Might is right - 1

As is common among all the social species, we humans also have a hierarchy of dominance built into our social relationships. I am not talking about the inherently asymmetric personal/biological relationships though they also have a dominance structure. To be specific I am not discussing here siblings, parent-child, husband-wife and personal-friendship. My concern here is of things which pervades the society macroscopically. This is in some sense a follow-up to concept of beauty article. I want to understand how dominance hierarchy shapes our perception of beauty.

Let me start with ugliness. What are the things considered ugly ? Who are the people usually considered ugly ? What aspects of them makes them ugly ? Are we conditional in judging ugliness of some particular aspects ? Some obvious ugliness candidates are bad personal hygiene, obviously abusive language, unnecessary violent behavior, etc. But here I am discounting all such personal eccentricities. My concern here is branding ugly of a certain group of people disregarding the individual members of that group. We may have personal friendship with members of that group even though perceiving their stock as ugly. The traits which gets branded as ugly are often cultural ones or derived/inherited from their social milieu. These people are also often lower down in the social dominance hierarchy. In short they are 'ugly' because the 'handsome' have won over them. This 'victory' is in whatever sense considered as a contemporary 'currency of power'.

Currency of power in itself is a dynamic object. In various times and milieu it has varied a lot but most such currencies correlate with each other. In tribal times, size of the tribe may have been the biggest factor determining power (so as to achieve greater food security and availability of mates, maybe also by plundering other tribes) so this was the currency of power for those times. In ancient historic times it was military power, which also correlates with size of group but is majorly influenced by technology. So the mongols who had topkhana under Babur had a greater currency of power over the vastly numerous indians. Same holds in the middle ages, though the power was gradually shifting to western societies again facilitated by technology. The primitive technology of asians and africans was no match for the steam powered industrial might of europeans. Here technology becomes a currency of power and strongly correlates with military might. This also correlates with size of the population. Witness the fact that share of people of european descent has increased in tandem with their control over world (and currently falling share of their population is a precursor of their decline). In modern ages, west's continued its forward march and its dominance of world was comprehensive untill about 30 years ago. Asian resurgence is a new phenomenon and naturally not without repercussions, we'll see this later. Especially in modern ages, financial prosperity becomes more and more a denominator of power. In today's sterile (i.e war abhorrent) times, military might is superseded by financial/economic/commercial prowess as a currency of power, though they are still correlated.

Whatever is the contemporary currency of power, it not only enables dominance of people, but for some psychological reasons also subjugates their minds. So the victor are designated more handsome, more cultured, more sophisticated and better in almost every respects not just by the victors but also by the losers. I am most fascinated by the beauty equation of this struggle. But unlike concept of beauty, here I will concern with much more than mere physical appearance. In the next few articles I will talk about power versus physical appearance, language, dramas, movies, music, and most surprisingly jokes.