Competition
Limited resources lead to two kinds of competition:
- If resources are scattered and cannot be defended, people compete through speed, trying to take the resources before someone else does,
- But if resources are close enough to be defended, then people compete through confrontation + aggression.
Because these struggles demand so much energy from both the victors and the vanquished, that aggressive competition quickly leads to a stable hierarchy based on the ‘dominance’ relationships that people have internalized. The winners no longer have to fight, because the losers want to avoid trouble and so concede the resources to the winners.
Hierarchies thus reflect the combined result of everyone’s efforts to come out on top of the pyramid. There, we find quite peaceful dominant individuals who remain in biological equilibrium as long as their dominance is not questioned.
At the bottom, we find the dominated individuals who have no choice but to engage their behavioral inhibitions and learn to live with the agony of resource shortages.
