"If humans survived through gentleness and cooperation, why does the world we witness today still look like a place where the powerful and the strong dominate and oppress the group?"
Whenever we discuss how gentleness and hyper-sociality were the weapons that placed humanity on the throne of survival, we inevitably run into the massive wall of the present. A quick turn of the news shows a world seemingly driven by the logic of dominance—ruled by those holding capital and power, the so-called strong. How do we explain this blatant contradiction? Was the claim that gentleness was a weapon of survival merely a comforting, sugar-coated package?
Evolutionary anthropology and history offer a fascinating answer to this bleak question: the dominance of the strong we witness today is not human nature, but a "side effect of evolution" spawned by the rapid environmental shift known as civilization.
The Prehistoric Rule of Pulling Down the Strong
When we picture primitive times, we often imagine a muscular leader wielding a club, ruling the tribespeople through fear. This is the rough, savage image routinely served up by movies and media. However, the records of anthropologists who actually embedded themselves with surviving hunter-gatherer tribes tell a completely different story.
Whenever an "alpha male" emerged among prehistoric humans, attempting to dominate the group through sheer force, the community joined forces to thoroughly subdue him. In anthropology, this is known as a "reverse dominance hierarchy." If someone tried to monopolize the catch or lord over others, the tribespeople used gossip, ridicule, and shaming to erode his authority. If he still refused to listen, they exiled him from the tribe or even executed him under the cover of night.
The invention of weapons like stone axes and arrows leveled the playing field; no matter how strong a man was, he could lose his life to a single arrow shot by the weak while he slept. In other words, human hyper-sociality operated in a way that monitored the group to ensure no single dictator could rise, maintaining a fierce equality. Gentle egalitarianism was the foundational rule of survival.
The Trap of Inequality Brought by Agricultural Abundance
Why, then, did this wonderfully gentle and egalitarian structure twist into the dominant, hierarchy-driven society we see today? The culprit is agriculture, often hailed as the greatest revolution in human history.
When agriculture began roughly 10,000 years ago, humanity ceased its wandering and settled down. For the first time, "surplus production"—wealth that could be hoarded—came into existence. In the hunter-gatherer days, meat could not be preserved, meaning it absolutely had to be shared equally. With farming, however, grain began to pile up, layer by layer, inside storage bins.
This is exactly where the fracture occurred. Power was born when someone managed to monopolize that storehouse. The birth of private property triggered the need for armies to protect or seize it, giving rise to ruling classes: kings and aristocrats who controlled the military. The strong began to dominate the group not through physical force like a wolf, but through a "system" made of institutions, laws, armies, and capital. The instinct of gentle equality that humanity had evolved over hundreds of thousands of years lost its way and turned dark, trapped in a rapidly shifting environment of capital and mega-cities over a mere blink of 10,000 years.
The DNA of the Reverse Dominance Hierarchy Flowing Within Us
Despite all this, why do we still rage against absurd tyrannies, point fingers at the abuses of power, and stand in solidarity with the weak? It is because the 100,000-year-old instinct of the reverse dominance hierarchy, engraved in our DNA, is still alive and breathing.
The dominance of the strong and the inequality we see on the news are temporary phenomena, occupying a mere 1% of the total timeline of human history—the post-civilization era. If human beings were governed solely by rational self-interest or the logic of the powerful, human society would have imploded from selfishness long ago. Today’s democratic systems that keep ruling powers in check, civic solidarity, and welfare programs that aid the vulnerable are all modern versions of the reverse dominance hierarchy, proving that we are the descendants of the gentle Homo symbiosus.
The inequality of the present is not because human nature is inherently evil. It is simply a transitional side effect experienced by a species that evolved through gentleness for hundreds of thousands of years, now wearing the incredibly unfamiliar and ill-fitting clothes of civilization and capital. Therefore, the power to change the world has never belonged to the club of the tyrant, but to the gentle solidarity of the majority who seek to pull the tyrant down and bring everyone back to the egalitarian round table.
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