Self-Domestication and Ecological Dysfunction: The Thesis of Rogue Primate

In Rogue Primate, John A. Livingston argues that the human species is ecologically anomalous due to a process of self-domestication. His core claim is that humans, unlike other animals, have systematically severed their adaptive ties to the natural world by domesticating not only other species but themselves. This domestication has produced a creature that is biologically unregulated, ecologically destabilizing, and ideologically incapable of recognizing its own excesses.

Livingston’s argument proceeds from a zoological observation: all domesticated animals exhibit reduced behavioral plasticity, constrained environments, and dependency on external control. He contends that humans—through agriculture, sedentism, and increasingly abstract cultural systems—have subjected themselves to similar constraints. However, unlike other domesticated species, humans lack a controlling external force (e.g., a predator or owner), rendering them uniquely unbounded.

The result is a species that operates without natural checks and whose behavioral system is structured by ideological constructs—namely, anthropocentrism and instrumental rationality. This permits human systems to expand indefinitely, treating ecological limits as technical problems to be solved rather than boundaries to be respected. According to Livingston, this condition accounts for the widespread ecological degradation now observable across all biomes.

He further critiques the notion of “sustainable development,” dismissing it as internally contradictory. If development is understood as continued expansion and control, then sustainability—which presumes limits—cannot coexist with it. Likewise, appeals to human uniqueness or moral exceptionalism are seen not as explanatory frameworks but as ideological cover for behavior that would otherwise be diagnosed as maladaptive.

Livingston concludes that the only viable long-term adjustment would involve relinquishing the foundational assumptions of human supremacy and re-integrating human life within ecological systems not as managers, but as participants. Whether such a reorientation is plausible is left open, but the diagnosis is clear: the human species has become ecologically rogue, and no amount of technical refinement can address the root cause without ideological overhaul.

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Let me know if you'd like a version that includes citations or references to parallel thinkers in environmental philosophy, anthropology, or biology.

Though John A. Livingston does not frame intra-human hostility as his primary focus, he does strongly imply that the condition of being a "rogue primate" entails not only ecological aggression but also social and psychological dysfunction, including hostility toward one another.

Here’s how this is embedded in his argument:

• Domestication reduces behavioral flexibility and fosters dependency, but in humans, it’s coupled with prosthetic extensions of control (technology, institutions, ideology). These do not promote harmony; they intensify competition, abstraction, and hierarchy. The result is not only alienation from nature but estrangement from one another.

• He critiques ideologies of control and supremacy—not only over nature but also over other humans. Civilizational systems that rationalize domination of the environment tend to replicate those same logics internally, through class structures, conquest, and institutional violence.

• Livingston also notes that mass societies require high levels of ideological conformity and control to maintain themselves—features often associated with repression, surveillance, and coercion. In such systems, humans become alienated units rather than cooperative members of a living community.

• Importantly, he characterizes the rogue primate as a creature that has abandoned its evolved social and ecological embeddedness, which, in other primates, provides mechanisms for conflict resolution, bonding, and mutual regulation. Without this embeddedness, conflict becomes systemic rather than episodic, driven by economic, political, and ideological forces rather than immediate survival needs.

In short, while Livingston doesn't center his analysis on intra-species hostility, he treats it as a symptom of the same structural estrangement that defines the rogue condition. The human being, having removed itself from the ecological order, has also undermined the basis for sustained, meaningful social cooperation.

LLM