A Dead French Anthropologist Is Why You Think Egalitarian Polyamory is Difficult

The objection this essay takes on isn't about loving more than one person, which people mostly accept. It's the egalitarian part. Critics call non-hierarchical polyamory naive because they assume every human relationship has to have a pecking order, that someone always comes first. The piece argues that assumption is cultural rather than natural, and turns to evolutionary anthropology to show it.

The through-line comes from Christopher Boehm: somewhere around 1.8 million years ago our ancestors actively dismantled ape-style dominance hierarchies. Sleeping on the ground meant taking turns on watch, and unreliable hunting meant survival depended on sharing, so humans evolved a deep drive for fairness and ran on what Boehm calls reverse dominance hierarchies, where the group keeps would-be bullies in check. Hierarchy showed up later, with scale. Once farming put thousands of strangers in one place, shame and social pressure stopped working, so we delegated punishment to a new invention, the State.

The ending is where it pays off. Rigid hierarchy got rebranded as the natural order, blessed by divine right, until Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island looked at European class society and questioned whether it was civilized at all. If hierarchy was learned, it can be unlearned, and egalitarian polyamory stops looking idealistic and starts looking like a return to form.