Protocols for Emus

The behavior described by the term “narcissist” is a natural kind in the human sciences. Aggressive, egocentric, power-seeking behavior has existed at all times and places. Preventing it and handling it when it can’t be prevented is a problem every group and society faces. Some groups have effective control mechanisms; others are easily wrecked by power-seeking behavior. Unfortunately, the networked nature of today’s groups make it challenging to deal with problematic individuals. From pop-up villages to communities aligned on health goals, many of today’s groups have an online component. Their fuzzy edges are difficult to police, and it’s challenging to get everyone on the same page. But I think every group, especially spiritually charged ones, ought to have a philosophy of how to manage these behaviors.

Australian Aboriginal author Tyson Yunkaporta touches on the problem of narcissists in his interesting book Sand Talk. He introduces the theme by explaining the mythological significance of the Emu. In one variation of the myth,

all the species sat down for a yarn to decide which one would be the custodial species for all creation. Emu made a hell of a mess, running around showing off his speed and claiming his superiority, demanding to be the boss and shouting over everyone. You can see the dark shape of Emu in the Milky Way. Kangaroo (his head the Southern Cross) is holding him down, Echidna is grasping him from behind, and the great Serpent is coiled around his legs. Containing the excesses of malignant narcissists is a team effort.

Emu is a troublemaker who brings into existence the most destructive idea in existence: I am greater than you; you are less than me. This is the source of all human misery. Aboriginal society was designed over thousands of years to deal with this problem. Some people are just idiots—and everybody has a bit of idiot in them from time to time, coming from some deep place inside that whispers, ‘You are special. You are greater than other people and things. You are more important than everything and everyone. All things and all people exist to serve you.’ This behaviour needs massive checks and balances to contain the damage it can do.

The basic protocols of Aboriginal society, like most societies, include respecting and hearing from all points of view in a yarn. Narcissists demand this right, then refuse to allow other points of view on the grounds that any other opinion somehow infringes their freedom of speech or is offensive. They destroy the basic social contracts of reciprocity (which allow people to build a reputation of generosity based on sharing to ensure ongoing connectedness and support), shattering those frameworks of harmony with a few words of nasty gossip. They apply double standards and break down systems of give and take until every member of a social group becomes isolated, lost in a Darwinian struggle for power and dwindling resources that destroys everything.

Yunkaporta is mixing up a pidgin concept here, explaining the Aboriginal perspective on these behaviors in terms from Greek mythology, modern diagnostics, and the langauge of rights. But the Emu story demonstrates clearly enough that certain behaviors familiar to us existed in Aboriginal society in fair proportion. They are a problem as old as time itself.

How do they show up in other societies? Sociologist Robert Bellah argues that religious evolution is basically all about different ways of managing the problems caused by aggressive upstart males. Across time and place, groups have managed them in many different ways. Another Aboriginal society, the Pintupi people, simply leave the area wherever an upstart is trying to assert himself, ignoring and shunning the aggressor. Other Aboriginal and Polynesian societies limit male aggression through social roles that require them to nurture younger males, a socially sanctioned form of dominance.

According to Bellah, efforts to control upstart males get weaker over time. Hawai’i already represents a less happy case. By the time Westerners first visited it in 1778, it was a highly stratified and inegalitarian system resembling an early state, ruled by a paramount chief who also served as a head priest. Upstarts appeared here too, in the form of subchiefs who were liable to usurp the top chiefdom with military force, as well as independent prophets who sometimes spoke against the chief’s rule. Overall, the more egalitarian tribal society had been replaced by a despotic king with arbitrary power over his subjects.

I have referred to the despotic founders of early states, who came to power through blood and terror as they almost always did, as upstarts of the kind that tribal society usually managed to repress . . . though upstarts are found in all societies, successful upstarts appear only in complex societies.

Bellah ties this to agricultural surpluses that allow larger, militarized groups to form. But because such power-seking behavior is an invariant, rules and codes to control despotism continue to develop as society complexifies. Priests and moral authorities in Axial Age religions are supposed to take vows of poverty, and material resources accumulated by the church are not monks’ to personally spend. As money systems arise and lending becomes a way to concentrate leverage over others, prohibitions and limits on usury become part of religious law. Government “by the people, for the people” is a hierarchy of the group over the upstart, with sanctioned use of violence against the upstart.

Our society has its own protocols for controlling despotic behavior. One of our strategies is to pathologize it. So-called Cluster B personality disorders, such as Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Antisocial Personality Disorder, turn these behaviors into medical problems. If you read the DSM-5 criteria for NPD, you’ll see that they’re all descriptions of non-normative behavior—they’re moral evaluations. Medicalization in this case (not all cases) is a way of enforcing the social order. NPD diagnosis recipients are treated with talk therapy, which (again, in this limited case) can be understood as a sort of moral reform for troublemakers. There’s a history of debate in the psychiatric field as to whether severe scociopathy can be treated with talk therapy at all, but recent behavioral approaches like DBT seem to have some efficacy.

Diagnostic protocols also give everyday people language with which to understand others’ problematic behavior. But they don’t give any information as to how to deal with narcissists, so people end up turning to lots of different sources to figure out what to do. On in-law horror story subreddits, people are encouraged to go “no contact.” But in scenes with complicated social dynamics and the smooth, clout-chasing narcissists described by David Chapman in a well-known blog post, going no contact is not always an option. Even if groups aggressively police their boundaries and evict aggressors, this alone doesn’t mean behavior change happens.

Not every part of our society has protocols in place, or follows the ones that are there. Since I moved in the Bay Area, I have been surprised at how tolerant of Emu behavior some social groups here are. When I asked friends about it, they responded that a part of California culture is to treat others as basically ok, regardless of whatever kind of weird they are. I respect this in principle, but there are limits in practice—for me, at least, or for communities I want to be part of. California rationalist and EA communities have gone through years of fallout caused by protecting narcissists within their spaces. Whether that’s a result of this specific “you’re basically ok” policy I don’t know, but California communities seem especially vulnerable to these behaviors.

There’s another thing going on, though. Our society seems to have sanctioned a certain type of upstart volatility, carving out space for it in the form of the “startup founder” role. California and San Francisco in particular is where that role is most cultivated. Founders are encouraged to monopolize industries and pursue Schumpeterian creative destruction. One friend of mine joked that endless production of founders to this tune is Maoist in nature—the continous revolution! Jokes aside, characters like Elon Musk demonstrate that this kind of power hunger is basically unlimited in scope. Emus run circles around everyone and act like despots at all scales; with enough talent and resources, they make moves into government itself. Politics is another favored location for upstarts. Before Elon and Trump, there were Napoleon and Cromwell.

Yunkaporta agrees with Bellah. He says complex civilizational cultures are particularly bad at preventing upstarts, that their whole founding ideology is based on Emu logic. While he doesn’t single out the West in particular, the modern West with its founding notion of individual freedoms is especially conducive to upstarts. Our culture uniquely expresses the will, the strong and unrestrained far-ranging soul. We actively celebrate expressions of that spirit. Elon and Trump and their ilk are celebrated, even as they are diagnosed as narcissists by both professionals and armchair psychologists. The grandiosity exuded by narcissists can also have a charismatic quality which is interesting, addicting, and often disables rational thought of everyday people. More on charisma another day.

Narcissism, upstart males, aggressive chiefs, charismatic prophets and Emus; I’m with Yunkaporta, interpreting them here as all part of the same “cluster” of sociological dynamics. Whatever they’re called, these dynamics require active management. Bellah draws from evolutionary psychology to explain how all these protocols for managing narcissists express the same fundamental themes. Dominance and aggression, as well as nurturance and care, are aspects of mammalian existence that can never be excised. “Human egalitarianism does not come easily… it is not the absence of the disposition to dominate; rather, it requires hard, sometimes aggressive, work to keep potential upstarts from dominating the rest.”

Protective Protocols for Fuzzy Groups & Network Tribes

If our complex society is bad at dealing with narcissistic upstarts, maybe there’s something we can learn from earlier social groups. McLuhan famously argued that electronic technology would have a retribalizing effect. Let’s take this to be more than hyperbole and look at what made hunter gatherer egalitarianism work. Here’s Bellah, first quoting an evopsych source.

“There appear to be two components of this kind of egalitarian social control. One is the moral community incorporating strong forces for social conformity . . . The other ingredient is the deliberate use of social sanctioning to enforce political equality among fully adult males.” I would add ritual as the common expression of the moral community without which the process of sanctioning would make no sense . . . the strong pull of social solidarity, especially as expressed in ritual, that rewards the renunciation of dominance with a sense of full social acceptance.

So that’s three components: moral community, enforced equality through social sanctions, and ritual solidarity. Let’s try to put these in more plain language.

Moral community means there needs to be a shared “us” and a collective orientation towards certain principles, as well as a shared understanding of what problematic behavior looks like. Social sanctions toward equality means enforcement of boundaries, but also an orientation toward growth and healing. Ritual means a shared willingness to shoulder responsibility and conduct collective work.

Having all three seems like a high bar for most social groups. We don’t live in tribes today, but in fuzzy networks with semi-coherent people-clusters. But I think some of the new kinds of movements I’m looking at actually could meet these criteria, and could bootstrap effective protocols for preventing upstart behavior.

A lot of the groups I’m interested in are already what I call moral ecosystems—fuzzy networks of people oriented around shared moral sources and visions of the good life. Rationalists grew out of the earlier New Atheism movement, and are much more willing to use a collective “we.” The internet group TPOT grew out of a looser group of postrationalists, and similarly shares a clear collective identity and moral orientation. There are a bunch of interesting new philosophical academies that not are not just training centers but also espouse a collective identity project, whether neo-Stoic, neo-Epicurean, neo-Hegelian, or neo-Buddhist. McLuhan’s retriablization is actually happening in this fashion.

Social sanctions and ritual can be part of network tribes, but only in their local instantiations. They basically require work, and work needs a clear sense of participants and stakeholders. This isn’t something for open online environments, where responsibility and participation is widely diffused. It needs to happen among instances of these groups that are on the ground and can conduct that shared process (or at least in a private Discord). For TPOT, that would be instances of Vibecamp. For the nascent pop-up city community, that would be Edge City or the next Zu-event. For meta-modernists or Buddhist modernists, that’s your local meetup or sangha.

Robert Bellah uses the term “reverse dominance hierarchy” to talk about coalitions that actively and continuously work to eliminate potential despotism. The hierarchy in quesetion is the elevation of the group over the upstart. Hierarchy is scary for a lot of groups that want to think of themselves as essentially flat. But hierarchy and status differences can be legitimate authority, and being in moral community together can justify the use of aggression. Sand Talk gives a good example of what aggressive sanctions might look like:

Punishment is harsh and swift, but afterwards there is no criminal record, no grudge against the transgressor. Perpetrators are only criminals until they are punished, and then they may be respected again and begin afresh to make a positive contribution to the group. In this way, people will not lie and shift blame or avoid punishment by twisting rules to escape accountability. They can look forward to a clean slate and therefore be willing and equal participants in their own punishment and transformation, which is a learning process more than anything else.”

So-called restorative justice processes like this interest me more than simply banning narcissists from the group, publicly canceling them, or shuttling them off to therapy. One problem I see is that when narcissists are fully banished from social groups, they go set up shop in other social groups with less effective self-policing. Over time there is a funneling effect where the narcissists end up paired with more and more vulnerable groups and people. It would be better if people who aren’t utterly destructive can remain in the group, but like Yunkaporta says, punishment has to be real and meaningful for it to work.

One of my friend groups has something they call the Guardian Process, which addresses the learning part Yunkaporta mentions. It’s a multi-step protocol that kind of functions somewhat like a corporate 360 Review, but with a team of trusted friends and collaborators. A problematic person has to voluntarily opt into it, but provided they do, here’s how it works. First they assemble a team of trusted people who have seen them at their worst. Together they write a list of situations and incidents where the person has caused harm and drama, and wishes they’ve acted differently. Everyone looks for underlying patterns that could reveal something about the person’s psychology. Finally a plan is made, which could include anything from different kinds of community accountability to intentional periods of deep emotional growth.

I asked my friends about this, and they said that it worked best when the subject was a person with a lot of embedded history in their crew. They tried it a different time with someone who was more peripheral, and it didn’t work; they ended up just excluding that person. This seems to reinforce the conclusion that restorative justice processes work best with smaller, more defined, “tribe” style groups.

Dealing with narcissists is cornerstone of my personal philosophy. Interactions with people who try to dominate and subordinate you are an unavoidable part of life, so I’ve tried to develop principles for responding to it when I see it in my community. My personal policy is a no-tolerance policy. When I encounter people who try to dominate me in any way, I let them know what I think of them by being rude or staring them down. I try to communicate through the quality of my gaze and body language that I think they ain’t shit and have no power over me. It’s simple but direct one-on-one aggression. Maintaining these personal boundaries are important to me because I’ve been manipulated in the past.

I also practice reality testing, checking my intuition with others who run in the same social scenes. This is more than gossip; it’s a protocol of asking people directly how someone makes them feel, then I share, and we discuss. Usually my intuition is right. As we’ve seen, dealing with narcissists is a group endeavor and requires knowledge circulation. Without this, the aggressor will dominate you individually, play you against others, and lie to get what they want. There’s a famous blog post that describes how many communities have a “missing stair,” a person who is “massively unsafe and uncomfortable and against code,” but who everyone gets used to just works around. Such people aren’t necessarily being protected, but they are de facto protected by being treated as a missing stair. In my experience, this often happens when information isn’t shared in a group, as a group. Just knowing isn’t really enough. It has to be made public in order for the group to formulate them as a collective problem. This doesn’t mean an announcement to the general public, just public to the set of stakeholders. Otherwise that missing step is nobody’s responsibility.

Before trying to design a protocol for your group, I think it’s wise to sensitize yourself to these interactions, and to understand how they affect you and the community you’re in. That can be painful but it’s worth it. This is how I personally act in order to protect the safety and integrity of my communities. But communities themselves need more than just information. It’s promising that certain swathes of society, like activist communities, seem to have an awareness of restorative justice and have adopted some of its principles. As network tribes of spirituality, health, governance, and civic engagement grow, I’m interested in following along with how they develop their own protective Emu protocols and guardian processes.

Thanks to Solon and Joe Edelman for conversations informing this post, and to Paprika for introducing me to Sand Talk.