When we first meet Eeyore he is standing by himself in a corner of the forest where the thistles grow.  If you are ever looking for a pessimist, off in a corner is a good place to start.  We like being off in a corner.  Any corner will do.  Out on the edge of town, in an obscure college, in a corner of the organization chart, making stained glass windows.  Forests are good.  Deserts are wonderful.  Anywhere out of the spotlight, away from the crowd.

It may not be that all pessimists are loners, but there seems to be a very strong correlation.  In fact, this retreat from the main stream of life is in many ways at the heart of the pessimism of Eeyore.  Of course there are lots of simple answers for why this is.  Most of these simple minded explanations come from psychologists, self help book writers, and other, perhaps well meaning, optimists.  All of them are wrong.  Or at least vastly incomplete.

The easiest answer is self doubt.  Self doubt is in fact an occupational hazard for a pessimist.  Many pessimists have this tendency.  Eeyore certainly did.  And I must admit that I slip into it all too often.  But pessimist are not alone in this.  Nor is the corner always the only way to deal with self doubt.  Loosing yourself in the crowd is an even more popular alternative.

Withdrawal and self doubt form a cycle.  Each a cause as well as an effect.  The questions are how the cycle gets started, and more importantly, how to end it.  Again there are lots of answers about how this all starts.  Falling out of high chairs, inattentive Mothers, that sort of thing.  The view from the bog is that there are two main causes.

The first is being different.  We have dealt with that issue at some length already.  At an early age those of us with gray fur, floppy ears, somber dispositions, and wrinkled black cowboy hats soon realize that we are different.  People, especially those who conform to the current fashion of the Ideal Person, are quick to point out any differences we have failed to notice on our own.  As the earliest social groups form, we find ourselves on the fringe, or left out altogether.  The first corner is usually in a playground somewhere.

But these are childhood traumas, often counter-balanced by loving families, a few good friends, success in school or shop or 4H.  Most of us get over these things.  But the next discovery is more difficult to deal with.

It’s called the pecking order.  You find it in almost all social animals, including — especially — man.  What starts out as cute play in baby animals as they wrestle and spar, turns deadly serious when they become adults.  The bigger, stronger, or simply more aggressive animals begin to dominate the others.  In the more complex social structures there are clearly discernible domination hierarchies.

Domestic animals are usually caged or leashed.  And they have been spared the survival of the fittest because they are fed and sheltered by their human masters.  For modern pets, it is survival of the cutest.  You will notice some more aggressive and some less aggressive dogs and cats.  And they occasionally get in fights, if they are able to escape from their homes.  But to a young child at least, it is not clear exactly what those fights are about.

Enter PBS and the nature shows violating the privacy of wild animals.  Especially in the last few years as these show have become more realistic, again and again we see savage battles for dominance and territory.  The announcer is usually quick to point out that one contestant usually withdraws before there is too much blood.  But is all too clear that these are real battles.  Too many of them have too many scars to think otherwise.  The stakes are not just sex once a year (being a dominant male is not all it’s cracked up to be), but often, quite literally life and death.  Even if he survives the battle, a deposed dominant male is usually banished from the group and his chances of living out the year are dim.

But surely civilized man has risen above these domination hierarchies.  No such luck.  You find domination hierarchies almost everywhere you look.  The will to dominate begins in the human families among children just as it begins among puppies and kittens.  Since children are usually born one at a time, it is usually the older child that tries to dominate the younger siblings.  But not always.  Sometimes an aggressive younger child will actually dominate an older brother or sister, often causing both of them real problems in later life.  Your kids aren’t fighting over nothing.  It is just that the fights have almost nothing to do with the trivial issues at hand.  They are fighting for dominance.  Unfortunately, some of the worst problems between siblings arise when they are not able to fight openly for some reason.  The competition can fester and poison the relationship for life.

As we grow up and go to school, we are exposed to formal and informal social groups.  Again and again, there is competition for dominance.  Who will decide what a group of friends will do after school?  Who will pick the topic for the group to report on?  Who will decide who is one of us and who is not?  Who will be the leader of the gang?  Of course, for most of our lives as young children and teenagers, we are subject to various levels and forms of domination from adults.  They tell us what to do and how to do it.  They set the rules and try to run our lives.  The rebellion of youth is usually against the domination by parents, teachers, and other adults.  It doesn’t really matter what they are telling you to do.  The problem is just that they are telling you what to do.  That they are trying to control you.  That they are in a position of dominance.

As we move into adulthood, the groups and social structures get even more complex.  For some of us, work is a real killer.  Aside from an abortive attempt at an academic career, my early years went pretty well.  I was young and inexperienced and expected to be told what to do.  But more importantly, I was lucky to work in environments which encouraged and rewarded innovation and where the domination was the natural leadership of the older, more experienced, and more skilled.  But as you begin to master your craft, the experience and skill levels no longer correlate so well with the management levels.  One day you wake up with a boss who doesn’t seem to you to be qualified to tell you what to do based on skill or experience, whose only real qualification seems to be aggressiveness and the willingness to do whatever the next level boss wants done.  In the worst cases, this can be someone who seems to be more concerned with their own position and place in the pecking order than with the success of the enterprise.

The trouble is not so much in the structures themselves.  In many situations a hierarchical organization is clearly the most appropriate to meet the needs of society.  I am not advocating anarchy here.  The trouble is in the way the people in the upper levels of these organizations treat those in the lower levels and in what people will do in order to move up the pecking order.

The dominant individual doesn’t just kill off all the weaker individuals.  That doesn’t leave him much left to dominate, nor anyone left to feed him.  Rather he demands a gesture of submission from each of the members of the group at regular intervals.  You have to roll over and expose your belly to him.  Of course you in turn get to dominate those below you in the hierarchy.  You get to show your teeth and growl at them and they have to roll over for you.  In the military they encode the submissive gestures in salutes.  Other organizations have other signs of submission.

If you feel strong enough and aggressive enough, you may one day decide to challenge the individual over you.  You growl back.  Then the battle begins.  One of you withdraws or is defeated.  In complex social groups, the challenge may be made by a group of younger individuals.  But one still ends up on top.

In human organizations, the signs of submission are sometimes, but not always, more subtle.  A domineering boss doesn’t usually show his teeth.  Growling is usually enough.  And you don’t have to show him your belly.  But you have to find some submissive gesture to let him know that you are willing to submit and do whatever he says.  You have to show him that you are loyal and will support him in whatever he says.  You have to kiss up.

Being submissive to your boss is not enough.  He expects you to dominate those under you.  You are supposed to know how to keep your troops in line.  Hierarchical organizations want people who know how to play the game.  They like people who are ambitious.  They like climbers.  The fast track crowd who know what to wear and what to drive and who to drink with and when to submit and when to challenge.

Those who don’t want play the game at all are the greatest threat to the organization.  Bosses are used to dealing with the employee that wants their job.  That’s the way its supposed to be.  The problem is with the employee who doesn’t want to move up the organization at all.  For a while there was a myth in corporate America of the “individual contributor”.  They almost never survive (well I didn’t at least).  They are too hard to control, too unpredictable, and they keep forgetting to make the appropriate submissive gestures.  When someone no longer wants to move up the organization, his boss has lost the most important carrot and must resort to the stick.

So how do you deal with the pecking order that infests so many corporate, academic, and government organizations.  One approach is just never to get involved.  Many people, lots of Eeyore types among them, choose careers or jobs that do not require them to fight for their slot in the organization chart.  They practice a craft, or run a small business, or ski a lot.  Right from the start they choose some nice quiet corner where they can make a living without having to face the pecking order of a large organization.

Others survive for a while in the corporate, academic, or civil service jungles until they finally bale out or are thrown out.  I always imagined that my personnel file had a red stamp across it warning “Not management material”.  Still I had somehow stumbled to a director level before I was thrown out.  I am not really sure why I was “made redundant”, to use the delightful British euphemism for getting laid off, but I firmly believe that the underlying reason was that I did not fit into the pecking order very well.  Not “sound”, to use another British term.  Too independent, not enough submissive gestures.  And worst of all, not able to keep what I really think from being written all over my face.

So I looked for a quite place in the bog.  Something with a few thistles to keep body and soul together, but where there was little competition and no organization.  No more pecking orders for a while.  Quite a lot of us Eeyore types are former warriors from organization charts, now off in a corner licking our wounds and discovering that you can, to some degree at least, get out of the game.  It is not just that we don’t want to be dominated.  It is as much that we don’t want to dominate.  We simply don’t want to play the game at all.

A third option is to choose your organizations carefully.  While oppressive domination hierarchies are all too common among humans, there are lots of examples where individuals and even organizations are able to rise above this baser instinct.  Where human values manage to transcend animal values.  Where respect, decency, and tolerance overcome the will to dominate.  Where skill, dedication, and hard work are the measure by which people move up the organization.  My experience has been that, especially in large organizations, there are pockets where humanity and concern for human values dominate, and others where its pretty much dog eat dog and cover your ass.  So sometimes it is not so much a matter of choosing the right organization as the right group.

Once you have found a good group, staying there can be hard, and costly.  Especially if you are forced to pass up a promotion to stay there.  Passing up a promotion, or even not actively seeking a promotion, will set of alarms in many organizations.  I was accused of being “un-American” because I did not want to apply for the vice president position.  Perhaps it is un-American.  Not only in America, but in all industrial societies, we have let the primitive concept of a pecking order become a measure of success.  How many people report to you?  Are you the CEO?  A vice president?  A director?  A Manager?  Are you the chair of the committee?  Are you the president of the club?  Are you on the congregation’s advisory board?

But Eeyore types know there are other, more meaningful measures of success.  You don’t necessarily need to be in the spotlight.  You don’t need to be near the top of some pecking order.  You don’t need a big house on the hill or a fat Mercedes.  You can be off in a corner, and still live a happy, useful life.  Success has to go with goals.  If your goals are domination and status, then the pecking order is the place for you.  But if you have other goals in life, you may want to ask yourself if you are being dragged along by the crowd, trying to find safety in numbers, doing what everyone else is doing, because everyone is doing it.  Never mind that most of them have no idea why.  You may want to bail out, a least for a while, and find a quite corner, off in the bog to think about things for a while.

I used to think that the pecking order followed the three laws of thermodynamics.  You can’t win.  There is always someone over you, and even if you are the most powerful person in the world today, you won’t be tomorrow.  You can’t break even.  If you are not moving up the pecking order, you are, or soon will be, moving down.  And you can’t get out of the game.  Here is where I have changed my mind.  I now think that you can indeed get out of the game.

Of course, you can’t really escape completely.  You have to work and live in this or some other society.  And in any society there will be some domination hierarchies.  Some you can escape, but others you have to learn to live with.  Besides, man is a social animal.  The will to dominate is the down side of being social, but there is a positive side.  There are family and friends and Pooh and Christopher Robin.  There is concern and caring and love.  So Eeyore lives in the corner in the bog, but stays in the forest.  He thinks about

“Why and wherefore and inasmuch as which?”

and tries to avoid the pecking order.

But it usually gets you in the end.