A Night Out With Otto.
This is a discussion of aggressiveness in humans. Realize that aggressive is a
word with two primary meanings. One meaning is that aggressive is synonymous with active.
That meaning is quite important, but this essay is about another meaning. That is the
association of aggression with violence or threat of violence. This is a social behavior
and only has meaning in a social context. Violence has meant different things to different
cultures. In some cultures it has been celebrated. In some cultures it has been
considered evil. Very often aggressiveness has been mistaken for violence, but they are
quite different. The aggressiveness may be the source of violence, but violence is not
the source of aggressiveness. Also there may be a misunderstanding about violence.
Violence can be physical or mental. That is something that many people seem to have
trouble understanding.
Aggressiveness is fundamentally a reproductive behavior. In animals other than
humans, it is usually just used by males to compete with other males for access to females
or some other reproductive resource. Reproductive resources may be feeding grounds,
breeding areas or some other resource that the male can use to dominate access to females.
Aggressiveness is fundamentally a display behavior. In nature it is almost never
intended to lead to the death of the opponent or even a severe injury. Very often it is
indirect in that it is done to impress the females. The corresponding behavior in females
is coyness. Females promote conflicts between the males so that they can judge the
fittest. In this sense, colorful reproductive displays by males are aggressive yet have
no connotations of violence.
Another aspect of aggressiveness is not directly related to reproduction, but is a
method of organizing the social group. It may be about who gets to take the first turn at
the watering hole. This aspect of aggressiveness is what this essay is about. In humans,
it is about who takes the first action.
In humans there are at least two kinds of aggressive hierarchies. One is the
Alpha dominance hierarchy and the other is the pecking order. Humans use both kinds of
systems.
In the basic alpha dominance hierarchy there is a single male who dominates the
rest of the social group. In the pecking order each individual has a position that is
above and below everyone else. Particularly for humans, because it is an organizational
system, the alpha dominance hierarchy is more efficient because it keeps conflict to a
minimum.
In humans, ideally the alpha may go unchallenged for a long time to, even when the
new member is added to the social group. When a new member enters the social group of the
pecking order, they may literally get beat up by whoever is at the top of the order and
everyone below him until they find their spot in the order where no one below them can
beat them up.
In that for humans to dominance hierarchy is primarily about an organizational
system, the function of the alpha may be almost only that. They may get almost no
prerogatives and it may have no reproductive advantage. Though as part of this
organizational pattern they actually do have the function of first contact with encounters
from outside the social group. Primarily though, it is about organization. Who walks
through the door first.
There can be co-alphas and there can be retired alphas. And woe be to him that
messes up the organizational system.
This is largely a theoretical description up to this point and may sound like it
is only theoretical in practice, but it is extremely real and important as this
description is meant to convey.
This is hard to describe, so let me tell you a story. You might think this a bit
juvenile, but so are humans quite often. I have been many places and seen many things.
Hopefully I learned from them all. I'm a big guy. I have always been a big guy and it is
something I have always had to deal with. usually, I wasn't smart enough to deal with it
in any reasonable fashion and so from my many mistakes I learned a lot. This is natural
human behavior.
My mother had a neurotic fear of violence. She knew I was going to be big and so
she worked to make sure that I would be incapable of violence. I was always big and
strong, but quite inhibited. Note what her lessons were. It takes two to make a fight and
if you are in a fight you are being bad. Those are simple and profound. Also, they are
both wrong, though there is no way I could know that at the time.
To put this in context, I was always bigger than my peers, my classmates. At age
13 I weighed 238 pounds. At age 14 I had a physical education teacher that decided that
though I was a typical 14 year old blob, he was going to whip me into shape. A couple
years of weight training and circuit training, and I was a monster who could bench press
over 300 pounds. My hobby was handball, so I was also very fast. Be aware, that didn't
mean I had a clue.
Move back a bit. I had two older brothers that were bigger and physically stronger
than I was. My self image was not that I was big or strong. Quite the contrary. My oldest
brother was so strong that he didn't have to want to hurt me to beat me in a physical
contest. My other brother was not so nice and so as a rule, I lost to him. Even in grammar
school, I did not understand that "fights" were just display behaviors were something where
no one was supposed to get hurt and winning was a social thing. Fighting with my brothers,
I got hurt and I always lost quite personally. I did not understand the social contests
and competitions with my classmates that were called "fights". I understood what happened
with my brothers.
Move forward again to adolescence where behaviors are still so simple but
developing some resemblance to real social behaviors. There was a dominance hierarchy. It
was organizational. Realize, I grew up in the suburbs. There were no real competitive
forces effecting us. It was simply social forces in play. Psychologically, I was
completely clueless and incapable of competition. Physically, I was bigger and far more
powerful than most adults. I was trained to fight for my life. Not only that, I just
naturally move at about twice the speed of other people. I react before most people could
think of reacting. A prerogative of the hierarchy and where its organization serves is who
moves aside when two people walk towards each other or who goes through a door first. I
would think about it and make a decision before the other person could even start to
react. This is a good place to start chuckling.
Think about it in terms of sociobiology. There are what are called behavioral
releases. The fight or flight mechanism. When a person is physically threatened, there are
generally only two possible responses, fight or flight. Fight is an aggressive response.
Flight is a type of submissive response. There are varieties of both, because these are
actually somewhat complex behaviors in oh so social humans. Well, if you are as big and
strong as I was, there is an alternative. Do nothing. Threats didn't work. I was immune to
that kind of physical violence. I couldn't understand it either. You want to fight me? Uh,
people get hurt that way. I had no concept of natural displays where no one gets hurt.
When fighting my brothers, someone got hurt. I couldn't believe that someone would start a
fight without a good reason. I was pretty oblivious at the time and had many inhibitions
to work against.
The problem is that we are all learning social behavior as is instinctive and
natural. They are all trying to create a natural social organizational system, naturally
based on a dominance hierarchy. I'm totally disrupting the system. I don't fit in. I don't
act dominant or submissive, which might be OK, except that anything but dominant is
interpreted as submissive. Unfortunately, I didn't act submissive. Even as big as I was, I
could have been fit in this very adaptive system, but I didn't follow any of the rules. I
just couldn't be ignored. That just caused "displays". No one wanted it and I have to give
them points for trying to fit me in, but I disrupted the organizational system.
Now step out of this narrative again. It is all well and good to tell my story
here, but what is the meaning? This was at a special time and place. This was a time when
one could look at behaviors like they were pure chemical compounds. A display behavior
that was a "fight" had no appreciable real violence to it. This was during the early
1970's. Ten years later, the violence was real and very dangerous. This was when
pre-marital sex was still a taboo and pornography was rare. Ten years later, the media
was saturated with sex. When I was in school, aggressiveness was a fast car. Seeing the
"dominance" hierarchy at that time, it was clear that it was an organizational system. It
was based on aggressiveness in some way, but it was a cooperative system for allowing
humans in a social group to organize themselves.
A night out with Otto you ask. That was when I was older and dealing with real
social systems. The dominance hierarchy was a common system many social settings. In the
masculine world of the blue collar worker at that time, the dominance hierarchy was a real
phenomena. It was before weapons might be common and was based on the reality of hard
fists, but not only on that. It showed why the system was based on aggressiveness. It was
that that allowed an individual to dominate resources and mates.
I worked many years as an electrician. That meant that I might be in a social
group of other electricians that I regularly worked with or I might be working in a
factory as a transient within a factory where there was an existing social group..
I was older and a little bit wiser. I had learned not to confuse the social system. The
members of any social system want a stable system where everyone knows their place and how
to act. Disruption of this is a bad thing. Look at wild animals where an alpha male
dominates a breeding resource. Confusion leads to greater fighting and lower reproductive
success in the social group. There were consequences to this.
I learned that the alpha was not necessarily the one who wanted to be the most dominant.
Humans are too sophisticated for something that simple. An excessively violent person is
no good for anyone, but an alpha had to have the capability to be violent to suppress any
other violent individuals that might tend to disrupt things. I learned that because of my
physical presence, I was almost always offered the position. Growl a bit and remember to
protect my prerogatives some and all went well. I had the choice of protecting others in
the social group and usually did. It was very unnatural to me though and I made mistakes.
Only one was of consequence and shows the importance of the system.
I was working on a team and a new electrician came on. He was young and of average size.
he challenged me with minor insults and I ignored him. I was supposed to have put him in
his place. The rest of the social group was waiting for me to put him in his place. It
would have been easy, but I paid no attention. This made everyone else uncomfortable. The
upshot was that I let it go on too long before I noticed it and the disruption was done.
It could have and would have led to a real fight. I was physically his superior enough
that no one would have gotten hurt and I would have won the fight, but I had already
failed at the behavior and my function. I ended up getting fired as a direct result of not
maintaining the social organization. They didn't know why, but after my failure, I could
not be tolerated by the social group that was the employees of that company. It would have
caused ongoing disruption like it had in school earlier.
Realize, no one is that conscious of this stuff. They are just responding naturally, but it is
oh so real. I became conscious of it because I was so exposed to it and made so many costly
mistakes. It gets really weird at times. I will mention one time before returning to Otto.
At least by the time I went to college I was fully immersed in a social group that did not
use the aggressive based dominance hierarchy. As a matter of fact, using aggressive
behavior would probably have gotten me widely ostracized, especially by the people that I
considered my social group. Still, they were able to adjust to my physical presence and as
far as I know, rarely felt physically intimidated. That was partly because of careful
avoidance on my part of allowing any misunderstanding. I was at UC Santa Cruz. Social
competition, physically, economically or academically was not the norm and was generally
not socially acceptable. I can only think that competition based on style was acceptable.
That was then.
I spent a quarter at the Bodega Marine Lab. That was an even more academically oriented
group and again, non-competitive to the point of being anti-competitive. We had the Spring
Ball. It was a party for the students and staff at the lab. The Pirate showed up. He was a
local and certainly not an academian. He got fairly drunk and annoyed a number of people.
What was interesting and I experienced this repeatedly over time, was that the same people
that would have socially ostracized me for any aggressive display within the social group
for any reason, wanted me to basically beat him up and eject him from the party. Not just
eject him, but thrash him a bit for good measure. Very interesting. In the more aggressive
based groups, the alpha was expected to be in front when dealing with outsiders from the
social group.
Now back to Otto. I worked as an electrician for some time in a printing factory. There
were about 50 employees on the floor with a well developed long term social organization.
I was obviously a temporary person, but was accepted into the social group as a member.
Now according to theory, I can act as an alpha or not and will be given more latitude
because I will not be there for more than a couple months.
Otto was a large guy. not as big as me, but definitely a big guy. He did have a very large
head though and I assure you that a great deal of it was bone. Hitting him with your hand
would be a mistake. I heard that once he was in a fight with a trucker and was basically
beating him up when one of his co-workers drove by. Later when asked why he was beating
him up, he replied that he thought that the trucker was going to start a fight with him.
Now there's some logic.
Interestingly, it was not as simple as Otto. Otto was in his late 20's. His two brothers
worked there as well. The older brother was a bruiser, but was at least 40. The younger
brother was just a bit older than Otto, but was of much more average build. The older
brother was a retired alpha. You would not want to fight him or he you. He would have
probably won, but he would hurt for days afterwards and any injuries would heal more
slowly. Overall though, the dynamics were interesting because they showed that the alpha
was really not just one person. There were more than one person involved potentially. The
alpha was a group. This is not that rare.
It's not as important to this description to say, but I went out drinking with Otto and
Jim one night. It was amusing so I'll tell some of it, but not all. Jim was a big African
American guy and was not in the hierarchy the same way as Otto, probably because there
were only two African Americans working at the factory. They were not as directly in the
social group. At the first place we stopped, we were drinking mugs of beer. Now Otto
wanted to fight me. It was nothing personal, He was just a fighter that liked to fight and
naturally wanted to try me. I avoid fights. Now there are rules to this. He can't just say
he wants to fight me. It does have to be by mutual consent or it is not a social behavior.
His strategy was to be loud and obnoxious enough to get me to object and then it was fair
to challenge me then. He's just following instinct and learned rules. The waitress asked
me to do something about him and I said, sorry, but he's just looking for a fight. At one
point, I had just sat down on the bar stool after getting something. I happened to be
laughing at the time. As I sat down, Otto backhanded me in the chest with his beer mug
in hand. I flew off the stool backwards and landed sitting on the floor
still holding my beer and still laughing. Actually, I did think it was funny, but the
point is that I did not give either a dominant or submissive response. Otto could still
not follow a normal behavioral sequence without more clues. Plus he now has to wonder just
how tough I might be.
I don't remember the whole evening. I think he sort of gave up some trying to figure
things out after that. There were a lot of other weird events of the night and he did
punch out the windshield of my van at some point when Jim was threatening me. He said
he didn't want us argueing. Still, the entire night was not an extremely closely examined
event of youth. It was not a time to be in academic mode. A lesson is where it is learned.
Aggressiveness is a fascinating human behavior with many aspects. Perhaps the most
interesting is the important constructive organization it can offer to a social group. It
may come at a cost, but it is still critically important.