equally important, to anticipate the objections that likely will (and certainly
should) be raised to such an unattractive thesis.

The proposed explanation promptly triggers the second question: How,
then, can we account for the undeniable occasional emergence of demo-
cratic polities? Many of those who have wrestled with this problem find the
answer in some unique concatenation of economic, social, historical, and
political "facilitating" factors. These factors undoubtedly play a role. None-
theless, paradoxically enough, we must again turn to evolutionary theory
for the necessary, though not sufficient, condition that makes democracy
sometimes possible.

Although it shares the proclivity of its fellow social primates for hierar-
chical social organization, Homo sapiens is the only species capable of
creating and, under some circumstances, acting in accordance with cultural
beliefs that actually run counter to its innate behavioral tendencies. The
generally accepted, if lamentably awkward, term for this truly unique
capacity is "indoctrinability." ² Celibacy and the (presumably) less demand-
ing ideal of faithful monogamy are obvious examples of indoctrinability at
work. Democracy, an idea almost as alien to our social primate nature, is
another. It is indoctrinability, then, that makes it possible, given some
conjunction of the aforementioned facilitating social, economic, and other,
conditions, for democracies occasionally to emerge and to have some
chance to survive.

Our original objective was to address the two questions identified above.
As we proceeded, however, a third task emerged. A neo-Darwinian perspec-
tive on the prospects of democracy in a social primate species can all too
easily be misperceived as deliberately or inadvertently (the net effect is the
same) antidemocratic in thrust. That is assuredly neither our position nor
our desire. Our intent, rather, is to show that the democratic cause will
continue to be ill served if we fail to take adequate account of our species'
innate hierarchical inclinations.

That evolution has endowed Homo sapiens with a genetic bias toward
hierarchy, dominance, and submission need not necessarily be a counsel of
despair. Better to grasp this reality ³ than to blissfully believe that our species
is innately democratic in its political tendencies and that other forms of
government are unfortunate, but essentially temporary, aberrations. Only
after we recognize and accept that fact can we begin to think realistically
about the type of domestic and foreign policies required for the survival of
democratic government, a subject to which we finally decided to devote our
concluding chapter.

Failing a basic evolutionary understanding, there is little reason to expect
that democracies will be any more common or viable in the future than they

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