Might Is Right, If It Is Stable

Just a quickie.

A running theme from our brutish beginnings is that physical strength equals dominance and superiority. While it may have been true for millions of years, we now find ourselves in a somewhat changed environment and can harness more destructive force by pushing a button or pulling a trigger than the most trained set of muscles ever could. While I would be willing to bet that on the nation-level political and economic dominance is still determined by raw military power (can't argue with nuclear submarines carrying nuclear weapons that can strike anywhere on the planet), I am talking about individual patterns of power dynamics here. And what I am hinting at is that "might is right" is merely a small subset of a much larger conversation of dominance.

I would define the dominance I am talking about as an "access to most/best options". Dinosaurs were, perhaps, the most fearsome predators that have lived on Earth yet and during their time were at the top of the food chain, but not having the options to avert a meteor strike or adapting to a cool climate and scarce food supply meant their extinction. Similarly, a person who seeks to solve every problem with violence and raw power is as unequipped for success as a person suffering from tetraplegia or a psychopath.

Perhaps the most curious demonstration of this is an experiment with pigs performed by B.A. Baldwin and G.B. Meese, as described by Richard Dawkins in his The Selfish Gene: 

"Experimental psychologists are accustomed to putting pigeons or rats in small Skinner boxes, where they soon learn to press delicate little levers for food reward. Pigs can learn the same thing in a scaled-up Skinner box with a very undelicate snout lever. Trained pigs were put in a  skinner sty, but there is an added twist to the tale. The snout lever was at one end of the sty; the food dispenser at the other. So the pig had to press the lever, then race up to the other end of the sty to get the food, then rush back to the lever, and so on. This sounds all very well, but Baldwin and Meese put pairs of pigs into the apparatus. It now became possible for one pig to exploit the other. The ‘slave’ pig rushed back and forth pressing the bar. The ‘master’ pig sat by the food chute and ate the food as it was dispensed. Pairs of pigs did indeed settle down into a stable master/slave pattern of this kind, one working and running, the other doing most of the eating. Now for the paradox. The labels ‘master’ and ‘slave’ turned out to be all topsy-turvy. Whenever a pair of pigs settled down to a stable pattern, the pig that ended up playing the ‘master’ or ‘exploiting’ the role was the pig that, in all other ways, was subordinate. The so-called ‘slave’ pig, the one that did all the work, was the pig that was usually dominant. Anyone knowing the pigs would have predicted that, on the contrary, the dominant pig would have been the master, doing most of the eating; the subordinate pig should have been the hard-working and scarcely-eating slave.

How could this paradoxical reversal arise? It is easy to understand once you start thinking in terms of stable strategies. […] The strategy ‘if dominant, sit by the food trough; if subordinate work the lever’ sounds sensible but would not be stable. The subordinate pig, having pressed the lever, would come sprinting over, only to find the dominant pig with its front feet firmly in the trough and impossible to dislodge. The subordinate pig would soon give up pressing the lever, for the habit would never be rewarded. But now consider the reverse strategy: ‘If dominant, work the lever; if subordinate sit by the food trough.’ This would be stable, even though it has the paradoxical result that the subordinate pig gets most of the food. All that is necessary is that there should be some food left for the dominant pig when it charges up from the other end of the sty. As soon as it arrives, it has no difficulties in tossing the subordinate pig out of the trough. As long as there is a crumb left to reward it, its habit of working the lever, and thereby stuffing the subordinate pig, will persist."

See what I mean by access to most options? Both pigs are similar and the ecology of their existence in the sty would only be differentiated by their size and strength - the stronger one would have the one additional option of pushing the other pig away from the food. But suppose the pigs were significantly different, say, one of them were one of those miniature pigs and there was a hole in the sty small enough for it to fit through and gain access to all the food it could eat? Wouldn't that just happen to give a much smaller and weaker pig a crucial advantage, access to an additional, better option? It would and it would put it in a dominant position irrespective to might, but in direct proportion to access to options.

I could continue to show how a submissive partner in a sexual relationship is thus actually dominant by the virtue of having access to more options, but I'll leave that for another time.