Domestication at the Top (When Wolves Build Kennels)

If civilization is a long, grinding process of domestication (that’s my argument), selecting for docility, compliance, and symbolic performance…then what’s going on with the people at the top?

Because they sure as hell don’t look tame, do they? They build empires, command armies, rewrite laws the rest of us have to follow. They don’t defer…they conquer.

Are they exempt, then, from this domestication process?

Let’s rewind to the Y-chromosome bottleneck…that strange stretch of human history, 7,000 to 5,000 years ago, when genetic data tells us most men stopped passing on their genes, and a tiny handful of “winners” (guys like Genghis Khan) took it all. We’re not talking about cooperative foragers here. These are men who were clearly strategic, coercive, and absolutely fluent in domination.

But not in the old-school neanderthal way. Apparently, punching you way to power doesn’t scale. These men had to be able to read rooms and redraw maps…think founders of priesthoods, inventors of kingship, codifiers of laws, and masters of narrative, ritual, and symbolic control (bullshit).

They weren’t “submissive” in the normal sense, but they were domesticated in a different way. They were hyper-adapted to symbolic systems. Law, religion, custom, money…these weren’t just ideas to these guys, they were weapons. Far more effective weapons than fists.

Let’s sketch out a hypothetical profile for one of these bottleneck assholes.

He dominates by strategy instead of brute force. He’s hierarchically fluent (can operate within or redesign pecking orders). He can tolerate the the horrors of oppressing others (especially if someone else is doing the dirty work). He’s emotionally detached. And he shows great capacity to scale coercion through symbols, structures, and beliefs.

He’s not the village psychopath….worse, he’s the village priest.

But there’s a twist. That system he builds to extract compliance from others? It eventually tames him, too.

Why?

Because once the machine is running (once you’ve got states, kingdoms, priesthoods, inheritance lines) you don’t need wild visionaries anymore. You need clerks, protocols, safe hands. Even the sons of kings get domesticated. They’re raised in bullshit, married for alliance, and punished for improvising.

A conqueror’s grandson is a functionary. The great-grandson is essentially a clerk.

The same hierarchy that rewarded strategic aggression begins selecting for ritualized obedience…symbolic performance…following rules. The alpha male is a bureaucrat in a velvet robe now, parroting the very scripts that once gave him power. Eventually, even elite males are just well-dressed livestock, performing authority within a system they no longer control.

So no…elites were hardly immune to domestication. They may instigate it. They certainly perpetuate it. And they seem to benefit most from it in the short-term. But they’re clearly the biggest “victims” of their own process, in the end. The smallest brains. The most disconnected from reality. Bloated pale bodies riddled with civilizational disease.