Dr. Nicholas Wright

We have many different systems and they're all important for how we act in society, how we make decisions about things like who we support politically or whether we go to war, for example.

Now, yes, these social systems are very important to look at social hierarchies, and they create the space, a space at the top of our social hierarchies for a leader or a leadership, something that will be at the top of our hierarchy.

But what could that be?

It's not only going to be monarchy.

Clearly, it could also be, for example, in the United States, 250 odd years ago, you had a war.

uh, a war of independence.

And, and it was at the point of that was to get rid of the monarch, right?

And then, and then we have other parts of the brain that can, uh, think up clever ideas and put those, uh, uh, systems, those institutions, uh, as things that we then will have at the top of our hierarchy or that can create spaces that can help us fill the top of that hierarchy and how we choose those people then wouldn't be through the intuitive and,

ancient system of the family unit or family inheritance, which is, you know, the most common, always the most basic fundamental unit of social organization in humans.

But then you could, for example, have the US Constitution, which had votes, and then they selected a leader who then ruled for a defined period of time.

And I think this also

indicates that these rules are not only, for example, if you look at the American issues, not only about how things are written down, but they're also about the human beings and how they decide to act.

So they set the social parameters.

So George Washington famously

chose to step down right he could basically have become a king a lot of people would argue but he chose to set down and by setting that precedent you know the founding fathers united states were really quite remarkable guys and he set that precedent that helped set the unwritten rules by which the united states along with the written rules now has a system a democratic system in which it it

it can have a leadership position filled.

And in a country like Britain, for example, or the Netherlands, you have a hybrid system.

And we often have hybrid systems too.

And our brains live with this kind of hybridity all the time.

I don't think we can have any kind of large-scale social structure where there won't be leadership.