Politics as we know it, as it developed, is a solution to a particular problem: the overlapping territories of men. Men needed a system to allow them to share overlapping territories without constant, disruptive, territorial disputes. Women are much better at sharing territories, and solve their problems in a powerfully communitarian way, leveraging complex psychological mechanisms. Their naturally higher agreeability makes them a collective force that forms the meat of any local community. Men, being more disagreeable and aggressive, as well as more generally variable (and with more of them collecting at the extremes), and with a drive for a more expansive territory, need some mechanism to solve the problem of conflicting and overlapping territories among them.

Now, they could just fight and kill each other. And they do and they have. They could avoid each other, and that works to some degree too, although it requires an understanding of and respect for one another’s territory, as well as an excess of desirable and available territory. But men would generally prefer to have some way to compete and maybe even collaborate a bit that doesn’t require physical confrontation and direct displays of aggression that might hurt them.

Since it’s not always great to have death or injury result from conflicts, it’s better to find some proxy mode for struggle and negotiation. Many animals, after all, do not always need to kill one another in their struggles. Deer rarely seriously injure one another in their annual rut. Their battles allow them to test one another, figure out their standing, and resolve their disputes largely without serious harm. They get the results of the negotiation from locking horns without having to be impaled on them. And this is not an uncommon phenomenon.

So what problem does politics solve? I believe it solves the problem of the particular challenges men face in negotiating their territory disputes. No doubt we could talk at length about the solutions women have come up with to manage their historical territorial disputes, but at the moment that’s not my concern, even though it makes up, in my opinion, the real bulk of all social connection and interaction.

You can see why men developed politics. You need some proxy for constant and chaotic conflict. You need some set of rules. A way to handle disputes between and within territories for this particular kind of creatures. A way to struggle and negotiate and compete without risking injury and death at every turn. The social life is a bit like a game. And games need rules. And ways of dealing with competitors and threats (and the variability, aggression, and disagreeability of men provides plenty of those), and ways of negotiating all kinds of disputes. Because these challenges exist, you need rules, and you also need allies. Men are less likely to seek the security of a group by nature, and more likely to seek it as a means to an end, as a resource for allies to respond to competitors and threats.

Politics wasn’t designed to exclude women. Women had their own politics, a very powerful and pervasive and inescapable body politic that was very detailed and strongly enforced by soft political forces. Its tendrils were everywhere, the core of family and community life. More stable and less variable and dramatic than the politics of men, more implied and less explicit. It was a different game for a different set of people with different problems to solve.

Men and women managed separate but intersecting territories that each affected the other. One was more openly codified and confrontational, the other was less codified and implied and influential. And both still exist. Men continued to formalize and improve the structures that helped them negotiate and share one another’s territories. In fact they got so good and so effective that it opened up opportunities for people who weren’t even men to enter the game.

Women still played their own social game, but now they could play the men’s too. And keep operating their own endemic social power structure within it. Which has proved a challenge for men, who never really learned how to understand or play the women’s game as well as women learned to play theirs. They also struggle more with how to bring their full competitive might, that was developed for use on one another, against a class they would much rather compete for.

The effect of men and women sharing politics is still a process that is being worked out. The consequences haven’t yet been fully understood. Not that I’m in any way against it. Reaching the point we have may be part of the natural evolution of the idea, but it may also make it harder for it to fulfill its original function, and that may have some side effects that will need to be dealt with someday.

I should mention before I close that I owe a debt to Camille Paglia for helping me focus my thinking in this area. I had a sense of this perspective, both from personal experience and from my study of the animal world (particularly tigers). But hearing her articulate her views helped me crystallize some of my own.

I feel that there is so much more to say. But this is enough of a beginning for now. It’s strange that politics takes such a consistent form across all societies throughout time, and has so many parallels in the animal world, but there is so little in the modern account that can explain sensibly why this should be so and give a proper account of how the institutions evolved historically. Instead our narratives are polluted with ideological dreck that is more concerned with pushing some agenda of how things should be or selling us on some picture of things to justify forcing through something they want than truly wondering why they are the way they are.