(for Moralia, written from the cave)
I believe that humans are a species evolved from branches of the same bush that produced our closest genotypic relations, apes and chimpanzees.
We know that even higher mammals have a large number of impressively complex inborn “instincts” : behaviors that are pre-programmed by biology, not learned during childhood. A newborn horse, for example, can stand and walk within hours of birth, something that takes a human many carefully supervised months to learn.
It would be very strange if humans did not also evidence similar inborn traits, and indeed we do.
I believe that the urgent will to power is, like many other predilections, something we are born with. Similarly the desire to submit to those who assert and gain power is an equally powerful complementary trait. The dominant can never be truly happy unless they attain the power positions they seek over others. The submissive can never be truly happy unless they are explicitly and sometimes brutally subordinate to those who naturally desire power.
Why evolution has presented us with this situation is irrelevant but not uninteresting. Remember, our instinctual behaviors are much, much older than our higher-brain social and political beliefs, and are, ultimately, probably still more urgent.
The sexual fantasies of submissive heterosexual men, for example, generally involve emasculation by powerful women and cuckoldry by powerful men. Why would evolution preserve such traits which seemingly would quickly be eliminated from the gene pool?
My contention is that the “silverback” dominant males and their equivalents among the females cannot physically monopolize or entirely manage the breeding in a large social group. Individuals willing to train the young without producing most of them are required. As a result, the existence of a separate caste works well for the general population’s growth and maintenance.
This more complex system is so important to the overall success of a colony that I believe the subordinate caste of males and females have evolved to receive the same kind of overwhelming pleasure from their particular service and lowly position that the dominant castes receive from their high position and power.
And so the cycle continued until, frankly, only the last few centuries when the less natural but more ethical concept of the absolute equality of all humans was born and quickly propogated.
But it remains true that that utimate satisfaction and happiness, beyond that which modern ethics can supply, comes only from knowing your own place in the natural order, and explicitly occupying it.
Tags: bdsm, domination, femdom, submission
