The Pod of Killer Wholves:
I've invented an imaginary hybrid creature, a miraculous cross between killer whales and wolves, which I call "killer wholves." I did this because when discussing general ideas about which the majority of the public is really afraid or defensive, you can't name an existing person, or a specific institution, or even mention a specific animal or plant species. The reason for this is that when people have fundamental dishonesty and bad faith surrounding a topic where vested interests dominate, the reader will always try to find an errant factoid that the writer stumbled into, or the reader will try to discredit the person being quoted, or the reader will try to create some kind of exemptions or exceptions for the specific organization mentioned. I invented "killer wholves" in order to defeat these tactics so that only the general ideas I want to communicate will be up for discussion, which, of course, bad faith people can't stand.
Bad faith people, and scared people, generally cannot discuss hypotheticals. They must have the precise name of an exact person or an exact institution or an exact species, or they simply panic. The reason for this is because categorical thinking, or theoretical thinking, or hypothetical thinking, opens everyone up to serious reconsiderations of preexisting prejudices that people aren't merely holding on to, but are deeply addicted to; and these things are always connected to some sort of survival instinct.
So, when the topic is religion, politics, gender roles, economics, sexuality, or any topic about which the mass of people have felt compelled to live in bad faith, you'll see a pattern of people refusing to address, or entertain, or play with, any notion where there is not some easy personal attack, easy institutional attack, or easy plucking off of some minor factual error. In general, in the philosophical sense, most people can no longer actually really work with ideas, but only propaganda positions related to their specific survival status. By inventing a "pack of killer wholves," I intend to end-run and ruin all those techniques for avoiding general theoretical discussion. In short, I hope to force you to think abstractly, although most people simply want nothing to do with that and are frankly horrified of it.
But back to the killer wholves: The killer wholves can swim and hunt at sea as ferociously as a killer whale, but they are additionally formidable as hunters because they can emerge from the water and quickly chase down any land prey. They have become, in our little story, the most merciless hunters anyone can find. All of that ferocity and hostility and murderous rage that they have to stir up in order to take out a buffalo or a gray whale — that comes at a cost. After the successful hunt, (a hunt made more successful by the fact that this pack of predators is able to rouse themselves into a killing mania), they find that they are too wound up to move back into a relaxing and socially-nurturing mood. And that's a problem, a big problem. Their initial impulse, after morphing themselves into predatory machines, is to come back to the "home base" and begin biting at each other and growling at each other; and this could sometimes break into open fighting.
The killer wholves had to come up with some way to ensure pack cohesion, because their hunting techniques require intricate teamwork and deep bonding and trust between all of the members of the pack. If after each hunt the pack has to endure days of fighting, growling, fussing and general conflict, there is no way they can maintain the bonding and cohesion required to do the job they have to do together. They aren't big enough to take out their biggest prey alone, and they aren't fast enough to chase the smaller ones on an individual basis. The facts of their hunting lives dictate they must surround, entrap, ambush and herd their victims in ways that require the kind of cooperation that might be needed to run a football team. And there's the rub: How do they keep all that excellent group solidarity together but simultaneously maintain the infinitely hostile nature required to murder their prey? That's a tricky question, but alas, natural selection, evolution, or just plain smarts on the part of the killer wholves produced an answer. That answer is the omega male within the killer wholf pack. He will be the solution to the whole problem, but how, and why?
I'm going to anthropomorphize for a moment and pretend nature is a person who is conscious. (I actually know natural selection does not work in any such mythological way, but I'm going to employ a myth only for the sake of showing how a certain solution looks when viewed through human eyes. Again, I'm not trying to get the reader to believe any particular metaphysics, nor am I attempting to say that the following my is really true, but I'm just using the myth as a metaphor to point out why certain solutions work in nature.)
Imagine that Nature were a person, and imagine that she was watching the killer wholves and noticed that every time they finished a hunt, they were practically ready to begin killing each other. Imagine further that Nature saw that these killer wholf packs were breaking up due to the continual conflicts that arose from the ferocity of mood it took to really pull off the tearing apart of a baby elephant or a massive crocodile? Well, some means would need to be devised in order to get the pack to rouse themselves into a killing fury, but, most critically, then to settle them down into something like domestic harmony after the dirty work of hunting was done. Enter the omega male. The answer is almost stunningly simple. After the hunt, come back to home base and begin growling at, snapping at, and generally bullying the omega male in the pack. Simply dump all that excess hostility from the hunt onto this one individual in the pack. That way the rest of the pack can be spared continual bickering and infighting and get down to cementing deep and nurturing bonds. But again, why the omega male? Why not do this to another member of the killer wholf pack?
The answer of who to sacrifice was astoundingly logical and elegant and can be explained in several sentences: The alpha male can't be picked on because firstly, he's the biggest and strongest, and secondly, because his leadership is needed, not just in terms of "group management" tasks, but in terms of "hunt timing" and many other "decision-making" processes. The beta males can only be abused mildly as they must have enough self-confidence in them to take over should anything happen to the alpha male. If the alpha male is killed during a hunt with a particularly resilient horned animal, the survival of the pack would depend on a strong beta male coming forward to assure continuity of pack discipline and breeding. And while the females in the killer wholf pack are often seen to appear subservient, they can't really be persecuted too much because if they are overstressed on too regular a basis, they won't be healthy mothers, and they might not be up for breeding. Such a scenario can't be risked or the whole species simply has no future. A similar problem poses itself when one wonders if the killer wholf pack might be able to take all its aggressions out on the children, but alas, the children are the immediate embodiment of the future, the whole genetic purpose behind the pack even existing. Now that we've ruled out the #1 male, and ruled out his back-up beta males, and now that we've ruled out the females and children, who does that leave? Who is left as a safe venting place to simply dump all of the pack's problems onto? You now see it can only be the omega male in the Killer Wholf pack.
Again, to avoid the misunderstanding that I'm trying to demonize the whole pack, or demonize the human race, by analogy, remember that I noted the whole question of the omega male rose not as a kind of arbitrary bullying, but rather as a matter of survival itself, survival of the entire group. So bullying the omega male in the pack is not merely kind of hobby the pack engages in just to kind of indulge in sadistic power, but is rather a survival behavior that allows for the possibility of the pack to not only survive, but to be a place of nurturing and solidarity, (and in anthropomorphic terms we might even say "love"). So it's no petty matter that the omega male needs to be sacrificed. It's all of survival and all of the future. It's a big thing. But how is the omega male to be selected?
The sorting rather comes of itself. It's clear enough if a litter of killer wholves is born that, right from the start, one of these is the runt of the litter. Of course merely being physically smaller and weaker at the beginning is not necessarily enough to seal the role of omega male in any killer wholf pack. Some runts turn out to have a perkier disposition and a heroic fighting spirit. So, we can't know from day-one which puppy grows up to be the omega male. However, by adolescence the pack is beginning to sort itself out. A few beta males take on the alpha male and lose, but even in losing, the alpha male and the females note how very close those beta males came to displacing the alpha male. This is not easily forgotten, and so, if they remain in the pack, they remain as respected b-players, just beneath the alpha male. The betas are not to be toyed with or flippantly picked on. No such thing would turn out well for anyone who thought so. Of course the females and children still remain exempt from certain pressures because, again, without them, there is no natural reason to live, since the species itself would face immediate extinction if they were harassed too deeply. Alas, there is one male who grows up not being a female, not being a child, not being an alpha male or beta male. That male is therefore the one, the omega male, not a formidable enough fighter to be valued as a male, but also not nearly of the reproductive use that the females and children are. (Who would want his weak genes to be carried on anyway?)
Given his seeming uselessness, why not expel him from the pack? There is a very critical reason not to. The whole pack, in an odd twist of logic, will be relying on him to survive, not because of his reproductive, fighting or hunting skills, (although any of them could be employed in dire circumstances), but because he will be the safety value which anyone and everyone can turn to in order to dump all their anger, all their hostility, all their left-over ferocity onto. Again, I am not saying they are doing this because they are bad, or evil, (to again use human anthropomorphic terms), but rather because if they don't, they won't be able to be civil with their fellow pack members, and their whole society could break apart, thus dooming their species. Again, as Murakami said, "Someone must be sacrificed." The only question is, "Who?" And the only answer is, "The omega male."
And now that I have set this mythology up, is it hard for you to see if you are the omega male in your family, in your dating circles, on the job, or at the social services office? And if you are not an omega male, after reading the above fable, it should be clear enough to you who the omega men are around you. In fact, you've probably already been using them as a safe outlet for years, thus sparing all the "really important" people in your life, like you boss, or spouse, or social connections, all of the toxic waste that you need to let out somewhere. After all, Capitalism, for all its virtues, is very like the hunter-predator wold. And it's not easy to get mating or careers going well without some fair amount of pitched battling. You can't risk ruining yourself by taking your frustrations out on a coworker who's stronger than you, or a boss who could simply fire you, nor can you, if your spouse is emotionally more secure than you, go home and give them a good dose of abuse or neglect. So you yourself probably cannot survive without an omega male hidden somewhere in the mix, (a topic about which people have so much shame that, outside this column, I rarely confront them; but suffice it to say, if I watched your life for a month, I've figured out who your omega male is).
By now your hackles have gone up, and you are possibly shouting at the screen: Racism! Sexism! Fascism! And so I will attempt to soothe any guilt you may have by noting that omega males are not always as easy to come by as it may seem. Since everyone needs one, or even several, (and some people have harems of them), there just may have to be another dumping outlet for people to go to. And so I also, counter to all the really sexist and really conservative commentators to bring up similar scenarios, admit the existence of omega females. Maintaining an omega female in any group setting is difficult for many reasons I won't cover just now, but nonetheless, it can be done, and it is, from time to time. So, unlike other "men's liberation" commentators, I do not propose that women don't suffer. In fact, I don't even propose that alpha males don't suffer.
In any case, for various reasons, one can, from time to time, find a true omega female, and the pack will find one if for some reason the omega male is hard to find or just too much in demand by other packs. But I will make the "unfair generalization" that the omega is more often than not a male; and his life is generally unimaginably harsh, short and brutal. You sometimes feel guilty about this, but you wisely control that guilt, since, after all, unless you're intrepid enough to get into S & M, or some other very adventurous outlet, you've just got to have your alpha male in order to live, whether you're male or female.