Pecking Order Behavior, The Territorial Imperative,

Reciprocity and Sovereignty

"In the way of the superior man there are four things, to not one of which have I as yet attained.-To serve my father, as I would require my son to serve me: to this I have not attained; to serve my prince as I would require my minister to serve me: to this I have not attained; to serve my elder brother as I would require my younger brother to serve me: to this I have not attained; to set the example in behaving to a friend, as I would require him to behave to me: to this I have not attained.” Confucius, “Analects”

Reciprocity by itself does not guarantee protection from pecking order behavior becoming a part of positive or statutory law. In the Confucian system obedience was required to ones Father, to Elders, to the Emperor, to the Elder Brother, etc. In the passage above Confucius makes it clear that this obedience is a two-way street. You obey your Elder Brother and your Younger Brother obeys you. You obey your Father and your Son obeys you.

There is another story about Confucius where a son has behaved in a disgraceful fashion. Confucius does not punish the son and the Prince who he is serving as a minister asks him why. Confucius speaks about the immorality of the times and how the father did not raise the son properly.

It is important to understand these things. If a person claims an authority or right over others, he creates a situation where others will feel that it is legitimate for someone to claim a similar authority or right over him. If a person denies the right of others to command him, then he also suggests that he himself has no right to command others.

Custer was disliked by the officer corps of the 7^th Cavalry because he broke this rule. He disregarded the rules and commands of those above him and insisted on strict obedience to every order he gave. Generally speaking people will feel abused by others if others insist on treating them in a fashion that they will not accept from their superiors.

Caste societies are built on this kind of institutionalized pecking order behavior. The King is nominally obedient to God, the Aristocrats to the King, the lesser Aristocrats to the Greater, so on down the line to the peasant or serf, or Brahmin to Untouchable.

The traditional Republic is a balance of power between very minor or petty Kings who have banded together for their mutual benefit. The word Republic comes from the Latin De Re Publica, which means of the common wealth or property. Hence also our word commonwealth. In this system each head of household is a King with full power to command those beneath him in his own household. He respects the similar powers of other Kings on the condition that they respect his. Here reciprocity becomes the basis of equal rights between Persons. This is the basis of the law of Persons of the Roman Republic.

In this system personhood is limited to property owners and their dependents are not full persons. The degree of authority which each Person has over the lesser persons in his territory varies from system to system. In most historical examples of this kind of early system, the authority of the Person was fairly absolute including the right to kill lesser persons in his territory for any reason he deemed necessary.

Since the ‘kingdoms’ were households and all members of the household knew each other intimately and were bound together by natural bonds of affection, the abuse of such powers was relatively rare. Husbands do not normally kill their wives or Fathers their children.

For another minor King to attempt to interfere would amount to the invasion of a sovereign kingdom by an alien force. Each dominant male would deeply resent and violently resist the invasion of his territory by others. Each Citizen not directly involved would see such an action as a threat to his own Sovereignty. This is the instinctive basis for the right to privacy. A fact that is easily apparent in our own system where it derives from the castle doctrine of English Common Law. As long as the percentage of property owners is large enough, this sense of equality and dealing with equals is a major shaping force on the character of the Citizens. The practice of respecting others creates a culture of equality and a concept of human rights and dignities. In these early societies these rights are strictly limited to certain adult males, but the idea and tradition develops. A multi-tyrant Social Contract exists with a psychology of equal rights and mutual respect.

As these early groups of roughly equal property owning Persons continued to exist, some would do better and some would do worse in acquiring and increasing property and wealth. This would mean that some would lose the amount of property required to be full Persons and find their status diminished. The number of Persons would diminish as this process continued until only a small number of Persons retained the traditional rights of Citizens in the Republic.

At this point the society has ceased to be a Republic and become an Oligarchy. At this time two things have happened. There is a large population of disenfranchised persons who remember and expect to exercise the authority of Persons and have their rights respected, and the legal rights and powers of Persons have been limited to a small minority of very wealthy individuals.

In this society most daily interaction between each Person and those around him is that of a master to his servants or dependents. This means that each spends the majority of his time dealing with inferiors and superiors but not equals so the culture even among Persons is no longer one of equals respecting the rights of other equals, but that of master and servant. The size of the personal fortune and the number of retainers grows to a point where the bonds of mutual affection no longer restrain the abuses of the absolute power such persons possessed over their households under the Republic.

The majority of the population is forced to live at the whim of these Persons and also ceases to feel the emotional reality of equal rights and citizenship. The entire society though still formally possessing the institutions and laws of a Republic has become that of a pecking order or caste society.

The ability of a few hundred absolute tyrants to oppress the people is greater than the ability of one absolute tyrant to oppress the people. There is a limit to how much oppression one person can do. There are only 24 hours in a day, and you can only give so much attention and time to so many people around you. This oppression by multiple petty tyrants coupled with the memory of greater personal rights and dignity and the presence of opposed powers struggling for supremacy makes this system inherently unstable. Revolution follows automatically.

The great Persons no longer understanding and feeling the meaning of equality and citizenship begin to compete to see who will be King. They enlist the aid of the disenfranchised persons who remember better times and become populist tyrants, dictators, or kings. This is what happened in Rome when Caesar rose to power. The period in which this power struggle takes place is frequently a sort of multi-tyrant anarchy in which numerous minor tyrants struggle to see who will be the lord of all.

At this point in the development of society something counter-intuitive occurs. The dictator now has to protect the rights of the weak against the strong. There are two major reasons for this. 1) If he allows anyone else to exercise a dictatorial power akin to his, he allows them to make their own laws and implicitly ignore his laws and decisions, or apparently exercise an arbitrary authority equal to his own. Allowing this kind of disrespect to his authority by the great men of the empire is suicidal. 2) Part of his power to overcome other Persons roughly equal to him in wealth derives from the support of the common people whom he must therefore be solicitous of.

Since it is dangerous to the King to let his Officers act independently of his laws and edicts, he must insist on all obeying the law. Outside of the immediate presence of the King or Emperor the society becomes a government by law. The habit of accepting legal standards rather than personal power as the final authority in disputes becomes established throughout society except in the royal or imperial court itself.

This habit of seeing all persons as equal before an impartial law results in an increase of legal rights and a decrease in status rights in all levels of society. Slaves receive greater legal protection. The traditional right of a husband to kill his wife and children are suspended or voided altogether. The Sovereignty of the upper classes diminishes and personal Sovereignty over the self increases in all classes. All of this occurs without any intention on the part of the persons involved. Certain behaviors are reinforced and others weakened by the necessary constraints of the system.

The Emperor is forced to enforce rule by law because the Empire is too big for him to rule on every individual incident himself and he cannot allow others to appear to ignore or disrespect him by ruling on them arbitrarily themselves. This development requires a large empire. It does not follow in small political organizations or City States.

This development habituates the ordinary people and even the upper classes to the rule of an established law. Human rights which vanished during the period of the Oligarchy make a reappearance under the Principate. One of the peculiar contradictions of history occurs. During periods of the worst sorts of tyranny, under men like Nero and Caligula, while the most horrible abuses ensue in their immediate vicinity, human rights and the rule of law advance everywhere outside their immediate presence. This is the equality of Subjects, not of Citizens. The presence of the Emperor immediately suspends all rights of the Subject.

Since the Aristocrats now have no more rights in the presence of the Emperor than a slave has in their presence, they protest this as the worst and most degrading form of tyranny. Indeed such persons in the immediate vicinity of the Emperor had fewer rights in the sense of legal protection from his arbitrary authority than a slave did from abuses at their hands in the absence of the Emperor. They suffer the most from his arbitrary authority since they must be present in the court to advance their own power and personal interests.

It differs from the equality of Citizens in the early Republic because there no authority existed which had such an absolute sovereignty over the Citizens, though those Citizens all exerted such an absolute authority over their own households.

Sometimes this system reverts to a temporary Oligarchy. The Emperor or King sees the Nobles as allies instead of threats to his own power. He allows them to exercise a dictatorial power and make arbitrary rulings in their own realms as he does in the Kingdom at large. Another exercise of the sense of reciprocity in this case reciprocity in pecking order rights. Generally this leads to another period of Multi-tyrant anarchy and a less trusting person rising to ultimate power.

Human rights and the idea of equal rights for all are fragile concepts. They are easily destroyed by economic forces. Subtle changes in a society, its economy, the distribution of wealth, or the exercise of authority can produce a culture which conditions formally free Citizens to think, feel, and act like Subjects. The economic development, population density, overall size of a society interact with genetically programmed human instincts like territoriality, pecking order behavior, and reciprocity to increase or decrease the emotional understanding of human rights through a complex system of subtle reinforcement of one or the other.

In a society of equals, reciprocity means respecting the rights of others. In a caste society, reciprocity between castes means treating your inferiors as you would have your superiors treat you. Between equals it means reciprocally protecting your castes rights to abuse those beneath you. Reciprocity rules the sense of justice in all societies. Humans easily accept either sort of society as long as the principle of Reciprocity is observed.

In our society, the Citizen is supposed to have a third kind of equality than either of the two discussed above. The Citizen has no authority over him which can suspend his Rights. There is no emperor, king or dictator whose mere presence and word voids the rule of law. In this his Citizenship is like that of the Citizen of the Republic. In our society the Citizen has no authority to suspend or ignore the rights of others, he is equal to them under the law. In this his Citizenship is similar to that of the Citizenship of the Roman Principate.

In both cases the differences are towards a system of equality and away from caste and status psychology and rights. There is no Emperor above and no slave or servant caste below the Citizen of the United States. His rights cannot be voided by status and he cannot disrespect the rights of others because of his personal status. Understanding and feeling this intellectually and to the bottom of the heart is essential to being an American. The Citizen of the US is the absolute Sovereign of his own person and private property. He is free to rule himself and dispose of his property with absolutely no interference by the State unless his actions are in some clear manner harmful to his fellow Citizens. His Sovereignty is absolute in these areas and ends only where the Sovereignty of his fellow Citizens begins. The body of Natural Rights he possesses are a psychological and emotional equivalent of personal territory and violation of them is a violation of his personal territory.

The principle of reciprocity applies in his obligation to absolutely protect the rights of others in order to protect his own rights. He recognizes that any power to violate the rights of another is potentially a power to violate his own rights and he must therefore oppose vesting any organization private or public with such powers. Men must defend the legitimate rights of women. Women must defend the legitimate rights of men. Whites must defend the legitimate rights of Blacks. Blacks must defend the legitimate rights of Whites. He rejects the institutionalization of Pecking Order or Status rights in any form where they include a right to abuse his fellow Citizens. Such abuse being the voiding or violation of those fellow Citizens rights. He must also be wary of and opposed to subtle changes in society which might gradually condition his fellow Citizens to think more like subjects than Citizens.