The Molecule of More

particularly interesting is that Emerson called this man “my master.” 
He wrote of domination through submission—self-submission in the 
form of deference, humility, and obedience.
SUBMISSIVE MONKEYS, HUMBLE SPIES
When researchers at the Illinois State Psychiatric Institute injected a 
dopamine-boosting drug into stump-tailed macaque monkeys, they 
observed an increase in submissive gestures, such as lip smacking, gri-
macing (the monkey version of smiling), and holding out an arm to 
another monkey for a gentle bite. On the surface this response doesn’t 
make sense. Why would dopamine, the neurotransmitter of dominance, 
trigger submissive behavior? Is there a contradiction here? Not at all. 
In the control circuit, dopamine drives domination of the environment, 
not necessarily the people in it. Dopamine wants more, and it doesn’t 
care how it gets it. Moral or immoral, dominant or submissive, it’s all 
the same to dopamine, as long as it leads to a better future.
Consider a spy stationed in a hostile country, trying to gain access 
to a government building. While prowling around a back alley, he runs 
into the janitor. The spy treats the janitor as his equal, perhaps even his 
superior, in order to gain his cooperation—submissive behavior aimed 
at dominating the environment and reaching his goal.

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78
THE MOLECULE OF MORE
Submissive behavior can have negative connotations—letting 
people “walk all over you,” for instance—but the scope of submissive 
behavior is much wider than that. In modern society, submissive behav-
ior is often a sign of elevated social status—think of the strict adher-
ence to manners, the focus on social customs, and, in conversation, the 
deference to others that is part and parcel of the behavior of what we 
might call “the elite.” The common name for this behavior is courtesy, 
a word derived from the word court, because it was the behavior orig-
inally adopted by the nobility. By contrast, dominant behavior, repre-
senting the opposite of courtesy, may stem from personal insecurity or 
an imperfect education.
Planning, tenacity, and force of will through personal effort or by 
working with others: these are the ways control-circuit dopamine lets us 
dominate our environment. But how do we behave—and feel—when 
the system falls out of balance? In particular, what happens when there 
is too much or too little control dopamine?
OUTER SPACE CHALLENGE, 
INNER SPACE STRUGGLE
GQ Magazine:
What does it feel like to go to the moon?
Buzz Aldrin:
Look, we didn’t know what we were feeling. We 
weren’t feeling.
GQ:
What were your emotions as you walked on the surface 
of the moon?
BA:
Fighter pilots don’t have emotions.
GQ:
But you’re a human!
BA:
We had ice in our veins.
GQ:
Well, did you ever say, “I’m going to get in that [fragile 
lunar module], and land on the moon”? Did that ever sort of
flabbergast you?

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79
DOMINATION
BA:
I understood the construction of it. It’s got landing gear. 
It’s got struts that compress. It’s got probes that hang down. It 
was a marvel of engineering.
—Interview with Buzz Aldrin
Instead of taking a bow for walking on the moon, Colonel Buzz Aldrin, 
PhD, told his admirers, “It’s something we did. Now we should do 
something else,” apparently no more satisfied than if he had painted 
a fence. His desire was not to bask in his glory but to find “something 
else”—the next big challenge that could hold his interest. This perpet-
ual need to identify a goal and calculate a way to reach it was perhaps 
the most important factor in his historic success. But it’s not easy hav-
ing so much dopamine coursing through the control circuits. It almost 
certainly played a significant role in Aldrin’s post-lunar struggle with 
depression, alcoholism, three divorces, suicidal impulses, and a stay on 
a psychiatric ward, which he described in his candid autobiography,