We Are Not Wolves, Though We Should Wish To Be

I realized, sometime during the past two months, that people really like to refer to humans as "pack-animals."  They like to say that we operate best as a community, and that we are genetically designed to seek communion with each other.  They say that isolative people die younger, and have greater rates of depression.  They often compare humans to wolves, which is weird because, as far as I know, wolves only exhibit the frequently referenced wolf-pack hierarchy (alpha, beta, omega) in captivity.  In other words, people love to say that wolves exist in highly structured packs that are run by the dominant or "alpha" male.  Second in line is the beta, who acts sort of like a servant to the alpha.  Last in line is the omega who apparently is just everybody's bitch.  In reality though, wolves only do that when they are packed together with wolves that they are unaccustomed to (like they would be in a zoo or a refuge or something).  In the wild, wolves travel as families.  Father, mother, kids.  Cousins?  I don't know, I'm not some wolf expert.  My point is that the "wolf pack" that everyone loves to reference so much is actually an artificial construct that is sort of a due directly to the meddling of man, or possibly to extraordinary natural circumstances (disasters, famine, etc). 

I've been thinking about this concept for a while though.  Before I learned that about the wolves.  It seems to me that the people who insist that humans are pack animals are generally members of the pack.  They aren't the Alphas.  They aren't the leaders.  They are people who are confident in their incompetence, and know that without a strong leader guiding them, they would not survive.  They may not be stupid, or weak.  But they are afraid.  And furthermore, it seems that the leaders generally look at the pack as a group of pitiful creatures.  People who can not care for themselves.  And so the leader is there.  To make the decisions, and to save people from their own backward instincts.  We are so firmly modernized that we say things like "Without air conditioning, he could die!"  Granted, people die all the time in Phoenix (where I currently am) from heat related issues, but think about how long we as a species survived in all sorts of environments without air conditioning.  Cars.  Sunscreen.  Rectal exams.  Flavored yogurt NOW! with Fiber!  It seems that we are this weird accident that inexplicably continues to propagate, and the rest of creation is just waiting for us to go away so that they can get on with it.