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*Editor’s Note: Elephant Journal articles represent the personal views of the authors, and can not possibly reflect Elephant Journal as a whole. Disagree with an Op-Ed or opinion? We’re happy to share your experience here.
Over lunch recently, a friend leaned across the table and whispered conspiratorially: “What we need is a dumpster full of tainted food.”
I didn’t get the reference until she reminded me of the 2008 documentary “Stress: Portrait of a Killer.”
In it, Stanford University neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky studies baboon troops in their natural habitat. He notes that these animals, like humans, organize themselves in strict hierarchies where “alpha males” dominate at the top. They don’t lead from compassion or caring. They don’t share or cooperate. No, they torment and abuse the males, females, and children below them. This creates a chain reaction—and generational pattern—where baboons learn to bully those below them, creating a culture of chronic stress—especially for those lower in the hierarchy.
The repeated pattern over generations could make us believe that hierarchy is natural—both for baboons and, by extension, their fellow primates: humans.
As Isabel Wilkerson writes in Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, “Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.”
But what if hierarchy is not natural?
The documentary provides a possible answer. One day, a baboon troop comes across a dumpster bin of contaminated food. All of the alpha males—those who ate the largest portion of food—died. Those animals lower down the hierarchy survived.
What did the remaining baboons do without the alpha males? Wallow in search of a leader? Turn the hierarchy upside down, letting those who had been abused become the abusers? No.
The troop reorganized itself into a social system based on community and collaboration. No more abuse. No more bullies. No more hierarchy. Those days are over. When young adolescents from other troops seek to join them, they are set straight quickly—or sent away—if they exhibit any bad behavior.
Perhaps it is time for us humans also to do away with the American caste system, that system we call patriarchy.
Since its inception (and with few exceptions) the American system, and the institutions built to support it, have ensured that white, wealthy, cisgender, straight Christian men maintained power. No matter how much we might have personally internalized the belief that “all men are created equal,” the reality tells a different story, and never more than today.
Checks and balances are eroding. Congress is cowed. The Supreme Court is complicit. The Justice Department answers to one man. The list goes on.
The Trump administration doesn’t even bother to hide this anymore. To them, representative government that would require, for instance, approval to go to war, is a mere inconvenience to be worked around. Trump and his cabinet see themselves as alpha males who should rule without restraint, accountability, or explanation—and the women who play this game are no different.
Our society is in collapse and disrepair. The cracks are widening into an abyss that is ready to swallow us all.
Billionaires are not worried; they’re building bunkers.
Politicians are only thinking as far ahead as the next election.
Local leaders are proving themselves not up to the task, trafficking mostly in harsh rhetoric rather than action or policy.
And so, it is down to you. And it is down to me.
When systems fail, there is an opportunity for something new to emerge.
Can we answer this call? Can we create real, substantial transformation in which we don’t merely change out a leader, but we restructure how society functions?
I say, let’s look at my city: Minneapolis.
~
The morning Alex Pretti was murdered in cold blood by ICE agents, I was driving to a yoga class.
I braked when I saw emergency lights, masses of people, and blocked streets ahead. I didn’t know what had happened, but just a few short weeks after the murder of Renee Good in our streets, I felt my blood turn cold.
A man ran up to my car and said, “Someone’s been shot. We’re trying to direct traffic away.” The look on my face might be the reason he added, “He might be okay.”
I drove home in a kind of stunned silence. Not the surprised kind of silence though; those days are long over.
Many more events have swept our nation and globe since ICE tormented this North Star city, and like so many things, it seems to have already faded from the headlines. Not locally, however. The vigils remain, as does the anger, sadness, and calls for justice.
During January and February, many of us wondered if our police force—with their reputation still in tatters after the George Floyd murder of 2020—would stand with the people against these invaders. Perhaps they would seek to build new relationships with the community and stand with us against these uninvited, untrained, mall cops cosplaying as soldiers (nothing against mall cops). Yet, we were disappointed—but again, not surprised—when they focused more on breaking up and arresting protesters than on protecting our community.
Power aligns with power. That’s how it protects itself.
At least, that’s how it works in a hierarchical society. That’s certainly how America operates.
But the people of Minneapolis are test-driving a new model. One that can serve as an example not only for how to defeat ICE, but for how we could restructure our whole society.
Minneapolis is building infrastructure and community networks of people doing what they can to help one another. They are delivering food, making donations, supporting rent, and coming together to support local businesses—especially our immigrant-owned businesses. We are finding new and creative ways to share information, raise money, and warn and protect our neighbors. None of this is thanks to a leader. This is a leaderless, organic, intuitive movement driven by mutual care and support.
In a hierarchical society, people often expect leadership to do the protecting (forgetting all the times in the past that they have failed to do just that). In a communal or egalitarian society, the people protect and care for themselves and each other. Not through force or vigilantism, but through connection, and the kind of power that is generated in solidarity.
Yes, what we are seeing in Minneapolis is power. The kind of power that sees us all as one. We are exercising “power with,”, not “power over.” Power together. Power in unity.
But how do we spread this kind of power? Maybe the baboons can show us.
Don’t worry—I’m not advocating for dumpsters of tainted food. That’s not the lesson. The lesson is this: without the alpha males, the baboons did not choose to return to hierarchy. Nor did they simply replace the males with females and call it good (which is what some people mistakenly think matriarchy calls for). Instead, they instinctively created something better.
They organized themselves into a cooperative, circular structure. They began to demonstrate care for each other. Respect. Boundaries. As a long-term consequence of this new social structure, all the baboons in the troop benefited from lower stress levels and longer, happier lives.
What we need is a Minneapolis-type community-building revolution on a national, even global, scale.
One that can ultimately create a better, fairer, more equal society.
A society where bullies are rejected, rather than rewarded with power.
Where chest-thumping is ignored, not emulated.
Where those who hoard wealth at the expense of the poor are punished, not celebrated.
Where those demonstrating the desire to dominate (or decimate) other countries without alignment to international law, morality, or humanity are stripped of authority.
And where those wannabe strongmen who seek to rule by fear and intimidation are immediately evicted from power.
Minneapolis is setting the standard. Not only for how to resist ICE, but for how to reject the hierarchical system that would have created such a force in the first place.
And—it is showing us what can happen when we stop hoping and wishing for better leaders and start to rely on ourselves.
In other words, Minneapolis is practice ground for building a new, humane future.
~
author: Keri Mangis
Image: Author's Own
Editor: Molly Murphy
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