Stand Up Straight With Your Shoulder Back

Because territory matters , and because the best locales are always at short supply, territory seeking among animals produces conflict.

Conflict and Territory

Conflict, in turn, produces another problem : how to win or lose without the disagreeing parties to incurring too great a cost. Over millennia, animals who must co-habit with others in the same territories have in consequence learned many tricks to establish dominance, while risking the least amount of damage. A defeated wolf, for example, will roll over on its back, exposing its throat to the victor, who will not then deign to tear it out. The new dominant wolf may still require a future hunting partner, after all, even one as pathetic as his now-defeated foe.

The Neurochemistry of Defeat and Victory 

In the aftermath of losing a battle, regardless of how aggressively the lobster has behaved, it becomes unwilling to fight further, even against another, previously defeated opponent. A vanquished competitor loses confidence, sometimes for days. Sometimes the defeat can have more severe consequences. If a dominant lobster is badly defeated its brain basically dissolves. Then it grows a new, subordinate’s brain – one more appropriate to its new, lowly position.
Anyone who has experienced a painful transformation after serious defeat in romance or career may feel some sense of kinship with the once successful crustacean.

A lobster loser’s brain chemistry differs importantly form that of a lobster winner. High serotonin/ low octopamine characterizes the victor. The opposite neurochemical configuration, a high ratio of octopamine  to serotonin produces a defeated looking, scrunched up, inhibited, drooping, skulting sort of lobster.

Low serotonin means decreased confidence. Low serotonin means more response to stress and costlier physical preparedness for emergency. Low serotonin means less happiness, more pain and anxiety, more illness, and shorter lifespan. Higher spots in the dominance hierarchy, and the higher serotonin levels typical for those who inhabit them, are characterized by less illness, misery and death, even when facts such as absolute income are held constant. 

The Principle of Unequal Distribution 

When defeated lobster regains its courage and dares to fight again it is more likely to lose again than you would predict, statistically, from a tally of its previous fights. Its victorious opponent, on the other hand, is more likely to win. It is winner-take-all in the lobster world, just as it is in human societies, where top 1 % have as much loot as the bottom 50 % – and where the richest eighty-five people have a much as the bottom three and a half billion (Source: Credit Suisse: Global Wealth Report). That same brutal principle of unequal distribution applies outside the financial domain  – indeed , anywhere that creatieve production is required. For example, the majority of scientific papers are published by a very small group of scientists, and a tiny proportion of musicians produces almost all the recorded commercial music.

Sometimes it is known as the Matthew Principle (Matthew 25:29), derived from what might be the harshest statement ever attributed to Christ: “to those who have everything, more will be given; from those who have nothing , everything will be taken.”

The principle is sometime known as Price’s Law after Derek J. de Solla Price, the researcher who discovered its  application in science in 1963. Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923), an Italian polymath, noticed its applicability to wealth distribution in the early twentieth century, and it appears true for every society ever studied, regardless of governmental form.

All the Girls

The female lobsters identity the top guy quickly, and become irresistibly attracted to him. The dominant male, with his with upright and confident posture, not only gets the prime real estate and easiest access to the best hunting grounds. He also gets all the girls.

Why is all this relevant? We know that lobsters have been around , in one form or another , for more than 350 million years. This is a very long time. Sixty-five million years ago, there were still dinosaurs. That is the unimaginably distant past to us. To the lobsters, however, dinosaurs were nouveau riche, who appeared and disappeared in the flow near-eternal time. This means that dominance hierarchies have been an essentially permanent feature of the environment to which all comlex life has adapted. A third of a billion years ago, brains and nervous systems were comparatively simple.  Nonetheless, they already had the structure and the neurochemistry necessary to process information about status and society. The importance of this fact can hardly be overstated.

The Nature of Nature

It is a truism of biology that evolution is conservative. When something evolves, it must build upon what nature has already produced. New feature maybe added, and old features may undergo some alteration, but most things remain the same. Now evolution works, in large part, through variation and natural selection. But what exactly is the “nature” in “natural selection”? The nature is static and dynamic at the same time. Chaos and order are interchangeable, as well as terminally juxtaposed. Some things change quickly, but they are nested within other things that change less quickly. Leaves change more quickly than trees, and trees more quickly than forest. The longer a feature has existed the more time it has had to be selected – and to shape life. It does not matter whether that feature is physical and biological, or social and cultural. All that matters, from Darwinian perspective, is permanence – and the dominance hierarchy, however social or cultural it might appear, has been around for some half a  billion years.  It is permanent. it is real. The dominance hierarchy is not capitalism. It is not communismIt, either. It is not even a human creation. It is instead a near-eternal aspect of the environment. The part of our brain that keeps track of our position in the dominance hierarchy is therefore exceptionally ancient and fundamental. It is a master control system, modulating our perceptions, values, emotions, thoughts and actions. It powerfully affects every aspect of our Being, conscious and unconscious alike. This is why when we are defeated, we act very much like a lobster who have lost a fight. Our posture drops. We face the ground. We feel threatened , hurt, anxious and week. If things do not improve, we become chronically depressed. Under such conditions, we can’t easily put up the kind of fight that life demands, and we become easy targets of harder-shelled bullies.

Top and bottom

There is an unspeakably primordial calculator, deep within you, at the very foundation of your brain, far below your thoughts and feelings. It monitors exactly where you are positioned in society – on a scale of one to ten, for the sake of argument. If you are number one and male, you have access to the best places to live and the highest – quality food. People compete to do you favours. You have limitless opportunity for romantic and sexual contact. If you are female, you have access to many high quality suitors.
If you are low-status ten, by contrast, male or female, you have nowhere to live or nowhere good. Your food is terrible, when you are not going hungry. You are in a poor physical and mental condition. You are of minimum romantic interest to anyone, unless they are as desperate as you. Even money itself may prove of little use.You won’t know how to use it, because it is difficult to use money properly, particularly if you are not used to it. Money will make you liable to dangerous temptation of drug and alcohol. Emergencies are common at the bottom and you must be ready to survive. Unfortunately this constant alertness burns up a lot of precious energy and physical resources. When operating at the bottom, the ancient brain counter assumes that even the smallest unexpected impediment might produce an uncontrollable chain of negative events. You will therefore continually sacrifice what you could otherwise physically store for the future, using it up on heightened readiness and possibility of immediate panicked action in the present. Too much of that and everything falls apart. The ancient counter will even shut down your immune system. It will render you impulsive, so that you will jump, for example, at any short-term mating opportunities, or any possibilities of pleasure, no matter how subpar, disgraceful or illegal. The physical demands of emergency preparedness will wear you down in every way.
If you have high status, on the other hand, the counter assumes that your niche is secure, productive and safe. It thinks the chance that something  will damage you is low and can be safely discounted. The serotonin flows plentifully. This renders you confident and calm, standing tall and straight, and much less on constant alert. It is worthwhile to think in the long term and plan for better tomorrow.

Malfunction 

Sometimes, however, the counter mechanism can go wrong. Erratic habits of sleeping and eating can interfere with its function. Every body system must play its role properly, and at exactly the right time, or noise and chaos ensue. It is for this reason that routine i so necessary. The acts of life we repeat every day need to be automatized. They must be turned into stable and reliable habits  to they lose their complexity and gain predictability. Enough sleep and waking up at a constant hour is necessity. A fat and protein-heavy breakfast as soon as possible after waking up is necessity.
Other bad habits can also interfere with the counter’s accuracy. Sometimes this happens directly , for poorly understood biological reasons, and sometimes it happens because those habits initiate a complex positive feedback loop. Most people have been subject to the deafening howling of feedback at a concert, when sound system squeals painfully. The microphone sends a signal to the speakers. The speakers emit the signal. The signal can be picked up by the microphone and send through the system again, if it is too loud or too close to to the speakers. The sound rapidly amplifies to unbearable levels, sufficient to destroy the speakers, if it continues. The same destructive loop happens within people’s lives. Addiction to alcohol or another mood-altering drug is common positive-feedback process. Something similar often happens to people who develop an anxiety disorder. There are many systems of interaction between body, brain and social world that can get caught in positive feedback loops. Depressed people, for example, can start feeling useless and burdensome , as well as grief-stricken and pained. This make them withdraw from contact with friends and family. Then the withdrawal makes them more lonesome and isolated, and more likely to feel useless and burdensome. Then they withdraw more. In this manner, depression spirals and amplifies.

Rising Up 

If someone is badly hurt at some point in life – traumatized  – the dominance counter can transform in a manner that makes additional hurt more rather less likely. Their now-counterproductive psychological adaptation to earlier reality remain, and they are more stressed and uncertain than is necessary. In such situation , the psychological consequence of the previous bullying increases the likelihood of continued bullying in the present (even though, strictly speaking, it wouldn’t have to , because of maturation, or geographical relocation, or continued education, or improvement in objective status) .
Some people are bullied because they can not  fight back. This happens to people who are weaker , physically, than their opponents. But just as often , people are bullied because they won’t fight back. This happens not infrequently to people who are by temperament compassionate and self-sacrificing. It also happens to people who have decided, for one reason or another, that all form of aggression, including even feelings of anger, are morally wrong.
If you say no, early in the cycle of oppression, and you mean what you say (which means you state your refusal in no uncertain terms and stand behind it) then the scope for oppression on the part of the oppressor will remain properly bounded and limited. No one likes to be pushed around, but people often put up with it for too long. So they have to see their resentment, first , as anger, and then as indication that something needs to be said or done. When naive people discover the capacity for anger within themselves, they are shocked , sometimes severely. When the waking occurs – when once-naive people recognize in themselves the seeds of evil and monstrosity , and see themselves as dangerous (at least potentially) their fear disappears. They develop more self-respect. Then, perhaps, they begin resist oppression. They see they can and must stand up, because they begin to understand how genuinely monstrous they will become, otherwise, feeding on their resentment, transforming it into   the most destructive of wishes. To say it again: There is very little difference between the capacity for mayhem and destruction, integrated, and strength of character. This is one of the most difficult lessons in life.
Emotion is partially bodily expression, and can be amplified (or damaged) by the expression. Some of the positive feedback loops initiated by by body language can occur beyond the private confines of subjective experience. If your  posture is poor , for example – if you slump, shoulders forward and rounded, chest tucked in, head down, looking small, defeated and ineffectual, then you will feel small , defeated and ineffectual. The reaction of others will exemplify that. People will assign you a lower status , and the old counter that you share with lobsters, sitting at the very  base of your brain, will assign you lower dominance number. Then your brain will not produce as much serotonin. This will make you less happy, and more anxious and sad, and more likely to back down when you should stand up for yourself.
If you start to straighten up, people will look at and treat you differently. But standing up straight with your shoulders back is not something that is only physical, because you are not only a body. You are a spirit, so to speak – a psyche – as well. Standing up physically also implies and invokes and demands standing up metaphysically. Standing up means voluntarily accepting the burden of Being. Your nervous system responds entirely different manner when you face the demands of life voluntarily. You respond to a challenge, instead of bracing for catastrophe.
So attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them – at least the same right as others. Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully. People, including yourself will start to assume that you are competent and able. Emboldened by the positive responses you are now receiving , you will begin to be less anxious. Doing so will genuinely increase the probability that good things will happen to you. Thus emboldened, you will embark on the voyage of your life, let your light shine, so to speak, on the heavenly hill, and pursue your rightful destiny.

12 Rules For Life | Jordan Peterson

Rule # 1: STAND UP STRAIGHT WITH YOUR SHOULDER BACK