Dominance based hierarchies are only about 10K years old in humans. That’s less than 3% of human history. Peterson needs to do a bit more anthropological study.
Christopher Boehm is an anthropologist and primatologist who is currently the Director of the Jane Goodall Research Center at University of Southern California. He believes that suppressing our primate ancestors’ dominance hierarchies by enforcing these egalitarian norms was a central adaptation of human evolution. Enhanced cooperation lowered the risks of Paleolithic life for small, isolated bands of humans and was likely crucial to our survival and evolutionary success.
“In other words, inequality did not spread from group to group because it is an inherently better system for survival, but because it creates demographic instability, which drives migration and conflict and leads to the cultural — or physical — extinction of egalitarian societies.”
