David McElroy

For the last week or so, something has been telling me to check on my neighbor Ruth. Every night when I got home, I’d think about walking over to her house and knocking on the door. But I kept putting it off. It can always wait another day.

Ruth has lived near me several years. She’s in her mid 50s and lives alone. I originally got to know her because she has two young granddaughters who like to ask Lucy to stop and see them when they’re at Ruth’s house.

About six months ago, a man moved in with Ruth and I soon met him. He seemed nice enough. He was her ex-husband — and they were trying to see whether they could get back together again. As I talked to both of them over the coming weeks — sometimes individually and sometimes together — I knew it wasn’t going to work.

Ruth kicked him out about six weeks ago. She briefly told me that when I saw her on the street one day, but I didn’t have time to stop to chat about it then. But I’d been having a strange feeling lately that I needed to check on her.

I finally got home tonight about 8:30, but I didn’t even go inside. I left my things in the car and walked straight to Ruth’s house and knocked on the door.

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I’ve been away from Facebook for more than a year, but I recently waded into the waters of insanity there briefly. It was an eye-opening experience.

Facebook owns Instagram and is pushing users to integrate their accounts on the two services. Somehow, my Instagram settings were changed — without my knowledge — in a way that published all of my Instagram posts to Facebook. This meant I had to spend some time figuring out how to untangle the two accounts again. Out of curiosity, I browsed my old Facebook news feed while I was there.

The experience reminded me why I left. More than anything, though, it left me questioning the mental stability and judgment of some friends who I’ve always believed are good people. The raging political hatred they were expressing left me alarmed.

It wasn’t that I disagreed with the specifics of their political or social positions, in many cases. But the rage and hatred they were spewing made it seem that they had lost all perspective about life. It seemed as though the medium of social media had turned them into raging monsters.

They were angry about things they couldn’t control in the real world, so their rage drove them to scream with hatred of their enemies on Facebook. This does absolutely nothing to change the world around them in the ways they want — and that internal rage appears to be destroying them.

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I was fighting for dominance long before I understood hierarchy. In classrooms, on playgrounds, and on neighborhood fields, I considered it natural that I should be in charge.

I didn’t necessarily like most other people. I didn’t much care whether they liked me. But it was important to me to have as much control as I could get. If I couldn’t have leadership of the larger group, I would at least be the leader of the opposition — those who refused to go along. It was rarely open conflict, but everybody knew which few were competing for power. I was always one of those.

I read a long diatribe online today from a woman who was denouncing “male power hierarchies.” She claimed they were an instrument of “white supremacy” and she claimed white men were trained in this “unnatural power system” in order to oppress minorities.

I had to laugh. Nobody ever taught me to want dominance. Humans are naturally drawn to form dominance hierarchies and certain people among groups want power. Some people tend to be given power, even though some of them — those like me — weren’t the best liked. And this woman who was ranting would be shocked at the vicious power hierarchies among groups of young black men I’ve known. Is their hierarchy all about “white supremacy,” too?

Humans need hierarchies. We couldn’t survive without them. I can’t explain how we decide who gets power in a room, but we’ve all been in plenty of situations when we’ve known — without words — who was in charge and who would lead us.

I’ve sometimes been the one in charge — and I’ve sometimes been the one pushing power buttons to disrupt someone else’s control of a group. Like it or not, these are essential human skills.

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