Patriarchy Isn’t A Merit-Based Hierarchy
That’s a lie intended to justify such a disparate access to power
“Men are just used to competition,” a male friend said to me the other day in a discussion about patriarchy as a dominance-based hierarchy. “They are used to trying out for sports teams and getting selected according to their ability, so they don’t really see what the big deal is about hierarchy. It just makes sense to them.”
Besides the fact that many women have also been trying out for sports teams since they were young children, a dominance hierarchy isn’t about letting the cream rise to the top. It’s also not the only kind of hierarchy, and it most certainly isn’t merit-based. A dominance hierarchy (which is what patriarchy actually is, not just a dynamic between men and women) is about maintaining traditional power through bullying, coercion, and artificial barriers to true competition. It’s the complete antithesis of a merit-based system, no matter what Jordan Peterson and his ilk might try to tell you.
I have actually heard Peterson admit that patriarchy has many tyrannical elements (although on alternate days, he denies that patriarchy even exists) but when he does stipulate to it, defends it as necessary for a successful society. “Wouldn’t you want a surgeon who was excellent?” he queries. The problem with that analogy, however, is that an excellent surgeon has earned that status by demonstrating skill and patriarchy is not about earning your place in the hierarchy through merit. It’s about clawing your way to as high in the pecking order as you can get, by any means necessary, including violently holding other people down or erecting barriers to them being able to compete. I don’t want a surgeon who got a top slot at a hospital by breaking the hands of his rivals and telling lies about them, and who may or may not be any good with a scalpel. I’m guessing you don’t either.
Let me say it again for all those who have some kind of emotional knee jerk reaction to the word hierarchy, either for the good or for the ill. Hierarchy isn’t the problem. That word simply means a system or organization in which people or groups are ranked one above the other according to status or authority. How that status or authority is granted is the issue. Not everyone has the same skill or is equally capable of the same achievements, and we don’t need to live in a world where everyone has equal say about everything, but a dominance-based hierarchy isn’t a good way to reconcile that. This is because rankings and status are often artificial, based in immutable traits like gender, race, and sexuality, or in life situations that confer inherent disadvantages right from the start, such as being born into poverty. It’s also maintained through a kind of might makes right ethos that justifies and even approves of ruthlessness in order to rise in the pecking order.
Social stratification and massive wealth disparity, as well as gender power differentials are a relatively recent human development.
This is not healthy competition and it’s certainly not about merit. Some might say that it’s just the way of the world, the way that it’s always been, or that the only other option is anarchy, but that isn’t actually the case. Social stratification and massive wealth disparity, as well as gender power differentials are a relatively recent human development. Prior to a few thousand years ago, enforced egalitarianism was the survival strategy that our ancestors used to survive.
Christopher Boehm is an anthropologist and primatologist who is currently the Director of the Jane Goodall Research Center at the University of Southern California. He believes that suppressing our primate ancestors’ dominance hierarchies by enforcing these egalitarian norms was a central adaptation of human evolution. Enhanced cooperation lowered the risks of Paleolithic life for small, isolated bands of humans and was likely crucial to our survival and evolutionary success. It was only with the advent of agriculture and incursions from more warlike northern tribes (the so-called Kurgan invasion) that this began to change to a stratified society enforced by fear and coercion, and where known paternity becomes a central aspect.
There are also several current cultures around the world who don’t live within a patriarchal dominance hierarchy, further demonstrating that it’s not actually timeless, inevitable, or necessary. In fact, a Stanford University study determined that patriarchal dominance hierarchies which spread about 6–9 thousand years ago and overtook egalitarian communities did so not because they were a more efficient system, but because they caused so much societal disruption.
“In other words, inequality did not spread from group to group because it is an inherently better system for survival, but because it creates demographic instability, which drives migration and conflict and leads to the cultural — or physical — extinction of egalitarian societies.” New Scientist
Of course, some people born into poverty or other disadvantages make their way into a better economic or social status, but it takes more than just hard work and perseverance, often involving things like access to mentors and just plain good luck.
“Advantages beget advantages. Those who are born in the upperclass echelons are likely to remain in the upper class (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009). The majority of individuals who work at elite and prestigious firms tend to come from elite educational institutions (Rivera, 2016). And high-earning entrepreneurs disproportionately originate from highly educated and well-to-do families (Levine & Rubinstein, 2013). These are some examples of how advantage tends to be self-perpetuating, belying the American ideal of social mobility (e.g., Hochschild, 1996).” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
It’s an American myth that you can always just pull yourself up by your bootstraps, particularly when we have an economy that has as it’s foundation an underclass of low wage earners (or no wage earners) supporting the other part. The rest of the economy relies on poorly paid or free child care, as well as people like low wage grocery clerks, restaurant servers, and lettuce pickers, to name just a few. One study found that 1 in 3 people who work in manufacturing need some kind of public assistance just to make ends meet. There is currently no place in the US where a worker making minimum wage can afford to rent a two-bedroom apartment. Don’t people who work full time deserve to have some basic standard of living? Wouldn’t a true meritocracy support that?
No matter how many people do eventually make their way to something better, we still need about 1/4 of the people to do these jobs at measly wages. It’s a two-tiered economy. One in which 1 in 5 children (as well as 1 in 5 senior citizens) are not getting enough to eat by US guidelines for adequate food intake and nutrition. Nearly 1.4 million veterans use SNAP (supplemental nutritional assistance program or food stamps) to put food on the table as well. Shouldn’t those who served our country in the most profound way possible merit better? Do children and elders deserve to be hungry?
Getting back to equal opportunity, research shows that coming from a more highly educated and financially stable background gives you a huge leg up in the world.
In terms of access, we find a distinction between traditional professions, such as law, medicine, and finance, which are dominated by the children of higher managers and professionals, and more technical occupations, such as engineering and IT, that recruit more widely. Moreover, even when people who are from working-class backgrounds are successful in entering high-status occupations, they earn 17 percent less, on average, than individuals from privileged backgrounds.
Opportunities and expectations for higher education also help to perpetuate this disparity, but even when children from poorer backgrounds do go to college, they still typically end up earning significantly less than their peers who came from privileged backgrounds.
In the United States, for instance, out of a hundred children whose parents are among the bottom 10% of income earners, only twenty to thirty go to college. However, that figure reaches ninety when parents are within the top 10% earners. Incompetent Rich People Often Get Ahead
And all that is without factoring in the artificial barriers that are often purposely erected by those with the most power to prevent others from even having a shot. Limiting the power of those who are lower on the pyramid of the social hierarchy helps to legitimize the power of those who are closer to the apex. A dominance-based hierarchy like patriarchy reinforces social stratification and keeps people “in their place” by preventing them from competing with those with more traditional power. This helps to bolster the illusion that those at the top have earned their place there through their own hard work and diligence.
Beyond things like the “good ole boys network,” segregation (both the legal and the de facto kind) as well as the hundreds of laws that used to be different for women than they were for men, speak to this artificial reinforcement of the social status quo (to say nothing of all the customs).
Both Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously could not get hired by law firms when they completed law school, even though both graduated near the very top of their respective classes and went to top tier schools. The fact that they both went on to become Supreme Court Justices speaks to the anti-meritocracy flavor of the customs of that time to mostly not even interview female lawyers, much less hire them. Opportunities for black lawyers were similarly non-existent.
You do not foster a meritocracy by preventing certain groups of people from even having the chance to prove their skills. Obviously. Ergo, patriarchy has never been a meritocracy and was in fact, designed less than 10 thousand years ago as a type of feudal system where those with less power — not just women, but all those with less power — are intentionally kept that way in order to serve the interests of those with more.
Things may be a lot less formally stratified than they used to be even a few decades ago, but that’s because the dominance hierarchy inherent in patriarchy keeps being challenged. Although there are still structural roadblocks to a chance to compete based on your merits, at least they are no longer a matter of law as they were a mere 50 years ago. Still, people with “non-white sounding” or obviously female names get called for interviews significantly less than those named David Smith. This is so widely known and well established that some companies have started doing blind hiring where any personally identifying information is removed from a resume so that it can be evaluated without any unconscious bias and instead, strictly on its actual strengths.
Most people in America, even those who are close to the apex of the dominance hierarchy, are typically not oppressing others out of conscious malice. The vast majority of racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, etc., comes out of the subconscious desire to adhere to the patriarchal status quo, because it is most known, and therefore most comfortable. It’s the social system that we’ve all been indoctrinated into since birth, and we’ve been taught that if we don’t win, we lose — that it’s zero-sum world. Men, in particular, are taught to believe in this and accept it as only right and natural — hence my friend’s comment.
One of the ways to distinguish a hierarchy of actualization from a dominance hierarchy is that rather than being based in power over, it is based in power to or power with.
But since a patriarchal social system is one where some people have more inherent worth than others, primarily based on accidents of birth, and not by earning them, and because that stratification is maintained through bullying, coercion, and discrimination, it’s a good thing that other types of organizational and social structure are beginning to be more widely embraced. Movements toward hierarchies of actualization are beginning to take hold in the business world, particularly in highly competitive environments, not because they are nicer settings, but because they allow the work to be done more efficiently.
One of the ways to distinguish a hierarchy of actualization from a dominance hierarchy is that rather than being based in power over, it is based in power to or power with. Increasingly, businesses are embracing this model for the same reason that the Navy Seals do — it’s a lot more agile to let the people closest to the work make most of the relevant decisions. Layers of bureaucratic hierarchy just slow down the ability to act quickly.
Denmark teaches principles of this way of relating to other people in its schools. Students learn to compete primarily against themselves and to help other students who are struggling as a way to improve their own skills. This approach reduces bullying and helps to build a stronger sense of community, but it also teaches the relational skills necessary for successful management and entrepreneurship. As a result, Denmark is the 10th most competitive economy in the world.
Conversely, a patriarchal dominance hierarchy is not about building relationships that will strengthen an organization or even foster excellence. It is inherently about the stratification of society, with the strong exerting domination over anyone weaker or less powerful. It is about turning away from the cooperation and community that human beings crave in favor of aggrandizing the self at the expense of anyone who gets in your way. In order to do this, you must view everyone around you as a threat to your place in the hierarchy and you must numb yourself to the pain of others. You cannot rise in the hierarchy if you are too worried about the feelings of those you step on in order to do so.
This is not healthy competition or an example of those who have worked the hardest and have the most talent reaping the natural benefits of that. In fact, it’s the polar opposite. Patriarchy has always been a way to maintain and preserve traditional power in a highly stratified social system and to justify that by making it seem as though it was somehow earned. White men have 8 times as much political power as black women. Do you really think that’s due to merit? Really?
© Copyright Elle Beau 2020 Elle Beau writes on Medium about sex, life, relationships, society, anthropology, spirituality, and love. If this story is appearing anywhere other than Medium.com, it appears without my consent and has been stolen.
