Theories of human nature are often political arguments that appear biological. We have to be careful when appeals to human nature are made because they entail what is possible and impossible to change. As Hannah Arendt astutely points out, humans are mediated by a large array of conditions and we ought not conflate human relations under particular conditions with some trans-conditional notion of human nature (Arendt 2018). Jordan Peterson has recently recycled and popularized conservative notions of human nature–overemphasizing tradition, authority, and hierarchy. Jordan Peterson’s notions of hierarchy are so ahistorical and pseudoscientific that Jordan Peterson locates the existence of hierarchies in pre institutional phenomena. According to Jordan Peterson, race, class, and gender hierarchies are so innate that there is no alternative to accepting those basic structures. At best, Jordan Peterson advocates for individualistic change and quantitative changes within society rather than any qualitative social changes–and his criteria for individualistic change is both in reduction of the social relations that can arrive at the good life for individuals and highly questionable.

Jordan Peterson drastically under-emphasizes social causes of normative gender roles and relations and instead claims normative gender roles and relations–politically, economically, and culturally– are mere expressions of biology. Jordan Peterson uses pseudoscience to claim that there is such a thing as biological races within human beings, and Jordan Peterson claims that hierarchies are inevitable aspects of biological phenomena (hence his Lobster theory of hierarchy). Jordan Peterson’s atomistic analysis–where society is reduced to mere individuals– leaves no room for the meaningful kind of collective change that we ought to have. People who want large scale qualitative social change get diagnosed by Jordan Peterson as people who are not accepting individual responsibility, almost necessarily pushing for a world that is more chaotic than business as usual, and people who are trying to change aspects of society that are basically immutable and natural (upsetting the “natural order of things”).

Race, class and gender hierarchies are not equivalent throughout historical periods. In fact, they vary widely each of the above being historically constituted. For all of natural history up until humans, there are no institutional arrangements through which institutional hierarchies can form. For 95% of human history we have no evidence for institutionalized forms of command and obedience and ruling classes and ruling strata–that is no evidence of institutionalized hierarchies (Bookchin 2005). The first evidence of hierarchies takes us back a few thousand years–patriarchy being one of the first hierarchies we have anthropological evidence for (Bookchin 2005). Patriarchy gendered relations to private/public spheres, command and obedience, relations to production, and social roles in general (Bookchin 2005). After the development of patriarchy, state structures start emerging–centralizing power via a political ruling class (Bookchin 2005). Capitalist class relations don’t develop until Agrarian England in the 1600’s as landlord-capitalist tenant-wage laborer relations develop in tandem with new commodification of land and labor, and commodity production for market to competitively accumulate value (Wood 2002) (Aston and Philpin 2005). Commercial networks were then inoculated, subsumed to, and expanded by this new capitalist class relationship which in turn subsumed other modes of production for competitive value accumulation (Wolf 2010). Notions of race along with race hierarchies are a relatively recent phenomena developing with capitalism as specific forms of relations to production and roles, pseudo-speciation, and dehumanization.***

A list of evil ways of people can relate to one another without talking about good relations can overshadow other tendencies and potentialities of humans. There are wide arrays of ethically good kinds of human relations and behaviors including egalitarianism, mutualism, freedom, cooperative organization, solidarity, philia, imagination, creativity, and reasoning. Such capacities exist in spite of hierarchical relations which inhibit such capacities compared to good political, economic, and social relations.

Institutional hierarchies are not mere taxonomic hierarchies–such as family trees or ranking different kinds according to a particular metric. Institutional hierarchies are not equivalent to mere relative expertise compared to others in particular fields of propositional and practical knowledge. Institutional hierarchies are not mere real and perceived dominance patterns that exist in first nature. Institutional hierarchies are not reducible to, nor apparent in, non-institutional nature. The social definition of hierarchy is distinct from how the term is used by some (or even many) biologists. Jordan Peterson lumps and conflates all of the above together along with ruling classes and strata and then claims hierarchical relations are a necessary feature for human and non-human nature.

Not only does scientific and philosophical evidence show that institutional hierarchies are historically constituted, not innate to human biology, and highly mutable, there is also strong evidence that hierarchies are consistently linked to negative social health effects. Class relations cause and are defined by structural violence–absolute deprivation of resources and relative deprivation of resources– which is the biggest cause we know of for negative social health including everything from violence rates, lack of childhood wellbeing, drug abuse, lack of education, to addiction rates more broadly (WIlkinson and Pickett 2018) (Mate 2018). Hierarchies are defined through limiting freedom according to centralized and arbitrary forms of rule as well as a competitive ethos shown to inhibit everything from collective and individual mastery of skills, mutual aid, as well as overall flourishing of persons (Kohn 2017) (Kohn 2018). Excess stress–in large part caused and exacerbated by hierarchical relations and a lack of good social relations– is related to almost every single disease (Sapolsky 2001).

Philosophical and scientific evidence points to institutional hierarchies as not being inevitable and institutional hierarchies being detrimental to human relations. Natural and social history point to plenty of alternatives to social hierarchies– as evident in 95% of human history as well as a history of freedom emerging in opposition to a history of hierarchy and domination (Bookchin 2005). This history of freedom is rich enough to contain periodic mutual aid and sustained mutual aid throughout history, direct action against authoritarianism throughout history, collective organizations and decision making in line with an ethics of freedom and egalitarianism, and a revolutionary history including everything from the Paris Commune, to The Free Territory, To Shinmin in Korea, to EZLN, to Rojava. Kropotkin’s analysis of mutual aid as a factor in evolution provides us with positive notions of human nature and potential (Kropotkin 2016). Although Kropotkin’s notion of mutual aid was at times overly romantic (by overly reducing human nature without hierarchy to mutual aid (Bookchin 1999)), it is something that can be built upon and refined. Even Darwin’s notion of evolutionary fitness was based on adaptability to environment rather than mere competition. Mutualism and indirect mutualistic relationships are well accepted among biologists and ecologists. However, mutual aid is not something that necessarily happens and thrives when hierarchical relations are not present among human populations.

We need good social relations–and not just the absence of evil social relations– to enable the flourishing of the human capacity for mutual aid and other virtues to filter our volition. And through institutions and culture, humans have the ability to alter the course of our own relations through deliberately restructuring our political, economic, and social relations. However, such capacity for volition is always entangled with and limited by conditions and is not free from causality and context. Yet nonetheless, higher order volition and deliberate reasoning exist on institutional, collective, and individual scales as caused causal factors of our own development and the development of the non-human world–without which we cannot explain day to day events and history. We ought not evade our social responsibility to restructure the world through appeals to pseudoscientific and conservative notions of human nature that claim that there is no alternative to business as usual.

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***Ethnic discrimination–which exists prior to racism– is not equivalent to racialized forms of discrimination. Notions of race have no biological underpinnings–different shades of pigmentation do not constitute biological race categories. There are of course many other hierarchical structures, forms of oppression, and forms of arbitrarily limiting freedoms of persons than race, class, and gender hierarchies: such as religious hierarchies, ableism, nationalism and the nation state in particular, to unjust rules, to gerontocracy (arguably the first hierarchy), to heterosexism, to transphobia, to anti-Semitism, etc. Merely listing off such hierarchies, forms of oppression, and forms of arbitrarily limiting of freedoms of persons– and even defining them and briefly talking about them historically– does not do justice to the particularities of all of the above and the relations of all of the above to all of the above.

Hierarchical relations do not exist in reduction of each other, but affect one another and can underpin, catalyze, and even compete with other hierarchical relations. Here is a brief but by no means anywhere near exhaustive exploration into relations of hierarchies to hierarchies: Class relations underpin structural forms of racism along with racialized relations to production–although racism cannot be reduced to its structural forms. Similarly, class relations underpin the productive/reproductive split and patriarchal political and economic hierarchies–although gendered hierarchies are not merely reducible to such relations to production. Racism and patriarchy both have attitudinal, behavioral, ideological, and structural forms. Non-structural dimensions of racism and patriarchy can still exist after abolishing their structural forms–even though such political/economic forms are the most brutal forms of racism and sexism and the biggest perpetuators of racism and sexism broadly. As Bookchin said, “Without changing the most molecular relationships in society — notably, those between men and women, adults and children, whites and other ethnic groups, heterosexuals and gays (the list, in fact, is considerable) — society will be riddled by domination even in a socialistic ‘classless’ and ‘non-exploitative’ form. It would be infused by hierarchy even as it celebrated the dubious virtues of ‘people’s democracies,’ ’socialism’ and the ‘public ownership’ of ‘natural resources,’ And as long as hierarchy persists, as long as domination organises humanity around a system of elites, the project of dominating nature will continue to exist and inevitably lead our planet to ecological extinction,” (Bookchin 1980). Racism and patriarchy inhibit relationship building among the dispossessed, the working class, and non-ruling class broadly, which allows capitalism, statecraft, and arbitrary limits to freedom–which are problems in and of themselves– that underpin structural racism and patriarchy to continue with less opposition. There are a large variety of evil social relations that are neither eternal nor immutable aspects of human nature, but are instead historically specific and mutable social relations. A comprehensive understanding of them, their histories, their potentialities, and relations to other social phenomena requires a large scale investigation beyond the scope and scale of this particular essay.

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” – Ursula K. Leguin

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