Tall Poppy Syndrome

May 19, 2024

By AHNZ

New Zealand’s Tall Poppy Syndrome takes its name from a passage in Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita (The History of Rome) written in the final years before Year Zero. According to Fischer (2012) the final King of Rome, Tarquin, had a problem to solve in the form of chiefly men who stood out from the rest for their high abilities. The king led the delegation to his garden and without saying a word lopped off the heads of all the tallest poppies with his stick. The communication was clear. The king’s envoy set out to behead those high men and rid the kingdom of them.

Equality is our Tarquin. Egalitarianism is our sovereign king that strikes down anybody of talent or distinction before they can grow. This is a mechanism we have inherited from even deeper roots than Ancient Rome. Christopher Boehm (1999) studied tribal human groups as well as chimps and used the term Reverse Dominance Hierarchy. Boehm found hunter/gatherer societies to be obsessive about blocking alphas from emerging and a strong drive to band together to take them down. Thus, the internally enforced hierarchy is one of domination of the masses over the ruling minority.

A Tall Poppy Culture is initially anxious and afraid of a person (or perhaps even an artifact or group) that has threatened the status quo by standing out from it. Clarity sets in when the target (or suitable Scapegoat) can be identified and then eradicated by the masses. A politician can do quite well for himself by championing laws (even if they are illegal laws) that will taboo the bad man, bad woman, bad knife, bad animal, bad drink, bad medicine, bad book, etc. In New Zealand some innocent is always being bitten by a dog or stabbed or run over or burned or something and an aggrieved sub-group always Chimping Out by demanding a ban on the entire category of car or plane or knife or medicine etc. that resembles the supposedly offending object. Look here also to understand the proliferation of inspectors, officers, monitors, bureaucrats, compliance fees, taxes, levees, rates, speed limits, viewing cameras, warning signs, road cones etc. that opportunistically spring up for cashing in on the chimping out.

New Zealand’s cultural settings, then, are in this way at the same level as those of  hunter-gather homo sapiens bands going back 40,000 years to the Upper Paleolithic. They are the same settings that caused American philosophy Ayn Rand to remark that “Thousands of years ago the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burnt at the stake he’d taught his brothers to light, but he left them a gift they had not conceived and he lifted darkness from the face of the Earth.” Heraclitus, down the road a bit from Tarquin, made a more rageful observation about his home state of Ephesus: “The Ephesians would do well to hang themselves, every grown man of them, and leave the city to beardless lads; for they have cast out Hermodorus, the best man among them, saying: ‘We will have none who is best among us; if there be any such, let him be so elsewhere and among others.'”

Our Reverse Dominance Hierarchy culture keeps New Zealanders in the posture of chimps in that we don’t dare walk fully upright. We are groomed by our Family of Origin and Government Schools to stay down and to help cull the tall poppies. The down-side is obvious enough. It means it is an exception, an escape, an act of disobedience for any individual to break-away and perform acts of science or art or leadership that are excellent. This means great disadvantage in innovation and discovery and domestic productivity. As New Zealand poet Allen Curnow famously phrased it:  “Not I, some child, born in a marvelous year, Will learn the trick of standing upright here.”

The up-side of a Reverse Dominance Hierarchy is less obvious. It keeps us in stasis and preserves a functional stationary order that keeps body and soul together. In the collective judgement of the New Zealand corporate organism we don’t need any more change around here. Change is traumatic. New ideas and creative people are an invading virus and must be identified by antigens and fought off by macrophages. We have people for that who are highly paid for this function and make a career of Cancelling and Deplatforming such threats. The semi-permeable membrane of the Kiwi cell wall must not not be broken least we bleed out as a society and die. Gallipoli was such a traumatic event in cytoplasmic rupturing that we have been hypervigilant for generations. We traded freedom and wealth for security. If an individual really wants to achieve something great they must do it the ‘right’ way: Leave Eukaryotic New Zealand and offer a different country the benefits of your new idea. One the new ideas/institution/technology is proven elsewhere it can come to New Zealand by the official protein channels and be embraced by the nucleus of our own culture. The exiled Kiwi who has achieved this distinction can now be recognised if they would fulil the final prerequisite: either die or remain in permanent exile.

“This is where anyone who is brazen enough to strive for success — or, god forbid, to achieve it — immediately becomes a target for the “crab bucket mentalities” who, rather than strive for success themselves, derive enormous pleasure from attempting to cut the tall poppy back down… your less successful peers accuses you of being a “try-hard” — the implication being that effort is bad & non-effort is good. Do you ignore him? Or, next time, do you take pains to show him that you do not try hard?” – The Crab Bucket Mentality and The Fountainhead, Chris Lewis, TFR

“The oldest telling I know is Prometheus’ story from Greek myth. The God who brought mankind the technology of fire and was repaid with torment. Then there’s Adam and Eve who eat from the Tree of Knowledge in Eden and are cast out and cursed for it. In New Zealand it’s called Tall Poppy Syndrome.” – Prometheus In An Unholy Land, NZB3

“Men soon commenced to shed their clothing. Slacks were ripped off at the knees and the vogue of shorts commenced. Coats were flung off and then shirts. The ‘Tommy hats’ in which the New Zealanders had landed were soon thrown away and replaced by Australian felts, pith helmets or the New Zealand issue of unfortunate members of the reinforcement drafts … Within six weeks of landing the fashionable costume had become boots, shorts, identity disk, hat and when circumstances permitted a cheerful smile. The whole was topped off by a most glorious coat of sunburn.” – The Silent Division, Ormond Burton (1935,) nzhistory.govt

“Nothing better illustrates the English class divisions the New Zealand Company was so determined to replicate in the new colony than Ironside’s diary entry of 24 June 1843, in which he recalls finding ‘Capt. Wakefield, Mr Thompson, Capt. England, Mr Richardson, Mr Patchett, Mr Cotterell, & Mr Howard, gentlemen, & twelve other white people all of Nelson’ (my emphasis). Those ‘twelve other white people’ — unfortunate settler lads roped into a foolhardy and ultimately fatal mission by the fine ‘gentlemen’ who preceded them — also had names,…” –  No Left Turn, Chris Trotter (2010)

The Expeditionary Generation who submitted themselves to the Gallipoli Fiasco set New Zealand into the Reverse Dominance Hierarchy Culture. British officers (Alphas) demanded the ANZACs change their own hats for regulation ones during the landing. Our men refused to conform, disobediently re-wiring the new issue hats and uniforms in an act of protest to show what was thought of dominance hierarchies. As a result they now resembled Turks and would be shot by their own mates by mistake! The same thing happened during another government project when flight 901 to Antarctica deliberately flouted American officers (alphas) regulations rather than conform to the McMurdo Station dominance hierarchy. As a result they flew their plane full of civilians into Mt Erebus! New Zealanders prefer egalitarianism even if it kills us. By contrast, as quoted above, 1840s New Zealand’s dominance hierarchy was such that only the names of gentlemen were worth noting in Rev. Samuel Ironside’s diary of the Wairau Affray while the other 12 were just “white people.”

How Tall Poppy Syndrome Is Enforced

Our C18th Dominance Hierarchy has been replaced by the C20th Reverse Dominance Hierarchy and the concomitant desire for Fairness rather than Freedom. In a a less traumatised, more confident, nation these forces would be more in balance. Generally speaking Britain and the former colonies have eschewed their former heroic Tall Poppy nurturing environments after the existential traumatisation inflicted by the World Wars and their aftermath. The USA, having emerged stronger than ever from the wars, is much more in balance and can claim the rewards that come from nurturing winners. Only in the USA is there much of a contest between these 2 big forces. This being said, Americans have their own Reverse Dominance Hierarchy presidents and institutions including the Virginia State flag (image, right) which literally depicts reverse dominance with the Latin slogan thus always to tyrants.

In New Zealand the red and the blue, left and right, are both much of a muchness and only quibble over who best represents the status quo. Big stand-out popularist leaders like Richard Seddon, M.J Savage, Norm Kirk, and Rob Muldoon all owe their success to the perception that they championed the Reverse Dominance Hierarchy. Edmund Hillary, ‘humble beekeeper’, mitigated his greatness by never disclosing who first climbed Everest, supporting Leftist politics, and passing on his honors to  Tibetan village charities. New Zealanders got rid of all non-ceremonial Royalty and Governors in the time of Seddon and if they thought anyone occupied such a position they would have their head on a pike. However, we have more sophisticated ways of enforcing the RDH than our early hominid ancestors even though ours is essentially the same system. Here’s how it works.

Gossip and rumor dispensed by our feminine population poisons anybody from rising too high. A Tall Poppy’s opportunities to network or contribute will be cut back because behind their back they will be deferentially tabooed back into their proper place. Women tell lies about how much they love and approve of others (when they don’t) but men get the same job done by lying about how much they hate and disapprove of other men (when they don’t.) In a man’s RDH laboratory he’ll also be ‘taking someone down a peg or two’ who is ‘too big for his boots’ but achieving it by abuse. Telling another Kiwi male he’s impotent, stupid, gay, fat, ugly, useless, etc. enforces the RDH. Yet even these measures in Semantic Framing are only a back-up plan to save us from having to assassinate anyone from being a Tall Poppy.

The primary measure by which Tall Poppies are stopped in their tracks is through being socialised at an early age to self-attack. We use Affected Humility. We use Self-Mitigating Language. There is no need to back-stab or ball-break a member of our group who had reflexively, preemptively, made himself small.  All insipid, incestuous, petty, parochial little tribes and nations are filled up with self-mutilating psychopaths. If the inner Tall Poppy refuses to stay in abeyance then the Kiwi can, and does, literally kill himself. New Zealand has almost the highest suicide rate on the planet. Doctor Jack Lovelock was a successful national treasure before he fell under that train. We don’t talk about suicide here.

“The tall poppy syndrome is a phenomenon where high-achievers are attacked or resented for their success – New Zealand is particularly known for its intolerance of people who achieve success…My strategies have been exactly as Woodhams has described: to constantly refer to myself – and especially my intellectual ability – in self-deprecating terms, to rarely use my ‘Dr’ title in my signature strip in a work context…to appear less confident in public speaking and external stakeholder engagement situations than I actually feel, and so on. I don’t regret taking these strategies: they have made my professional life much smoother, and I have so perfected the art, I am rarely subjected to resentful attacks..” – Dr Catherine Knight blog (2016)

Reverse Dominance Hierarchy Today

As Gallipoli appears to be the crystalising event of our Reverse Dominance Hierarchy culture it’s fitting that its symbol, the poppy, is shared by the resultant Tall Poppy Syndrom.

As we got ourselves into it we may yet get out again. Only then will we shuck the Small Country Syndrome and stop asking tourists and foreigners to re-assure us they’ve heard of of New Zealand. Do they think we’re OK? What do you think of us? Australia got that/him/her/it from us!

Since the late 2010s New Zealanders have been experimenting with trying to reach again for a rung on the orthodox hierarchy ladder without letting go of the old one on the Reverse Dominance Hierarchy ladder. We’ve been having this strange amalgam of people who try to dominate others by virtue of their victimhood. It’s supposedly the case that such politicians and social activists are not really trying to claim power and wealth for themselves (but they get it anyway) but rather for the planet, for Black Lives, for First Nations, for women, etc. It’s quite ugly to see but at least it shows deep down that their is a desire not to be morally crippled if not the discovery of the “trick” of walking upright, unashamedly egotistical, yet.

Likewise, it seems like every group exercise needs moral cover. Nobody can just go for a walk or a run or a ride unless it’s to “Raise Awareness” for some poor subgroup. “It’s OK for bourgeois white people to ride electric unicycles through Bangladesh for recreation so long as they can call back to the slumdog urchins they tread over something like “This raises awareness for BLM!” or “Climate Change Justice for Palestine,” or “We ride today to raise funds for Bangladeshi unicycle hit-and-run victims!”” – Australian Truth, NZB3

Boehm wrote that in hunter-gatherer bands authority could not be exercised in public but it certainly was legitimate and relatively unrestrained in the home. “Dominant control is directed at children, and often at wives, so acts of interpersonal domination are witnessed constantly. Band members are kept aware of the danger of letting individuals develop authority that extends beyond the family. In many bands, men in particular must carefully shift gears when they move from a family-head role, in which a strong, paternal authority style may be socially acceptable, to a band-member role, in which it is not.”

Thus, our New Zealand Reverse Dominance Hierarchy has had to survive the break-down of boundaries between men’s spaces and women’s spaces. It used to be that men could enjoy some orthodox hierarchy in his own house, his castle. At the extreme, there was no such thing as rape in marriage and no wife’s testimony was admissible against her husband in court. However, male workplaces have been taken away now so it is not possible for men to retain their public egalitarian persona as well as their domestic dominator persona. Nor have men’s only clubs such as Workingmen’s Clubs or Mason’s Lodges etc. remained exclusive. Women, on the other hand, have a plethora of spaces just for themselves such as workplaces, university spaces, and women’s only gyms. Girls can join Boy Scouts but no boy wants to be a Girl Guide. Women can be bishops but no man wants to live as a nun.

In the old social contract men had a place to go where they could gather some masculine serotonin and manly dopamine. He could at least be a Tall Poppy at home, at the pub, in the club. But, he’ll be back to “pulling his head in” with the rest of the poppies the rest of the time. When there are no men’s spaces it’s not possible to keep up the duel persona. Women and children can see that the Lord of their Manor is nothing of the sort now they have access to witness him in the previously exclusive arenas of politics, pub, workplace, military. Men have become the big losers in the moratorium on excellence.

Meanwhile, as women have entered the spaces governed by Reverse Dominance Hierarchies they’ve been quite upset to learn what goes on here. When these industrial, academic, government, and corporate arenas were male-only it was taken for granted by men that Tall Poppies would be clobbered. Women were shocked to find all the workplace bullying, the humiliation, the mockery, the careful tightrope walks to not show the pride that would invite retaliatory correction. Boehm’s example of the !Kung tribe (Kalahari) shows with what delicacy and understatement men announce their accomplishments…

“The !Kung approach to curbing upstartism is assertively preemptive…Say that a man has been hunting. He must not come home and announce like a braggart, “I have killed a big one in the bush!” He must first sit down in silence until I or someone else comes up to his fire and asks, “What did you see today?” He replies quietly, “Ah, I’m no good for hunting. I saw nothing at all . . . maybe just a tiny one.” Then I smile to myself because I now know he has killed something big….even after his show of modesty, other band members preemptively take pains to put down the hunter. When they go to carry in the kill they express their “disappointment” boisterously.” – Boehm, ibid

Contrast this sort of self-mitigating male speech with what Wal Footrot or Barry Crump or Fred Dagg might say. The humble, down-to-earth rural, down-played, dry, unpretentious, simple Kiwi male archetype would fit right in on the Kalahari. None of those men would make a big production about bringing home a big win either. “Good on ya mate” was the height of excited praise from Crump or quite literally from Frank Whitten’s Southern Man persona in all those Speight’s beer adverts. John Clark, creator of Dagg, could have been talking about these generations of men when he said, “I would think Fred Dagg could be described as being in life’s great holding pattern. He’s simply awaiting landing instructions, more or less permanently.” Ref. NZ on Screen

Well, women strode into the pointy end of the Reverse Dominance Hierarchies and instead of saying “Oh you poor guys what have you had to put up with all these years?” they straight-up blamed it on men! The Patriarchy, they called it. Toxic Rape Culture, Homophobia, Sexisim, Emotional Abuse, Micro-Aggression, and Mansplaining were just some of the names for what blokes had hitherto referred to as life. Women took it personally to their sex as if all the time-tested institutions they were now being included in (at their own behest, mind you) were all about them.

Being humiliated, called names, etc. are all art forms in Tall Poppy etiquette to ensure participants don’t get too big for their boots and full of himself, Up Yourself, Stuck Up, Flash, on your High Horse with airs and graces. The New Zealand male had invented terminology to fill many technical manuals dedicated to Kiwi slang all largely dedicated to preserving the Reverse Dominance Hierarchy. It hurt (the beer helped) but it was for the greater purpose of preserving our species from rocking the boat too much and causing an existential cultural crisis. Nobody was quite sure what would happen if Wal/Barry/Fred/Frank wasn’t put into check but it was definitely something like Gallipoli x 1,000,000.

Woman suggests a good idea at the board meeting; Nobody listens. She thinks she has been ignored. No, it’s just that the assembled gathering are acutely aware that this sheila lacks the sense god gave to a !Kung bushman. A Kiwi bloke now cogitates and re-represents the self-same suggestion initially presented by the female colleague in the first instance. This time everyone in the group responds enthusiastically with the exception of course of the woman whose idea it was. “Sexism,” she will latter Tweet on social media to her girlfriends, “is rampant!”

Woman thinks she’s doing what a man does but he’s called “Leader” while she’s called “Bossy.” He’s excited, she’s hysterical. He’s confident, she’s excitable. He’s jokey, she’s mean. He gets jobs and pay she doesn’t? It’s probably not because she’s a girl but because in the RDH we are equal opportunity Tall Poppy killers. Men tried to warn women not to come in. “Stay home with the kids, we’ll do this for you.” But women wanted the vote, they wanted to be lawyers, judge. To be a poster for Rudyard Kipling’s If and especially the part about loss and pain and never breathing a word about your loss. They wanted in on being policemen, bishops, soldiers, to govern, to run the schools.

Maintaining the Reverse Dominance Hierarchy in the workplace is a heavy burden that modern women don’t seem to be taking well to. Instead of keeping people well-tuned and functional in the workplace we frequently have to resort to Phase 2 which is firing or cancelling or platforming people who upset us. Worse, Phase 3 which involves jailing or killing them. If the inheritors of our Tall Poppy System are not going to put in the work of maintaining it by the necessary Affected Humility and Mitigated Speech then there are only 2 things that can happen. Firstly, the thing we’re all traumatised and paranoid about will come true and New Zealand will fly apart. Or, alternatively, we return to an Orthodox Hierarchy where Tall Poppies don’t have to be removed for the ‘collective good’ and we step up and be a proper nation again rather than a scared weird little guy hiding from everyone in the South Pacific ocean.

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Image ref. poppies, brisbanekids.com.au

Ref. Fairness and Freedom, David Fischer (2012)

Ref. Hierarchy in the Forest, Christopher Boehm (1999)

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