In 1934 Rudolph Schenkel studied captured wolves at the Basel Zoological Garden in Switzerland. The conditions were harsh. Ten wolves were kept together in a small area with a floor space of approximately 30 feet by 65 feet. He developed a theory that asserted there was such a thing as an alpha in a pack of wolves. A theory that is now considered disproven.

A pack is a family. The two oldest breeders, the parents, are at the head of a pack. Those packs that benefit from a large and protected habitat, develop large and complex family units. Leadership is decided by age and personality traits. Those in the top spot are not there because they fought their peers for it. It was not their will for superiority. It was their responsibility. It is a result of the natural relationship that develops between the elders that excel in organizing the pack under proven strategies that provide for- and protect everyone, and those that recognize their role as dependents of these leaders and their strategies. If the strategies begin to fail, that’s when conflicts arise within the pack. The younger wolves rebel out of frustration or leave to create their own pack.

The wolves studied in 1934 were all brought from different zoos, and unrelated to each other. The equivalent of studying the family unit by observing the behavior of prisoners in a holding cell. What Schenkel saw is an active and everpresent behavioral trait in humans. Arising from the way we have structured our own post-industrial world. His mind recognized a pattern present in our society and projected it onto these incarcerated wolves.

What if we are all imprisoned? Ideologically incarcerated by what Viktor E. Frankl called “pseudo values”. What if our collective consciousness has been locked inside of an existential vacuum?

I have a friend who was once incarcerated in a Los Angeles detention center. He is biracial. Half Indian (Hindu), half White. This mixture gave people the impression that he was of Latin descent, because of the heavy Latin American presence in the area and the company he kept. This was never a major issue. Just the source of some occasional frustrations. It only became an issue the day he arrived at the prison. Once he went through the process of entering the security check and administrative system, he had to pass through an organizational system ran by the prisoners. After entering their cell block, the line of “fresh meat” was herded towards the middle of the common area. The closer he got to the end of the line, the more the pattern revealed itself. The new inmates walked up to a crowded table; three men were seated at the table across from the standing newbie. They spoke to the new inmate, and he left.

He walked up and realized he was in front of the leaders, or some high ranking member of the three main racial groups at the prison. He also realized he was being chosen by one of these groups and your group was determined by your racial background. He didn’t bother inquiring as to the possible existence of a Hindu prison gang. He knew he was simply fucked, and decided to keep his mouth shut. The Black leader ignored him completely. The Mexican leader spoke to him in Spanish. My friend’s blank stare made it obvious that he didn’t speak a word of Spanish. He grabbed my friend’s arm to inspect the medical wristband displaying his name. One glance prompted the Mexican leader to say, “Man! That’s some Russian shit!” He looks at the White leader and says, “He’s yours.”

Now he was in the precarious position of being a brown skinned man surrounded by hardcore white supremacists. He kept his head down and glommed onto a group within the gang who seemed to tolerate his presence.

One day the group decided to go out to the yard. Once out in the yard, a group member turns to him and says, “I have to give you props, man. Most motherfuckers are afraid to be out here. We’re outnumbered out here.” At this part of the story, my friend smiles at me and says, “This is when I knew I had fucked up.” Not by participating in the system, there was no choice in that. He wasn’t the type to isolate. Even if he was, a part of him probably knew that rejecting the group would have been suicide. But the mistake he made was not recognizing that he attached himself to a group that was desperate to prove itself valuable to the gang. He survived the ensuing riot by hitting the deck immediately.

Days later, he witnessed an event that perplexed him. He noticed the three racial groups took turns cleaning the cafeteria. At the beginning of the week, the next group holds a meeting where the leader asks his soldiers to show gratitude to the gang from the week before for a job well done. A demonstration of solidarity inside of a deeply divided system.

Coexisting ideological extremes living inside of an ecosystem that is increasingly owned by multinational corporations. Governed by representatives of a hierarchy who ascended to their post through the dedication- and skillful manipulation of- a morally ambiguous, yet dogmatic society. And policed by the threat of further deprivation of freedoms and violence at the hands of a militarized group that is driven by an authoritarianism that often breeds tyranny.

Millions of opinions, voices, and experiences- millions of souls, naturally conforming into a preexisting paradigm. Absorbed into a super-organism. Involuntarily funneled into the bottom tier of a hierarchical order. This is how imitative learning builds society. An analysis of the social cues in the environment are processed through an imperceptible maze of electrically stored information and leads to you unconsciously plug yourself into the social order. This provides you with the best chance for survival in the environment. From there group selection takes the reigns. The mistake we make is believing that this only occurs in under specific circumstances.

From the day our eyes and ears are fully developed, we are watching and listening. There is no context to what we see or hear, but we are programming the faces and facial expressions. We are programming the rythm of speech. How the people around you interact with you and each other. By the time we have fully encoded the rythm of our parents’ speech, we toss two thirds of our language faculties away. Now focusing on mimicking and contextualizing the sounds. We have also sacrificed 50% of our neurons to focus on developing those that help us navigate our environment. We narrow our focus to acquiring only those skills which are necessary. Who decides what skills are necessary? At first our parents. After that, society. Specifically, the social groups you interact with from childhood to adulthood.

In 1998, theorist Judith Rich-Harris published her book The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do. Without a Ph.D. behind her name, she put her lady-balls on the table and presented substantial evidence to the fact that parents have little to no long-term effect on their children’s personality, intelligence, or mental health. “The environment definitely has an effect on how children turn out, but it’s not the home environment. It’s not the nurture they do or don’t get from their parents… According to my theory, (The group socialization theory) children learn separately how to behave in each of their environments. Children don’t blindly generalize from one context to another–their behavior is a function of what they’ve experienced in that particular context. If the behavior they learned at home turns out to be inappropriate outside the home–and this is often the case–they drop the home behavior and learn something new… Assimilation is the way children are socialized–how they acquire the behaviors and attitudes that are appropriate for their culture.”

She also notes the hierarchical aspects to these social patterns.

“… But personality development, I believe, is more a function of differentiation. Groups sort themselves out. The members of groups differ in status and in the way they are typecast or labeled by the others. This is true even for identical twins who belong to the same peer group: One might be characterized as the bold one, the other as the shy one, for instance. Or the other members might address their comments and questions to one twin rather than the other–a sign that they regard that twin as the dominant one. If such differences in status or typecasting are persistent, I believe they can leave permanent marks on the personality.”

Some of the most subtle events bring a tsunami of electrical and chemical surges that change your entire programming in an instant. It changes the way you interact with your world. It connects you to the consensus reality. How ubiquitous this behavior is- is massively understated. The hierarchy seems to be the group’s natural state.

The hierarchy organizes itself.

Richard Savin-Williams spent a season watching summer campers interact. In June, the bunkmates met for the first time. For roughly an hour, the campers felt each other out, probing each other’s strengths and weaknesses, deciding who would be friends with whom. Then they quickly sorted themselves into a superorganism with a head, limbs and a tail. One camper became the “alpha male,” the dominant individual, the group leader. Another became the “bully,” a big, strong brute nobody particularly liked. A third became the “joker,” everybody’s good-natured sidekick. And one became the “nerd,” the unathletic, overly eager sort that everyone else felt free to kick around. Like the ants and the embryonic cells, each boy had taken his place in a kind of pre-ordained social blueprint.

Just how pre-ordained that blueprint was and how much of his potential each boy had to sacrifice to assume his role became clear when another researcher tried an experiment. The scientist assembled a cabin composed entirely of “leaders,” boys who had been dominant, “alpha” males in their old groups. Very quickly, the new cluster sorted itself out according to the familiar pattern. One of the leaders took charge. Another became the bully. A third became the group joker. And one of the formerly commanding lads even became the new group’s nerd.

The hierarchy enforces itself.

Savin-Williams also studied female summer campers and discovered that adolescent leaders were particularly gifted at dishing out ridicule. Female camp trend-setters–praised by gender studies specialists like Carol Gilligan for their warm and gentle cooperation–were particularly wicked conformity enforcers. They did it with the carrot and the stick. A dominant female camper would offer to fix another girl’s hair or help her with her choice of clothes…both quiet ways of shaping the follower’s appearance to fit the mold. But the verbal abuse these teen leaders could mete out to those who failed to conform was so devastating that it agonized even the researchers watching it. One of them, who had been forced to tears on several occasions by the viciousness of the attacks she’d witnessed, said, “Now I know why no one studies junior high-school girls. They are so cruel and horrible that no one can stand them! I remember my own adolescence as that way, and this summer was like reliving it. Never again!” Yet when the girls were quizzed about dominance, they claimed to dislike it. Though some of them stomped others with appalling verbal brutality, they abhorred being seen as authority figures because to them it represented being different. And difference among young girls just won’t do–conformity has a choke hold that won’t let go.

The hierarchy organically finds its purpose.

In the summer of 1954, Muzafar Sherif convinced twenty-two sets of working-class parents to let him take their twelve-year-old boys off their hands for three weeks. He brought the boys to a summer camp he had rented in Robbers Cave State Park, Oklahoma. There he conducted one of the most famous studies in social psychology, and one of the richest for understanding the foundations of morality. Sherif brought the boys to the camp in two groups of eleven, on two consecutive days, and housed them in different parts of the park. For the first five days, each group thought it was alone. Even still, they set about marking territory and creating tribal identities.
One group called themselves the “Rattlers,” and the other group took the name “Eagles.” The Rattlers discovered a good swimming hole upstream from the main camp and, after an initial swim, they made a few improvements to the site, such as laying a rock path down to the water. They then claimed the site as their own, as their special hideout, which they visited each day. The Rattlers were disturbed one day to discover paper cups at the site (which in fact they themselves had left behind); they were angry that “outsiders” had used their swimming hole.

A leader emerged in each group by consensus. When the boys were deciding what to do, they all suggested ideas. But when it came time to choose one of those ideas, the leader usually made the choice. Norms, songs, rituals, and distinctive identities began to form in each group (Rattlers are tough and never cry; Eagles never curse). Even though they were there to have fun, and even though they believed they were alone in the woods, each group ended up doing the sorts of things that would have been quite useful if they were about to face a rival group that claimed the same territory. Which they were.

On day 6 of the study, Sherif let the Rattlers get close enough to the baseball field to hear that other boys—the Eagles—were using it, even though the Rattlers had claimed it as their field. The Rattlers begged the camp counselors to let them challenge the Eagles to a baseball game. As he had planned to do from the start, Sherif then arranged a weeklong tournament of sports competitions and camping skills. From that point forward, Sherif says, “performance in all activities which might now become competitive (tent pitching, baseball, etc.) was entered into with more zest and also with more efficiency.” Tribal behavior increased dramatically. Both sides created flags and hung them in contested territory. They destroyed each other’s flags, raided and vandalized each other’s bunks, called each other nasty names, made weapons (socks filled with rocks), and would often have come to blows had the counselors not intervened.

This process produces thoughts and actions that help, hurt, or even sacrifice our existence- or another’s, to the group. The axiomatic tools used to develop a young mind into what is hopefully a psychologically healthy and sufficiently assimilated member of society can also turn people into monsters. But it does so for what they percieve to be the greater good. Opposite the road to hell, the road to heaven is sometimes paved with bad intentions.

“In an effective learning machine, the connections deep inside far outnumber windows to the outside world. Take the cerebral cortex, roughly 80% of whose nerves connect with each other, not with input from the eyes or ears. The learning device called human society follows the same rules. Individuals spend most of their time communicating with each other, not exploring such ubiquitous elements of their “environment”… This cabling for the group’s internal operations has a far greater impact on what we “see” and “hear” than many psychological researchers suspect. For it puts us in the hands of a conformity enforcer whose power and subtlety are almost beyond belief.”

Howard Bloom

Without behavioral conditioning, we are doomed to short, painful lives. If you lack critical social skills, for example. If your sexual development has been arrested or corrupted. If you are unable (or unwilling) to absorb and exercise social behaviors crucial to building relationships in school or work.You will undoubtedly face enormous challenges in providing for yourself and your family. In this age of social media you might also face a nightmarish life as the target of derission, pity, and shame. This is because we are now conditioned to conform to an unconscious competition. A system of hierarchies that enforces functionality over inquisitiveness. A utilitarian existence rather than an exploratory one. The only aspects of existence we are encouraged to explore are those that don’t question the consumerist agenda.

Idiosyncracies are inevitable thanks to the unique experiences provided by the conditions of your environment, and how that environment adjusts to you. Your singular perspective and the deviant behaviors it inspires generates diversity inside of a hierarchy built on conformity enforcement. Your individuality begins as as an infant and is initially met with resistance. We identify behaviors that need to cease, can be altered, or seem to be tolerated in moderation. This balance of altering, amplifying, and moderating behaviors and thoughts- along with the occasional monitoring of this system, is what builds our identity. Individuals survive these “free rider” moments because of the group’s own cost-benefit analysis. They will eventually see their more stubborn deviances adopted because of the good things they provide to the group.

Then there are those deviances thought to only generate destructive behaviors. These people either change, or are punished by the group. Homosexuality was one of the traits perceived as a punishable anomaly for centuries. In our reductive and sado-masochistic media machine, the literally destructive types of deviance gets the most attention. Making it easier to classify all deviant behavior as a problem. This is evident in the connection some groups of people still make between child molestation and homosexuality. They consider sexual tastes they deem as deviating from normative behavior as distateful and signs of psychopathy. This also happens to women who do not comform to gender roles and try to exhibit virtues that were considered masculine. We all know the names of the countries that continue to punish and execute women who want to explore their sexual options before being shackled to a man of their parent’s choosing.

We are still socialized into worshiping the head of the group. Those most indoctrinated and most skilled in the hierarchies of authority, fecundity, sociability, attractiveness, and intelligence. Thanks to the internet, these groups have become larger than ever before. A globalized competition that convinces one of their self-sufficiencies and independence. We are all players in this game for status because it impacts our ability to survive in our post-industrial society. That is the beauty of this beast. The game gives us purpose. It gifts us the confidence of status and power over somebody, somewhere. While still bonding you to the local group. Even if we are invisible and insignificant to those at the very top of the global hierarchy. The skills required to qualify for the game are skills that make us valuable to our group.

It convinces you that this is all a voluntary endeavor through the individualism the game promotes. It gives us the illusion of having an independent role in the otherwise dependent nature of life. We depend on the super-organism of the hierarchy.

Most of us have lost the ability to build our own house. No land to produce our own food or make our own clothes. No time to educate our children on the value of finding meaning outside of ourselves and the roles we choose in this system. On being a human being who is truly in tune with their nature. This hierarchical game attempts to replace the simple life of communal self-sufficiency, and the skills that it required, with a social structure centered on commercialism. It allows us to ignore our absolute dependence on our group, corporations, and governments, with an identity based on the unique mixture of things that we consume.

This system is doomed to fail in the long run, because it robs society of a larger purpose. Struggle is intrinsic to purpose. Not economic or political struggles. Not romantic, or familial struggles. We must struggle against the stagnant parts of our institutionalized ideologies, on bothe the liberal and conservative sides of the spectrum, and identify the transcendent values that will move our species forward.

Revolutions against the web of social management apparatuses are gaining ground. The mismanagement and corruption that plagues free market capitalism and globalization might have crippled this country’s economy. But I fear that this country was too ideologically rigid to handle the free market of images and ideas. The information age has connected the ideological radicals and gave them the images of decadence and vulgarity to recruit against the economic and political hierarchies. All the while our consumer obsessed social media networks have expanded the dialectics to rationalize and further cement the culture of tribalism and greed already prevalent in our society. Those who manage the system will respond to this bewildering environment of internet induced insubordination with tyranny, manipulation, and violence. All under the pretext of keeping us safe.

We need to wage war against something bigger than the circumstances surrounding our own existence; or we will only continue to wage war against ourselves. I am not on this soapbox to argue that society would be better off as Amish. Or sanctify those with dysfunctions who struggle inside of the system. Our ability to subconsciously comform is seen by our current sociological superstructure as a gift. Because it helps the global hierarchy currently in power. This project is simply an attempt to unveil the mechanisms behind our comformity. To paint a complete picture of the systems that program our species for life in a post-industrial society. In doing so, one inevitably finds the curses that accompany this gift.

“All progress means war with society.”

George Bernard Shaw

The Judith Rich-Harris interview was published in The Disinformation Series’ Abuse Your Illusions, under the title Don’t Blame Your Parents: An interview with Judith Rich-Harris. The Richard Savin-Williams study was excerpted from Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from The Big Bang to the 23rd Century, by Howard Bloom. The Muzafar Sherif study was excerpted from The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt.