situation inevitably favours, as great leaders, rather abnormal individuals, fired by some kind of obsessive fanaticism, who will be prepared to cut through the mass of conflicting evidence that the super-tribal condition throws up. This is one of the prices that the biological tribesman must pay for becoming an artificial super-tribesman. The only solution is to find a brilliant, rational, balanced, deep-thinking brain housed in a glamorous, flamboyant, self-assertive, colourful personality. Contradictory? Yes. Impossible? Perhaps; but there is a glimmer of hope in the fact that the very size of the super-tribe, which causes the problem in the first place, also offers literally millions of potential candidates.
5. You must suppress squabbles that break out between your subordinates.
If a baboon leader sees an unruly squabble taking place he is likely to interfere and suppress it, even though it does not in any way constitute a direct threat to himself. It gives him another opportunity of displaying his dominance and at the same time helps to maintain order inside the group. Interference of this kind from the dominant animal is directed particularly at squabbling juveniles, and helps to instil in them, at an early age, the idea of a powerful leader in their midst.
The equivalent of this behaviour for the human leader is the control and administration of the laws of his group. The rulers of the earlier and smaller super-tribes were powerfully active in this respect, but there has been increasing delegation of these duties in modern times, due to the increasing weight of other burdens that relate more directly to the status of the leader. Nevertheless, a squabbling community is an inefficient one and some degree of control and influence has to be retained.
6. You must reward your immediate subordinates by permitting them to enjoy the benefits of their high ranks.
The sub-dominant baboons, although they are the leader’s worst rivals, are also of great help to him in times of threat from outside the group. Further, if they are too strongly suppressed they may gang up on him and depose him. They therefore enjoy privileges which the weaker members of the group cannot share. They have more freedom of action and are permitted to stay closer to the dominant animal than are the junior males.
Any human leader who has failed to obey this rule has soon found himself in difficulties. He needs more help from his sub-dominants, and is in greater danger of a ‘palace revolt’, than his baboon equivalent. So much more can go on behind his back. The system of rewarding the subdominants requires brilliant expertise. The wrong sort of reward gives too much power to a serious rival. The trouble is that a true leader cannot enjoy true friendship. True friendship can only be fully expressed between members of roughly the same status level. A partial friendship can, of course, occur between a dominant and a subordinate, at any level, but it is always marred by the difference in rank. No matter how well meaning the partners in such a friendship may be, condescension and flattery inevitably creep in to cloud the relationship. The leader, at the very peak of the social pyramid, is, in the full sense of the word, permanently friendless; and his partial friends are perhaps more partial than he likes to think. As I said, the giving of favours requires an expert hand.
7. You must protect the weaker members of the group from undue persecution.
Females with young tend to cluster around the dominant male baboon. He meets any attack on these females or on unprotected infants with a savage onslaught. As a defender of the weak he is ensuring the survival of the future adults of the group. Human leaders have increasingly extended their protection of the weak to include also the old, the sick an
d the disabled. This is because efficient rulers not only need to defend the growing children, who will one day swell the ranks of their followers, but also need to reduce the anxieties of the active adults, all of whom are threatened with eventual senility, sudden sickness, or possible disability. With most people the urge to give aid in such cases is a natural development of their biologically co-operative nature. But for the ' leaders it is also a question of making people work more efficiently by taking a serious weight off their minds.
8. You must make decisions concerning the social activities of your group.
When the baboon leader decides to move, the whole group moves. When he rests, the group rests. When he feeds, the group feeds. Direct control of this kind is, of course, lost to the leader of a human super-tribe, but he can nevertheless play a vital role in encouraging the more abstract directions his group takes. He may foster the sciences or push towards a greater military emphasis. As with the other golden rules of leadership, it is important for him to exercise this one even when it does not appear to be strictly necessary. Even if a society is cruising happily along on a set and satisfactory course, it is vital for him to change that course in certain ways in order to make his impact felt. It is not enough simply to alter it as a reaction to something that is going wrong. He must spontaneously, of his own volition, insist on new lines of development, or he will be considered weak and colourless. If he has no ready-made preferences and enthusiasms, he must invent them. If he is seen to have what appear to be strong convictions on certain matters, he will be taken more seriously on all matters. Many modern leaders seem to overlook this and their political ‘platforms’ are desperately lacking in originality. If they win the battle for leadership it is not because they are more inspiring than their rivals but simply because they are less uninspiring.
9. You must reassure your extreme subordinates from time to time.
If a dominant baboon wishes to approach a subordinate peacefully, it may have difficulty doing so, because its close proximity is inevitably threatening. It can overcome this by performing a reassurance display. This consists of a very gentle approach, with no sudden or harsh movements, accompanied by facial expressions (called lip-smacking) which are typical of friendly subordinates. This helps to calm the fears of the weaker animal and the dominant one can then come near.
Human leaders, who may be characteristically tough and unsmiling with their immediate subordinates, frequently adopt an attitude of friendly submissiveness when coming into personal contact with their extreme subordinates. Towards them they offer a front of exaggerated courtesy, smiling, waving, shaking hands interminably and even fondling babies. But the smiles soon fade as they turn away and disappear back inside their ruthless world of power.
10. You must take the initiative in repelling threats or attacks arising from outside your group.
It is always the dominant baboon that is in the forefront of the defence against an attack from an external enemy. He plays the major role as the protector of the group. For the baboon, the enemy is usually a dangerous member of another species, but for the human leader it takes the form of a rival group of the same species. At such moments, his leadership is put to a severe test, but, in a sense, it is less severe than during times of peace. The external threat, as I pointed out in the last chapter, has such a powerful cohesive effect on the members of the threatened group that the leader’s task is in many ways made easier. The more daring and reckless he is, the more fervently he seems to be protecting the group who, caught up in the emotional fray, never dare question his actions (as they would in peace-time), no matter how irrational these actions may be. Carried along on the grotesque tidal-wave of enthusiasm that war chums up, the strong leader comes into his own. With the greatest of ease he can persuade the members of his group, deeply conditioned as they are to consider the killing of another human being as the most hideous crime known, to commit this same action as an act of honour and heroism. He can hardly put a foot wrong, but if he does, the news of his blunder can always be suppressed as bad for national morale. Should it become public, it can still be put down to bad luck rather than bad judgment. Bearing all this in mind, it is little wonder that, in times of peace, leaders are prone to invent, or at least to magnify, threats from foreign powers that they can then cast in the role of potential enemies. A little added cohesion goes a long way.
These, then, are the patterns of power. I should make it clear that I am not implying that the dominant baboon/human ruler comparison should be taken as meaning that we evolved from baboons, or that our dominance behaviour evolved from theirs. It is true that we shared a common ancestor with baboons, way back in our evolutionary history, but that is not the point. The point is that baboons, like our early human forbears, have moved out of the lush forest environment into the tougher world of the open country, where tighter group control is necessary. Forest-living monkeys and apes have a much looser social system; their leaders are under less pressure. The dominant baboon has a more significant role to play and I selected him as an example for this reason. The value of the baboon/human comparison lies in the way it reveals the very basic nature of human dominance patterns. The striking parallels that exist enable us to view the human power game with a fresh eye and see it for what it is: a fundamental piece of animal behaviour. But we must leave the baboons to their simpler tasks and take a closer look at the complications of the human situation.
For the modern human leader there are clearly difficulties in performing his dominant role efficiently. The grotesquely inflated power which he wields means that there is the ever present danger that only an individual with an equally grotesquely inflated ego will successfully be able to hold the super-tribal reins. Also, the immense pressures will easily push him into initiating acts of violence, an all-too-natural response to the strains of super-status. Furthermore, the absurd complexity of his task is bound to absorb him to such an extent that it inevitably makes him remote from the ordinary problems of his followers. A good tribal leader knows exactly what is happening in every comer of his group. A super-tribal leader, hopelessly isolated by his lofty position of super-status, and totally preoccupied by the machinery of power, rapidly becomes cut off.
It has been said that to be a successful leader in the modern world a man has to be prepared to make major decisions with the minimum of information. This is a frightening way to run a super-tribe, and yet it happens all the time. There is too much information available for any one individual to assimilate and, in addition, there is a great deal more, hidden in the super-tribal labyrinth, that can never be made available. A rational solution is to do away with the powerful leader-figure, to relegate him to the ancient, tribal past where he belonged, and to replace him with a computer-fed organization of interdependent, specialized experts.
Something approaching such an organization already exists, of course, and in England any civil servant will tell you without hesitation that it is the civil service that really runs the country. To emphasize his point he will inform you that when parliament is in session his work is seriously hampered; only during parliamentary recesses can serious progress be made. All this is very logical, but unfortunately it is not bio-logical, and the country he claims to be running happens to be made up of biological specimens—the supertribesmen. True, a super-tribe needs super-control, and if it is too much for one man it might seem reasonable to solve the problem by converting a power-figure into a power-organization. This does not, however, satisfy the biological demands of the followers. They may be able to reason super-tribally, but their feelings are still tribal, and they will continue to demand a real leader in the form of an identifiable, solitary individual. It is a fundamental pattern of their species, and there is no avoiding it. Institutions and computers may be valuable servants to the masters, but they can never themselves become masters (science fiction stories notwithstanding). A diffuse organization, a faceless machine, lacks the essential properties: it cannot inspire and it cannot be deposed. T
he single dominant human is therefore doomed to struggle on, behaving publicly like a tribal leader, with panache and assurance, while in private he grapples laboriously with the almost impossible tasks of super-tribal control.
Despite the great burdens of present-day leadership and despite the daunting fact that an ambitious male member of a modern super-tribe has a chance smaller than one in a million of becoming the dominant individual of his group, there has been no observable lessening of desire to achieve high status. The urge to climb the social ladder is too ancient, too deeply ingrained to be weakened by a rational assessment of the new situation.
Throughout the length and breadth of our massive communities there are, then, hundreds of thousands of frustrated, would-be leaders with no real hope of leading. What happens to their thwarted ladder-climbing? Where does all the energy go? They can, of course, give up and drop out, but this is a depressing condition. The flaw in the social dropout’s solution is that he does not really drop out at all: he stays put and pours scorn on the rat race that surrounds him. This unhappy state is avoided by the great majority of the super-tribesmen by the simple device of competing for leadership in specialized sub-groups of the super-tribe. For some this is easier than others. A competitive profession or craft automatically provides it own social hierarchy. But even there the odds against achieving true leadership may be too great. This gives rise to the almost arbitrary invention of new sub-groups where competition may prove more rewarding. All kinds of extraordinary cults are set up — everything from canary-breeding and train-spotting to ufo-watching and body-building. In each case the overt nature of the activity is comparatively unimportant. What is really important is that the pursuit provides a new social hierarchy where one did not exist before. Inside it a whole range of rules and procedures is rapidly developed, committees are formed and—most important of all—leaders emerge. A champion canary-breeder or body-builder would, in all probability, have no chance whatsoever of enjoying the heady fruits of dominance, were it not for his involvement in his specialized sub-group.
The Human Zoo: A Zoologist's Study of the Urban Animal Page 5
