Sometimes circumstances develop such that superficial and inaccurate representations of something become deeply ingrained in people’s minds. Thus we obtain expressions like “one person to another is a wolf,” which implies that the wolf is supposedly a creature extremely selfish, hostile, and aggressive towards its own kind, and people are similarly no different from wolves. Wolves are compared to many bad things in general. For example, someone even might call authoritarian political leaders wolves for their lies, sinister nature, bullying other people and psychopathic indifference to their pain. However, reality is sometimes far from what is commonly believed.

In fact, if you carefully study the behavior of wolves in natural conditions, you can understand that their social organization is more cooperative than hierarchical. The organizational structure of wolf societies is more like a circle than a pyramid. Games and mutual support bond them together, but not hostility and competition for dominance within the pack. Wolves cannot actually be called merciless and antisocial creatures.

We were all told that there is some “alpha male” in wolf society who does not occupy his position to the last degree due to aggressive domination. However, in fact the display of aggression by leaders of packs towards their subordinates is very rare. And generally, violent hierarchies of dominance in wolf societies arise only when unfamiliar individuals are placed together in one closed enclosure, while observations of wolves in their natural environment completely disprove the myth of a single, most aggressive “alpha male.”

We can also recall the work of ethologist Konrad Lorenz, who in his works, especially in his article “Morality and Weaponry,” found that wolves have an inhibitor of violence that is activated in one of the fighting wolves when demonstrating to another wolf submissive postures or vulnerable parts of the body such as the neck or abdomen. Observing this, the stunned aggressor loses the ability to continue the attack. And another ethologist, Jason Badger, once managed to infiltrate a wolf pack and observe their lives very closely. Among other things, he noted that overly aggressive individuals were simply expelled from the pack.

As we see, in natural conditions aggression among wolves is not encouraged. A wolf who is merciless to his relatives and ready to harm them for his dominance may only expect success in the conditions of a cell from which one simply cannot escape. And the cruelty and violent hierarchy that exist in human society are likely possible only because it has also been driven into “state cells.” Of course, the natural state of affairs should not be like this, and the expression “man is man’s wolf” should mean friendship and cooperation, not enmity and violence.