We support our Publishers and Content Creators. You can view this story on their website by CLICKING HERE.

Peace activists and hippies have for decades used Bonobos–a chimp-like primate known to be peace and sex loving relatives to human beings–as potential models for a peaceful future society. 

Advertisement

Bonobos, we were told, were like the hippie ideal, all free love and stoner-friendly. 

Yeah, well, it was all bul**hit. Bonobos are even more aggressive than chimpanzees, a famously aggressive primate known for tossing its excrement at zoogoers. I don’t know if bonobos are into flinging poo, but they are over twice as likely to be aggressive than chimps. 

Chimpanzee societies are dominated by males that kill other males, raid the territory of neighboring troops and defend their own ground with border patrols. Male chimpanzees also attack females to coerce them into mating, and sometimes even kill infants. Among bonobos, in contrast, females are dominant. Males do not go on patrols, form alliances or kill other bonobos. And bonobos usually resolve their disputes with sex — lots of it.

Bonobos became famous for showing that nature didn’t always have to be red in tooth and claw. “Bonobos are an icon for peace and love, the world’s ‘hippie chimps,’” Sally Coxe, a conservationist, said in 2006.

But these sweeping claims were not based on much data. Because bonobos live in remote, swampy rainforests, it has been much more difficult to observe them in the wild than chimpanzees. More recent research has shown that bonobos live a more aggressive life than their reputation would suggest.

Advertisement

All this fits with the hippie myth if you think about it. You can talk all you want about peace and love, but conflicts are inevitable, and aggression, if undesirable, is unavoidable. 

The big difference between bonobos and chimpanzees, it turns out, is that chimps are more likely to cooperate than bonobos. Also, bonobo females are more likely to be aggressive than chimpanzees. 

Sounds like Generation Z to me. 

As expected, given that females commonly outrank males, we found that bonobos exhibited lower rates of male-female aggression and higher rates of female-male aggression than chimpanzees. Surprisingly, we found higher rates of male-male aggression among bonobos than chimpanzees even when limiting analyses to contact aggression. In both species, more aggressive males obtained higher mating success. Although our findings indicate that the frequency of male-male aggression does not parallel species difference in its intensity, they support the view that contrary to male chimpanzees, whose reproductive success depends on strong coalitions, male bonobos have more individualistic reproductive strategies.

Aggressive women and unhappy loner men who lash out. And Andrew Tate-types get the girls, apparently. 

It’s 21st-century Western culture all right, and it’s hardly the utopian future that the Left keeps promising us. Maybe that is why they keep on pointing to bonobos as the future of mankind. 

Advertisement

The researcher, Dr. Maud Mouginot, set out to study why bonobos were so peaceful. Harvard researchers had put forth a theory about females domesticating males by mating with the more peaceful. 

She found life didn’t live up to hype:

Dr. Mouginot soon became perplexed, as she saw that male bonobos acted aggressively on a regular basis. Unlike male chimpanzees, who started their days in a mellow mood, the male bonobos seemed to wake up ready for a fight.

“I thought, where is the peaceful bonobo?” Dr. Mouginot said.

She and her colleagues trained field assistants, who made more observations throughout the pandemic. The new analysis, based on 9,300 hours of observations on 12 male bonobos and 14 male chimpanzees, found that bonobos committed aggressive acts 2.8 times as frequently as than the chimpanzees did.

The myth of the bonobo mirrors the one that Margaret Mead created about Somoa, in which peaceful natives practiced free love and lived in harmony with nature. 

Of course, what was presented as sociology turned out to be complete fiction, but fiction that set the stage for the casual sex revolution that has plagued the West. 

Mead completely misrepresented Samoan sexual attitudes and practices both before and after Christianity. Rather than being a society built on promiscuity, the entire civilization was actually built on the veneration of virginity, a devotion that Christianity only intensified.

For Samoans, there were no women more esteemed than the ceremonial virgins (called taupous), whose virginity at the time of marriage was so important that Samoans had an elaborate pre-marital, public ritual to determine virginity.

Furthermore, as Freeman shows, this regard for virginity was not confined to the upper classes from which the taupous came, but permeated the entire society, down to the lower levels — the levels Mead claimed were sexually the freest. Casual sexual liaisons under the palm tree, rather than being smiled upon, were (when they actually did occur) “recognized by all concerned as shameful departures from the well-defined ideal of chastity.” Finally, contrary to Mead, marital exclusivity was taken with the utmost seriousness by the Samoans. Adultery was punished by beating, mutilation or even death.

Advertisement

It shouldn’t surprise us that the scientific frauds all point in one direction because reality does not correspond with the wishes that leftists project on reality. 

That was as true with Margaret Mead as with the myth of the hippie ape and with the claim that net zero is compatible with a modern functioning society. Time and again, the cultural elite creates a myth that seems appealing to others, pushing the idea that there are no trade-offs in life and that we can have peace, love and happiness with no work, no conflict, and no restrain on our appetites. 

Would that it were so, but it never will be.