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Comment by devoply | Hacker News Reader

If you are oblivious to the dominance hierarchy then it does not affect you until you try to interact with it... like getting a mate or getting a certain level of recognition from your peers who are actively aware of it and their place in it.. etc. The hierarchy is part of a game, that you don't have to play unless you are forced to by other people. Due to economic need, sexual need, etc. There are alternative dominance hierarchies too, we call them sub-cultures that you might try to join instead for much the same purpose.

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Is the trick in not interacting with it?

Depends on what you want. If you are okay being socially isolated, then sure. But that causes its own psychological problems... loneliness.

That seems to be the trick the Buddhists and yourself have figured out. The language, however, is dated. Maybe you could update Buddhist mantra for 2017 using all the parlance of our times?

Well Buddhists may claim to, but how often does that not beak down into some other similar game where you have some sort of hierarchy form like for instance in Tibetan Buddhism, you have a guru and his disciples and they are better for their religiosity and what not. Maybe an ascetic monk aspires towards that, again at the cost of loneliness and then maybe through that he can assert his moral superiority over some group. It's all the same game bro.

I am better than you ... because... if anything in your existence has anything to do with that then you are in the game.

Is dropping this profound knowledge on us another way to play the game? Is the trick to happiness just carving out a facet in your life where you're secure in the hierarchy? (I'd borrow from Keith Johnstone and say High Status).

Don't people do that anyway. I am not dropping any wisdom, I am telling you how it is. What you do about it is up to you. From a societal perspective we are already doing things to make the dominance hierarchy of the corporation more amenable to humans. Stopping bullying by higher ups, harassment, etc. are all about that.

What prevents more of that is the nature of the game of business and the competition that goes with it, which is dog eat dog. Businesses would go out of business very quickly if they catered to the social needs of their employees rather than the business itself. The point then is to design a business process which isn't that ruthless with different objectives.

Maybe it's not zero, but some environments have much weaker hierarchies than others, and the various meditative practices seem like they could help with that.

Meditation showed you can step back from the anxiety generated by the social hierarchy. It should also help you interact with it without letting it push your buttons.

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