I, Mammal: How to Make Peace With the Animal Urge for Social Power

I, mammal

how to make peace with the animal urge for social power

Loretta G. Breuning, PhD

author of

Habits of a Happy Brain

and

The Science of Positivity

copyright 2011

by Loretta Graziano Breuning

Inner Mammal Institute

all rights reserved

ISBN- 978-1-941959-00-8

contact: loretta@innermammalinstitute.org

www.innermammalinstitute.org

also by Loretta G. Breuning, PhD

Habits of a Happy Brain

Retrain Your Brain to Boost Your Serotonin,

Dopamine, Oxytocin, and Endorphin Levels

The Science of Positivity

Stop Negative Thought Patterns

by Changing Your Brain Chemistry

Greaseless

How to Thrive without Bribes

in Developing Countries

Inner Mammal Institute

Get your free 5-day Happy Chemical Jumpstart at:

www.innermammalinstitute.org

Our moods and motivations are caused by brain chemicals inherited from earlier animals. These chemicals evolved to promote survival, not to make you happy all the time. You can re-wire yourself to enjoy more happy chemicals when you know how they work. The Inner Mammal Institute has plenty of free resources to help.

Dedication

to Donna Meehan

Rosen Method Practitioner

for extraordinary support

Contents

Preface

I’m a Mammal Among Mammals

Introduction

The Happiness That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Chapter 1

The Neurochemical Facts of Life

Chapter 2

The Chemistry of Happiness in Mammal

Chapter 3

What Social Power Means to Animals

Chapter 4

Sex and the Status Hierarchy

Chapter 5

Status Seeking on AutoPilot

Chapter 6

Self-Destructive Status Seeking

Chapter 7

You May Already Be a Winner

Chapter

A More Perfect World

Epilogue

A Mammal at the Movies

Bibliography

Index

Preface

I’m a Mammal Among Mammals

...Knowing the mammal brain helped me accept the world as it is. That doesn’t mean I paid bribes or joined the Mafia ...

I thought people were frustrating until I discovered the mammal brain. Now I know that people are simply heirs to the brain chemistry that causes mammals to seek social dominance.

Every mammal has brain structures that release the chemicals humans recognize as happiness (dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and endorphins). Unfortunately, the mammal brain does not emit these chemicals all the time. It uses them to reward survival behaviors.

Dominance promotes survival in a mammalian herd or pack or troop, and the mammal brain rewards it with happy chemicals. We don’t usually think of animals taking pleasure in status seeking, but research makes it clear that they do.

We humans have the limbic system common to all mammals beneath our big cortex. Once I understood this mammal brain, human antics made sense to me. Given the brains we have to work with, I appreciate how well we do.

Of course, we are different from animals. Our cortex is much bigger. A cortex restrains neurochemical impulses and generates alternatives, so we are more able to restrain ourselves and try something new. But your cortex can’t make you happy – it doesn’t control the happy chemicals. You can only get them from your mammal brain, and it saves them for boosts to survival as a mammal understands survival.

If you raise yourself up above others in even a small way, your mammal brain notices and responds with happy chemicals. It’s not about money. It’s about how you stack up against others in your own mind. In nature, animals must measure themselves against others in order to avoid dangerous conflicts. A brain that knows when to dominate and when to submit is more likely to thrive. A brain skilled at making social judgements would get passed on to later generations.

When you feel dominated by others, your brain releases unhappy chemicals. That unpleasant feeling motivates your mammal brain to look for ways to feel better. Mammals stimulate dopamine by finding new rewards. They stimulate serotonin by dominating others. They stimulate oxytocin by bonding with allies in their survival quest. This is easy to see in animals, and that makes it easier to see in ourselves.

I wish I had understood the mammal brain when I was young. I could have made sense of other people, and of my own neurochemical ups and downs. Research on the mammal brain was limited when I was young. But I’m not sure I would have believed the facts if I’d had them. Would I have accepted that my sophisticated cognitions are driven by this ancient limbic system? Would I have acknowledged that my neurochemistry evolved to reward reproductive success? I suspect I would have just sneered I don’t think that way.

My education taught me to blame frustrations on our society and its leaders. Once I discovered the mammal brain, I realized that frustration is part of any group, with any leader. People seek support from more dominant group members and feel grieved when these expectations are disappointed. People dislike being dominated and don’t notice their own quest for social dominance. Everyone wants the group to meet their individual needs, leaving groups with impossible conflicting demands. The problem is not our society but the brain’s quest for happy chemicals. Abstract theories about social dominance get created as the human cortex tries to make sense of its own mammal brain.

I am not a status seeker in the usual sense of the word. I don't go to cocktail parties in designer labels to drop the names of A-list people that I lunch with at five star restaurants. But I like happy chemicals and dislike unhappy chemicals, so I have to make peace with my mammal brain.

Happy chemicals are only emitted in brief squirts. We were not designed to gush happy chemicals all the time. (Designed by natural selection is always implied.) To get more happy chemicals, I have to advance my survival prospects again. The quest for happy chemicals often tempts people into self-destructive status-seeking strategies. These pitfalls are easier to avoid when you understand your own brain chemistry. But even if I learn to manage my own happy chemicals, I live in a world in which everyone else has a mammal brain. Everyone is looking for ways to stimulate their happy chemicals and avert unhappy chemicals. I am inevitably a mammal among mammals.

Running with Mammals

My awareness of the mammal brain began in one instant in 1995, while I was teaching my International Business class. I was describing Japan’s approach to quality when a student raised his hand and asked Didn’t they get this from us?

I knew he was right, but I didn’t want to say so. I knew that the US military initiated quality control programs in Japanese factories during the post-war occupation to help Japan build exports. But I didn’t want to say anything positive about the US – especially not the US military. I was in the habit of thinking that Americans are misguided and other countries are inspired. Everyone I knew thought that way. So while a hundred students stood and watched, I searched my brain for a way to answer the question that was consistent with my beliefs.

And then for some reason I noticed myself doing that. I saw myself actively pushing away information I knew to be true. Why would I do that? I’m a person of integrity. I couldn’t figure it out in that moment, but the question lingered in my mind. The answer came when I began reading about chimpanzees and baboons. I learned that our primate cousins – monkeys and apes – live in hierarchical groups and spend most of their free time negotiating their status. Suddenly, I got it. I am a mammal. My brain is looking for ways to raise my status. Putting down business and government hierarchies was my way of putting myself up. I could easily overlook this ignoble habit because it was so common in the herd of mammals I ran with.

My awareness of the mammal brain took a great leap forward in 2005, while I was standing in front of a class full of Armenian border guards. I’d been invited to Armenia to speak about my book, Greaseless: How to Thrive without Bribes in Developing Countries. The border guards stared at me icily as I extolled the virtues of refusing bribes. I could see their mustaches twitching. When I stopped talking and asked for questions, there was an eerie silence. Finally, one of them asked, Why are you talking to us about bribes?

I was talking to them because bribery is routine in their part of the world. Border guards are bribed to turn a blind eye to trafficking in weapons, drugs, and child prostitutes. I was talking to them in the context of a US State Department program to help reduce human trafficking. I was talking to them because they took bribes. But I couldn’t say that, so instead I offered, Nothing will change as long as you say ‘everyone does it’.

You don’t understand our country, a voice rang out. I understood better than he thought. I knew that his job would depend on funneling cash to his boss. In everybody-does-it countries, bribes must be paid for a birth certificate or a death certificate, a driver’s license or a wedding license. Even teachers expect bribes, I’ve learned from those who discretely sought me out after my talks in various countries. From daycare to graduate school, bribing teachers gains advantage and avoids reprisals. Doctors must be bribed, too. I knew that these border guards needed cash to function in their society.

As I formulated a response, animated whispers filled the room. Suddenly the door opened and my Embassy escort walked in. She dismissed the class and guided me to a waiting car.

What happened? I asked her.

They felt like you were accusing them, the young Armenian woman told me.

That answer surprised me because she had translated Greaseless into Armenian. She knew what it said. Before we had time to resolve this, our car reached the American Embassy and my problems got worse. The US Foreign Service Officers responsible for my visit were displeased. Some of my talks got cancelled.

It seems everyone was expecting me to blame the real bad guys – the top leaders of business and government. It hadn’t occurred to them that individual responsibility would be my focus. Blaming those above you in the hierarchy can be so automatic that people don't know they're doing it.

I was certainly not defending Armenia's leaders. They had taken power in a shootout inside the Armenian legislature. They machine-gunned the former prime minister while he was giving a speech on live television. Such violent power transitions are relatively common in everyone-does-it countries. The new governments are typically as corrupt as the ones they replace. Rage against the alphas doesn’t solve the corruption problem. It only feeds the cycle of mammalian dominance-seeking.

But resisting the direction of the herd had gotten me into trouble. My status was falling and my unhappy chemicals were surging. Why didn’t I just blame the real bad guys like everyone else? I had a lot of time to ponder that as I retreated from Armenia in defeat.

I was departing on a 6 AM flight. The Embassy made arrangements to have me dropped off at the airport at 4 AM. They informed me that for a $20 fee I could book an expediter to walk me through the airport formalities. I was thrilled to have back-up at that hour and agreed to pay the fee.

The airport was crowded when the expediter and I arrived. He checked me in quickly and then led me toward a mob of people. He pushed his way into the mob and pulled me behind him. He stopped abruptly and I couldn’t see what was happening in front of him. A moment later, he turned around and said go. I didn’t understand what he meant. Then he stepped aside and pushed me toward a small security gate, saying Have a good trip. In one step, the mob was gone and I was in a peaceful departure lounge.

I took a seat at a coffee shop and expressed my confusion to the traveler next to me. Did you use an expediter to get here? I asked.

She nodded.

Did we bribe our way in?

I imagine that’s how it works, she said, and introduced herself as a Canadian visiting Armenian relatives. They had taught her the realities on the ground. The fee we paid had probably greased the wheels of the security system.

I started to get frustrated, but then the baboons and chimpanzees I’d been reading about popped into my head. Suddenly, the pieces fit. I saw the airport security workers as dominance-seeking mammals. I saw the border guards and Embassy staffers as mammals. And despite my best intentions, I saw that I am a mammal too. We mammals care intensely about social dominance because our happy chemicals depend on it. And our unhappy chemicals.

Mammals dominate when they can do it without getting hurt. People often take bribes when they can do it without getting hurt. A mammal seizes the dominant position when it can because it’s always in the submissive position otherwise. Taking bribes is a double-dip of dominance: once when you demand the cash and again when you spend it.

Mammals are social animals. They find safety in groups and feel threatened when separated from the group. Mammals who live in a bribe-taking group would feel dangerously separated if they refused bribes. The diplomats who hosted me sensed the threat to their careers if they wandered too far from the herd. The mammal brain is always alert for survival threats, and these diplomats had reason to see me as a survival threat.

Of course, I was feeling threatened, too. I would not admit that I cared about status, but neurochemical alarms were coursing through my blood. No real threat existed. I’d been sheltered in a nice hotel eating delicious food. I was returning to my safe home and my safe job. My grown children were safe in their homes. Money wasn’t at issue because I did not write Greaseless for the money. But I was without allies and my status was taking a beating. My brain released unhappy chemicals because a mammal without allies or status is likely to be annihilated. It is likely to be killed by a predator before it succeeds at passing on its genes. I wasn’t worried about my DNA being wiped off the face of the earth, but my mammal brain was.

I could have protected myself by sticking with the pack and blaming the alphas. Why didn’t I? For some reason, I’d felt a strong repulsion toward bribery since my first encounter with it in 1976. I’d been a United Nations Volunteer in the Central African Republic, and often got hit up for bribes as I rode my motor scooter around the capital city. At first, I didn’t know what was happening when police pulled me over. I discussed it with a wide range of people, and most of them said Just give them money. Everyone does it.

But I couldn’t. I had a first-hand view of the corruption problem in my UN job. I was assigned to an international team of economists sent to calculate the GDP. Our project was at a standstill because the dictator kept all financial data secret. Central African Republic was ruled by a President-for-Life who later crowned himself emperor. Asking questions about public funds could land a person in prison or worse. On the first morning of my job, the office was abuzz with gossip because the UN population census team had fled the country in the middle of the night. They’d been ordered by the President to inflate their census by 50% – his way of inflating the aid money he put into his pocket. In such an environment, my team dared not ask questions about national income accounting. We simply showed up at the office each day but did no work. This was my introduction to the everybody-does-it mentality. I quit that job and looked for a new career.

As I lingered over my Armenian airport coffee, I wondered why I didn’t just follow the group. To the mammal brain, leaving the herd means instant death in the jaws of a lion. That terrible feeling goes away when you join in an everybody does it. Why couldn’t I do that? Then it dawned on me, at dawn in Armenia, that my Mafia roots had something to do with it.

My family is from the historic cradle of the Mafia. My grandparents were born in Sicily, a stone’s throw from the real-life town of Corleone, and my parents were raised in the Mafia’s New York stomping grounds. We left Brooklyn when I was a baby, and the Mafia was never talked about. But not talking about things is central to my cultural heritage. I had taken to researching the Mafia to help me understand the vacuum in my roots.

I learned that the Mafia is real. In Sicily, these dominators took a cut of everything and crushed resistance with extreme violence. Paradoxically, they seemed to win the hearts and minds of the people they abused – their own people. The reason, I discovered, is that Mafiosi represent themselves as protection from the real bad guys, which includes everyone outside the local group. In the US, organized crime bullied its way into a huge chunk of the economy. But it convinced people like my parents that talk of the Mafia is just bigotry on the part of the real bad guys.

Booker T. Washington visited Sicily in 1910, the year my grandfather left. Washington reported his observations in a book called The Man Farthest Down. He noticed that the police would stop any Sicilian peasant on the way to sell produce in town and confiscate a fifth of the goods before allowing passage. Washington expressed relief that the descendants of slaves in America did not suffer this problem.¹

I could have been born into that life. If my family hadn’t moved, I might have been dominated by thugs and dismissed it with an everyone does it. I wouldn’t have known that another life was possible. I just barely escaped that world, and maybe that’s why I reject the idea of breaking the law in the name of the good guys. I see how it leads to unchecked mammalian domination.

It’s easy to be tolerant of law-breakers in your comfortable living room. But if you were the average Sicilian, you would have lacked flush toilets until the 1960s. Your children would have gotten intestinal worms from soiled water. You would have bought drinking water from a Mafia delivery truck, at a price that would leave you unable to by meat. You would not have benefited from outside aid to Sicily because the Mafia sucked it up. Many parts of the world have similar organized crime systems. A veiled threat of violence is behind every social and economic interaction. The frustration that results tends to fuels the cycle of violent retaliation. People learn to dominate when they can get away with it and submit when that’s necessary to survive. The mammal brain is skilled at weighing survival prospects. It scans its world and decides whether lawfulness helps or hurts survival.

On my journey home from Armenia, I thought about the parallels between bribery and organized crime. That got me thinking about the parallels between organized crime and baboon troops. Baboons respect their alpha to avoid getting bitten and scratched. Mafiosi are called men of respect in the Italian language. Mammals respect dominators when it improves their own survival prospects.

Baboons and criminals cooperate when it promotes their survival. Mafiosi build bonds of trust with associates who might shoot them in the back of the head at any moment. Animals use tooth and claw instead of guns, but their dominance struggles are suspiciously similar. Monkeys and apes seek alliances with high-status troop-mates, and people seek alliances with dominant individuals. Each mammal brain promotes its survival and its children’s survival in the ways it has learned from past experience.

I was astounded by the common patterns in the social habits of monkeys, apes and humans. Species vary but the common core is extraordinary. The field notes of a primatologist sound remarkably like the lyrics of a country western song. A zoology textbook overlaps with a soap opera script, page after page. I wanted to know why. By the time my plane landed back in California, I was determined to find the facts about this common core.

Research on primate behavior is abundant, but scientists from separate disciplines rarely put the pieces together. For example, there are many scientific reports of male apes guarding fertile females, but this behavior is rarely explained. Animals don’t know about the sperm-and-egg thing, so why are they so picky about who mates with whom? Animals do not have a conscious, goal-directed intent to make babies with good survival prospects. Yet they consistently act in ways that promote their sperm and their eggs over their troop-mates’ sperm and eggs. Something motivates animals to focus their energy on reproductive success. That something is neurochemicals.

All mammals have common neurochemicals. From mice to elephants, a similar limbic system emits chemicals that motivate similar social behaviors. From wild animals like zebras and hyenas to domesticated animals like dogs and cows, mammals engage in similar rivalries in pursuit of reproductive success.

Male and female mammals have well-known hormonal differences, but beneath that they have neurochemicals in common. That’s why they have a common goal, but different strategies for pursuing it. Both genders strive to promote their genetic survival, but each gender chooses the strategies that work best for them. A male’s reproductive success benefits from maximizing opportunity. A female’s success rests on maximizing her children’s survival prospects. These differences are only variations on a theme. Males also protect the young, and females also compete for reproductive opportunity. Each gender inherited a cocktail of neurochemicals that mediates these behaviors.

A mammal’s neurochemicals continually rise and fall as its genetic survival prospects rise and fall. We humans try to make sense of our neurochemical ups and downs. Our cortex tries to give them meaning. We can only guess since neurochemicals do not speak to us in words. If we knew what our neurochemicals were telling us, we would not like it. By the time we are sophisticated enough to explore our own minds, we’ve learned to disdain our mammalian impulse to dominate and pass on our genes. But the impulses are there, and the better we understand them the better we can manage them.

Knowing the mammal brain helped me accept the world as it is. I did not start bribing or join the Mafia. I just started taking responsibility for my own happy chemicals instead of waiting for a better world to make me happy. People often get the idea that they cannot be happy until the world somehow changes. They continually find fault with the social arrangements they think are standing in the way of their happiness. In truth, no way of organizing the world can keep your happy chemicals flowing. They are only released in short bursts, which is why your mammal brain keeps motivating you to do what it takes to get more of them. This makes life frustrating, but the world cannot fix it for you.

When you understand the mammal brain, you know that people will always care intensely about their status and their children’s status. People will react fiercely to status threats, even tiny perceived slights. People will always be mammals.

This is not a book about how people should be. It's about how people are.

It’s not about other people’s neurochemistry. It’s about your own.

As I write, I look out a window at a squirrel in a tree. He flicks his tail, releasing chemicals that communicate his presence to potential mates and rivals. Every time I look out to rest my eyes, he’s at it again. The mammal brain never stops doing what it can to improve its survival prospects.

Introduction

The Happiness That

Dare Not Speak Its Name

...When a mammal gets the fig or the mate, a burst of happy chemicals is released in its brain...

A farmer taught me the mammalian facts of life. I was touring an organic farm and the owner explained the unromantic truth as he proudly displayed his organic cows. I rent bulls at breeding time, he said. They’re released into the pasture and the alpha bull pushes his way to the center of the herd. The other bulls start mingling with the cows around the edges. When the calves are born, paternity tests show that 70% of them are fathered by the one alpha.

I was fascinated. I asked the farmer why he rents bulls, since his cows surely give birth to some males. He explained that any males he keeps have to be castrated. Intact bulls are unmanageable on a farm because they fight with each other so much. Only specialists own such dominance-seeking beasts. Everyone else rents.

I wondered about the female side of bovine intimacy, but I didn’t ask. The answer came to me when I trained to be a Docent at the Oakland Zoo. I learned that stronger bovines seize the spots at the center of a herd where it’s safer from predators. Weaker bovines are pushed to the edges. Suddenly I made the connection. The high-ranking cows at the center of a herd get first dibs on the alpha bull’s superior genes. Dominant boy meets dominant girl. The lower-ranking ladies around the perimeter end up mating with the lower ranking bulls. It reminded me of singles trying to get into the hottest nightclub to improve their chances of meeting a 10. I was so excited by my insight into natural selection that I wanted to write to the farmer and share it with him. I restrained myself, however, not knowing how he might interpret such a missive from a lady he hardly knows.

Cows create social hierarchies without conscious intent. Each individual brain simply scans for opportunity while avoiding potentially dangerous conflicts. No social structure is imposed on them, but one emerges.

Mating habits vary from one mammalian species to another. But beneath the diversity lies a common core: status improves reproductive success, so mammals invest energy in status seeking. Human courtship likewise varies widely, but invariably rewards status in one form or another. Reproduction is not the conscious goal for animals or humans. Our brains simply seek happy-chemical rewards. The mammal brain evolved to do this and it does it well.

A mammal is always deciding when to dominate and when to submit. Dominating