We have an instinct to want to submit and worship as well as to dominate. It likely comes from the need of the group to have leadership. No decision is the worst possible decision. We also have an instinct to believe what we were taught as children. Again evolved for group cohesion. These instincts work by means of pleasure (joy, peace) and displeasure (fear, guilt) emotions.
You're describing something that evolutionary psychology and anthropology have explored quite a bit. A few thoughts on your framework:
On the dominance/submission instinct — you're right that hierarchical instincts appear to be deeply wired. Primatologists like Frans de Waal have documented how social hierarchy reduces constant conflict — having established leadership means the group doesn't relitigate every decision constantly. Your point about "no decision being the worst decision" is sharp: in ancestral environments, paralysis in the face of a predator or rival group was lethal. A bad leader was often better than no leader.
On inherited belief — this maps well onto what researchers call epistemic deference or cultural learning bias. Children are essentially designed to be credulous toward caregivers; it's cognitively efficient. You can't reason from first principles about fire or predators — you absorb the group's accumulated knowledge fast. The cost is that you also absorb its errors and myths.
On the emotional enforcement mechanism — this is the interesting part. These instincts don't work through conscious reasoning; they work through feelings that feel like they're about truth or morality but are really about group-fitness signals. Guilt and shame are social pain. Joy and peace often signal "I'm aligned with the group." This creates a real epistemic problem: the discomfort you feel when questioning a childhood belief can be indistinguishable from the discomfort of doing something genuinely wrong.
One implication worth sitting with: if these instincts are real, then a person's felt sense of moral certainty or spiritual peace isn't strong evidence that their beliefs are true — only that those beliefs are well-integrated into their psychology and social world.
Where are you taking this line of thinking?
Oh I don't know, I want to see where you will take it. It might be mentioned that no decision now is a valid decision. How can it be applied to nations, religions, businesses and families?
That's a rich question. Let me think through each domain seriously.
The "No Decision Is a Decision" Correction
First, you're right to sharpen this. Inaction isn't neutral — it has consequences just like any active choice. A nation that doesn't regulate, a religion that doesn't reform, a family that avoids a hard conversation — these are all choices with outcomes. The instinct toward submission partly works by making inaction feel safe, when it often isn't.
Nations
The dominance/submission dynamic plays out visibly here. Populations under stress reliably seek stronger leaders — this is well-documented across history. The emotional reward of having a decisive authority figure is real, which is why democracies are actually somewhat unnatural — they require citizens to tolerate ambiguity, disagreement, and weak central figures.
The inherited belief instinct becomes nationalism and cultural identity. These feel like truth but are largely accidents of birth. Nations that can't distinguish between "this is our tradition" and "this is correct" tend toward rigidity and conflict with neighbors.
The danger: populations can be managed through these instincts — manufactured enemies trigger submission to leadership, childhood indoctrination produces citizens who feel visceral discomfort questioning the state.
Religions
This is perhaps the most direct application. Religious institutions are extraordinarily well-optimized — likely unconsciously over centuries — for exploiting exactly these instincts:
- A cosmic authority figure satisfies the submission drive completely
- Childhood instruction during the peak credulous window locks in belief with emotional anchors
- Guilt and sin are social pain reframed as metaphysical reality
- Community belonging rewards conformity with genuine warmth and peace
None of this means religious beliefs are false — but it does mean the feeling of certainty they produce is not reliable evidence for their truth. The person raised in a different tradition feels equally certain.
The "no decision" point applies sharply here too — remaining in a faith by inertia, never genuinely examining it, is itself a choice. Many people make it unconsciously.
Businesses
Corporations select hard for dominance instincts at the top and submission instincts below. The hierarchy feels natural because it is natural — it maps onto ancestral group structures.
The inherited belief problem shows up as institutional culture — "this is how we do things here" resists examination because questioning it triggers mild versions of the same guilt and anxiety as questioning a childhood religion. Founders who built a culture are treated with something approaching ancestor worship even after conditions change.
The "no decision" trap is particularly costly in business — markets move, and comfortable inertia kills companies slowly and then suddenly.
Families
Families are where these instincts are installed. Parents hold extraordinary power — not just over behavior but over the emotional wiring of what feels true, safe, and good. This is mostly necessary, but it means:
- Family hierarchies can calcify long past their usefulness — adult children still navigating a childhood submission dynamic with parents
- Family beliefs (political, religious, dietary, social) carry an emotional charge that purely intellectual beliefs don't, because they're tied to love and belonging
- Challenging family orthodoxy feels like betrayal — that guilt is real even when the belief being questioned is plainly wrong
- The "no decision" problem: families that avoid hard conversations about money, illness, dysfunction, or changing roles make a decision by default — usually one that benefits whoever currently holds power
The Common Thread
Across all four: these instincts are conservative in the literal sense — they preserve existing structure. They make the current arrangement feel natural, right, and emotionally comfortable. Anyone who benefits from the current arrangement has an unconscious interest in never examining them.
The instincts aren't evil — they built every functional human group that ever existed. But they are blind. They don't know if the leader is wise or corrupt, if the inherited belief is true or false, if the current structure serves the group or just the people at the top.
The question they can never answer for themselves is: whose interests does this arrangement actually serve?
It serves the interests of the group. Maybe the leaders a bit more. There is a level of selection here where groups well led and tightly followed tend to prevail.
Yes, and this is a crucial clarification. You're describing multilevel selection — and it reframes everything.
The Selection Argument
Groups with strong leadership-followership dynamics, and tight inherited belief systems, outcompeted groups without them. Not because any individual planned it that way, but because those groups:
- Made faster decisions under pressure
- Maintained cohesion under stress
- Passed functional beliefs to the next generation efficiently
- Could coordinate large numbers of strangers around shared identity
This is why these instincts feel so righteous. They were genuinely adaptive. The guilt you feel breaking group norms, the peace you feel submitting to legitimate authority, the warmth of shared belief — these aren't illusions exactly. They worked. The groups that felt them most strongly are our ancestors.
The "Leaders Benefit a Bit More" Nuance
This is carefully put. It wasn't purely exploitative — a leader who extracted too much would lose the group's loyalty and the group would fail. There's a natural tension that keeps it somewhat honest:
- Leaders need followers to remain willing
- Followers need leaders to actually perform
- The arrangement only persists if both sides get something real
But "a bit more" compounds over time. And crucially, the instincts don't recalibrate well when conditions change — followers trained to submit continue submitting even when the leader stops performing. The emotional loyalty outlasts the rational justification.
Where Selection Gets Complicated
The group-selection logic works cleanly when groups are in genuine competition. But several things break the elegance:
Scale — the instincts evolved for groups of perhaps 50-150 people where everyone knew each other. Applied to nations of millions, the "group" becomes abstract. You can be made to feel tribal loyalty toward people you've never met, and hostility toward strangers who are in reality very similar to you. Leaders can manufacture the feeling of group cohesion without delivering its actual benefits.
The out-group problem — tight group cohesion almost always comes paired with out-group hostility. The same instincts that make a group strong internally make it dangerous externally. What served survival in a world of competing small bands is genuinely dangerous with modern weapons and global interdependence.
Memetic selection — beliefs and institutions now compete and spread in ways decoupled from group survival. A religion or ideology can spread globally not because it makes groups stronger but because it's emotionally compelling — it triggers the instincts effectively. The selection pressure has shifted from "does this help the group survive" to "does this spread."
The Deeper Irony
The very success of these instincts has created a world where they're increasingly mismatched to the problems we face. Climate change, nuclear weapons, pandemic disease — these require cooperation between groups, suppressing the very in-group/out-group instincts that made groups strong.
We need the coordination capacity that leadership instincts provide, but directed at a "group" that is essentially all of humanity. That's asking the instincts to operate at a scale and level of abstraction they were never designed for.
Which raises a genuinely hard question — can reason and conscious awareness of these instincts partially compensate for their limitations? Or are we too thoroughly run by them to get enough distance?
Natural processes don't plan ahead, they can't. They optimize for existing conditions. I might mention, regarding bad leaders, a lot depends on how they are chosen and leaders tend to favor family for genetic reasons, which is not the best as a rule. Before guns, it took getting close to assassinate the leader, so it had a selective effect, now gone.
These are excellent additions that sharpen the picture considerably.
Natural Processes Are Blind
This is fundamental and worth sitting with. Evolution, cultural selection, market forces — none of them have goals. They produce fit outcomes for current conditions with no foresight whatsoever. The lag between conditions changing and selection catching up can be catastrophic. We are running essentially stone-age social software on civilization-scale problems. Nobody designed this mismatch. Nobody can simply fix it either — you can't opt out of having the instincts.
Leader Selection Mechanisms Matter Enormously
This is undersold in most political thinking. The process by which leaders are chosen shapes everything, because it determines what qualities get selected for. Some mechanisms and what they actually select for:
- Hereditary succession — selects for being born to the right person. Occasionally brilliant, structurally unreliable
- Democratic election — selects heavily for charisma, emotional manipulation of the submission instinct, and the appearance of strength. Not reliably wisdom or competence
- Military coup — selects for ruthlessness and organizational skill within the army specifically
- Corporate boards — select for political skill within a small elite network, comfort with existing shareholders
- Religious succession — selects for doctrinal conformity and institutional loyalty
None of these reliably selects for actual competence at leading well. They select for competence at obtaining leadership, which is a very different skill.
Nepotism as Genetic Logic
Your point about family favoritism is sharp. From the leader's genetic perspective it makes perfect sense — inclusive fitness means your children and relatives carry your genes forward. A leader who places family in power is unconsciously optimizing for gene propagation, not group performance.
The group suffers but the instinct is indifferent to that. This is one of the clearest cases where individual genetic interest and group interest diverge. Almost every human institution has had to develop explicit rules against nepotism precisely because the instinct is so strong and so reliably damaging at scale. And those rules are constantly being eroded from within by the very instinct they're designed to constrain.
The Assassination Selection Effect — This Is Fascinating
This point deserves real attention because it's rarely made. Before ranged weapons:
- Killing a leader required physical proximity and personal courage
- It was therefore costly and risky for the assassin
- This created a meaningful filter — only leaders who provoked extreme grievance got removed this way
- But it did function as a corrective mechanism for the very worst abuses
- A tyrant who pushed too far faced genuine physical danger from those around him
- This kept a certain accountability in place — leaders had to maintain at least the loyalty of their immediate circle
The gun, and especially modern security apparatus, has largely eliminated this correction. A sufficiently protected leader can abuse their position without meaningful physical risk from those they harm. The feedback loop is broken.
What replaced it was supposed to be institutional — laws, elections, term limits, separation of powers. These are essentially attempts to recreate in bureaucratic form the corrective pressure that physical proximity once provided naturally. They work unevenly and are always vulnerable to being dismantled by a leader who consolidates power faster than institutions can respond.
The Compounding Problem
Put it all together and you get a grim picture:
Selection processes don't reliably choose good leaders. Good leaders tend to favor family over merit. The ancient corrective mechanisms for catastrophically bad leaders have been neutralized. And the instincts of followers push toward submission and loyalty even when the leader is visibly failing.
The institutional replacements — democracy, rule of law, free press — are genuine achievements but they're fragile, relatively recent, and are themselves subject to manipulation by the very instincts they're meant to constrain. A charismatic leader can use the submission instinct to dismantle the institutions designed to check him, with the genuine enthusiastic support of followers whose instincts are being expertly played.
The situation isn't hopeless — awareness of the mechanism is at least a partial defense. But it requires sustained conscious effort against the grain of instincts that feel completely natural and right. That's a difficult ask at the population level.
What we have is what we have; we muddle through.
Yes. And there's something honest and even wise in that.
Muddling Through Is Underrated
It lacks the satisfying narrative of either utopian progress or tragic decline. But it's actually what the historical record mostly shows. Civilizations don't usually solve their fundamental contradictions — they manage them, imperfectly, with constant backsliding and occasional lurches forward, and somehow continue.
The institutions that work best are probably the ones designed with muddling through in mind — that assume leaders will be self-interested, followers will be credulous, nepotism will happen, and build in friction and redundancy accordingly. Not because humans will rise to their best selves but because the system can absorb them at their ordinary worst.
The Honest Position
We can see the instincts operating. We can name them. We can build institutions that partially compensate for them. We can individually try to notice when guilt or submission or inherited belief is doing our thinking for us.
But we can't transcend the hardware. The person who thinks they've fully escaped these instincts through reason has probably just found a more sophisticated way to serve them.
Which Means
Grandiose solutions — the perfect system, the enlightened leader, the rational society — are probably themselves products of the same instincts. The yearning for a decisive answer, a strong framework, a belief system that resolves everything cleanly.
Muddling through, with eyes open, may genuinely be the most sophisticated response available.
It's not inspiring. But it has the considerable virtue of being true.
What I had in mind regarding assassin risk was previously it was usually family member or servant or guard or compatriot. Now it can be anyone, so the bad emperor effect is neutralized.
Ah, I misread your point entirely — you had it reversed from what I assumed, and it's more interesting this way.
The Correction
Previously, the people close enough to act were precisely the people the leader had to keep happy — family, palace guards, inner circle, senior military. This created real accountability but only to a very narrow group. The leader could oppress peasants freely as long as he kept the people with physical access satisfied. It was accountability to the elite, not to the population.
Roman emperors are the perfect case — they could be monsters to the general population but the moment they alienated the Praetorian Guard it was over. The guard actually auctioned the emperorship at one point. That's the mechanism laid bare.
What the Gun Changed
Now grievance anywhere in the population can reach the leader. The circle of potential accountability expanded from a dozen trusted intimates to essentially everyone. This should democratize the corrective mechanism.
But it has been largely neutralized by:
- Professional security services of extraordinary sophistication
- Physical separation of leaders from population
- The security apparatus itself becoming a power center that protects leaders from this broader accountability
So the old narrow accountability is gone, and the new broader accountability has been successfully walled off. In some ways the worst of both — emperors who don't need to satisfy either their inner circle or their general population, just whoever controls the security services.
Which returns to muddling through. The mechanisms evolve, the workarounds evolve, nothing is ever fully solved.
The mechanism worked better in the past as those close were informed.
Yes, that's a crucial distinction.
Informed Proximity
The inner circle — family, guards, senior advisors, military commanders — were not just physically close. They were informationally close. They saw the leader daily. They knew the actual decisions being made, the real reasoning, the private behavior versus the public performance. They couldn't be easily fooled by managed image.
A commander who watched his emperor make catastrophically bad military decisions had direct unfiltered knowledge. A family member who saw the private paranoia or incompetence couldn't have it spun away. The feedback was raw and immediate.
What We Have Now
Modern populations make judgments about leaders almost entirely through mediated information — press, television, social media, official announcements. All of these are manageable and are actively managed. The gap between the leader's actual functioning and the public image can be enormous and sustained almost indefinitely.
The people who do have informed proximity now — senior staff, intelligence chiefs, close advisers — are selected heavily for loyalty and discretion, and have powerful personal incentives not to act on what they know. Whistleblowing is costly. The mechanisms for acting on inside knowledge are weak and slow — journalism, investigations, elections — compared to the directness of the old corrective.
The Net Result
The old system had narrow accountability to informed people with direct means of correction.
The new system has theoretically broad accountability to largely uninformed people with slow and manipulable means of correction.
Neither is clean. But the old system's informational advantage was real and is genuinely lost.
That nothing is perfect is of course why change is constant. Nations come and go, yesterday's business leader is bankrupt today.
Yes. And this is actually a comforting thought if you hold it correctly.
Imperfection as the Engine
Nothing is stable because nothing is perfectly adapted. Every solution creates new problems. Every successful group attracts parasites, internal and external. Every institution that forms to solve a problem eventually starts serving its own continuity instead. The very success of a business or nation creates rigidities — the instincts toward inherited belief and submission to established authority work against the adaptation that success required in the first place.
Success selects for the conditions that produced it, which are never permanent.
The Lifecycle Is the Pattern
It's remarkably consistent across domains:
- Nations rise on energy and coherence, calcify into bureaucracy and privilege, decline or collapse
- Religions begin as radical challenges to existing order, become the existing order, require new radical challenges
- Businesses disrupt established players, become the established player, get disrupted
- Families build something across generations, the third generation has no memory of building, dissipates it
Gibbon saw it in Rome. Toynbee tried to systematize it across civilizations. Ibn Khaldun described it elegantly in the 14th century with his concept of asabiyyah — group cohesion that builds empires and then softens in comfort until a hungrier group displaces them.
The Stoic Reading
There's something almost settling in this view. The Roman emperor Hadrian reportedly murmured on his deathbed something like — little soul, wandering guest of the body, where will you go now. The whole empire felt that transience eventually.
Nothing failing is therefore surprising or uniquely catastrophic. It's the process working as it always has.
The Practical Reading
Which means the question is never really how do we build something permanent — that's the wrong question, probably driven by the same instincts toward certainty and stability.
The better question is how do we muddle through this particular transition without losing too much of what was built.
That's modest enough to be achievable. And it's essentially what every generation has actually done.
