Methods of Freedom: Non-Hierarchal Thought
by Benjamin ShenderCivilization is not only a method of living but also a way of thinking. This is very nearly a priori true. But, for the sake of argument, when a person lives in a certain social structure their minds become adapted to viewing the world in this social structure. For instance, a Christian sees the world in terms of forces of good and evil fighting each other for the domination of the world. This has a direct correlation with the theology of Christianity. In civilization, this leaves us with a way of thinking that relies on hierarchal structures. We then use these structures to organize our thoughts. And this shapes the way we view ourselves, our place in the world, and reality itself.
This structure sees things as subsets of each other, rather than as elements affecting each other. As such, it also views certain elements as innately superior to others. This paradigm innately follows a hierarchal social structure. If humans are arranged in a hierarchy, why should the rest of the universe be any different? But it is. The universe is made up of a number of individual and equal elements of a number that is so inconceivably large as to be essentially infinite, and certainly infinite for our purposes. These infinite elements make up quarks, leptons, and neutrinos. These interact to form what we call protons, neutrons, etc. Which in turn interact in ways that we call atoms. And those atoms interact into molecules. And molecules interact into stars and planets. Into life-forms. Those stars and planets then interact in ways that make up solar systems and galaxies. While life-forms interact in ways that we call ecosystems. But it is not a hierarchy with one element above another. It is made of an infinite number of equal elements interacting together in an equally infinite number of ways. And so do we, too, interact. As we are made of these elements we cannot rule, we are part and parcel. We must interact equally as we are made of the same base material that everything else. The only difference is that, for us, these elements are currently interacting in a way we call “human.� And, by the same token, we cannot serve.
However, these truisms do not stop people from seeing the world in this way. As planets being superior to moons, stars to plants, and galaxies to stars. Apparently with size being the only justification. It is this kind of thinking that also leads to human exceptionalism. This is what leads to people thinking about evolution like a process leading somewhere. This is even what gives people the idea of “progress� at all.
Without such a mindset it is readily apparent that humans must interact with all other elements, and any belief that humans could be exempt from such interaction is obviously foolhardy. Evolution is merely elements reacting to each other, with no certain destiny discernible. And there can be no certain development at all. One set of interactions can be judged ultimately superior to another, merely superior for the circumstance.
With this in mind we are forced to no other conclusion than that hierarchy is a farce. We perceive an individual as being superior and in so doing make him superior to us. It is something we made up. A single star can affect the whole galaxy. And a single slave can affect the whole empire. By simply perceiving a ruler as no more powerful than any other individual he becomes no more powerful than any other individual. And by doing so we can see that their interactions have no more affect than any of ours. There are certain things we are compelled to do by circumstance. And it is these things that comprise most of what a ruler does. The Egyptian Pharaoh was the most powerful person in all of Ancient Egypt, but the vast majority of things he did were not his choice but his obligation. These things are determined by ceremony, general opinion, and the material needs of your society. In a very real way President Bush had little choice but to invade Iraq. The United States is utterly dependent on oil and has little in the way of reserves in the territory of the United States. Since transitioning to another energy source is difficult and time consuming (if even possible), the only immediate and logical solution is to obtain the needed resources through warfare. I make no moral judgement here, only an acknowledgment of current fact. Ultimately, the lower we are placed in a hierarchy by general consensus the more freedom we have in our interactions. This leaves our net effect the same. Specifically, exactly as far reaching as the energy we put into that interaction.
Non-hierarchical thought. Good to start with attempting to heal ourselves. Like those self-developer gurus say; “Your subconscious beliefs create your realities”.
Well, in my subconscious if there is hierarchy, then it could be reflected to my actions. Am I thinking right?
To change that, I think it’s good to start by changing our thoughts, language [as you discussed in your previous article, Benjamin].
Comment by Elfun — 7 January 2006 @ 10:59 AM
Good post. This reminds me of a story. Long ago when I was about 21 or 22, some friends set me up with a divorced mom who was 3 or 4 years older than me. She turned out to be a big time Christian, which I most certainly wasn’t. In fact, she was my first ever bible-thumper. Early on she told me that she really wanted me to attend some Christian conference that was being held simultaneously in several cities, including ours. Basically, you’d show up at the big local venue and sit in an audience of a few thousand watching a guy speak on a big screen. So reluctantly, I showed up and wasted 2 or 3 hours of my life listening to some holy roller go on and on about the need to respect the “chain of command”. Not surprisingly, the next level below god was your holy roller pastor, then below him was the pater familias, then mom, and the kids. Sparky the Wonder Dog came dead last.
I left early never to return. It was nothing other than an attempt at brainwashing. It’s no exaggeration to say that the experience made me want to puke afterwards.
Having been born with an insubordinate nature, I have always chaffed under hierarchy. BTW, if you haven’t read Jeff Vail’s book, do so. It’s the most eye-opening thing I’ve read in years. It’s also encouraging to see the people here shedding light on hierarchy. However, when you bring this subject up with 99.9% of the population, they look at you as if you are insane because they are so utterly under the spell.
Comment by Peter — 7 January 2006 @ 5:41 PM
I’ll add the the guy speaking up on the screen talked about this “chain of command” as if it were as real as gravity or the Laws of Thermodynamics. You supposedly risked grave consequences if you chose not to bow down to it.
Comment by Peter — 7 January 2006 @ 6:04 PM
I’m about 2/3rds through Jared Diamond’s “Collapse,” and it begs a question in my mind that’s right on this topic: Why is hierarchy so prevalent? Are humans pre-wired for it?
All I can come up with is that hierarchy was a form that provided a means to organize agriculture from horticulture. This move is attractive to provide some stability in diet.
I read somewhere that horticulture doesn’t tend to last too long before agriculture sets in, with maybe a little time in or coexistence with pastoralism. Seems to me that hunter/gatherer to horticulture to agriculture is only an attractive path to provide more stability to food supplies. Each step costs freedom.
In other words, people are willing to trade their freedom, and even their basic nature and dignity as humans, for full bellies.
By the way, I think it becomes even harder to resist this trade when you feel that you have to make choices for others, such as your children.
Of course, most people in the US probably feel fairly confident that their kids will be fed, so the requirements go up: you have to provide a nice home in a “safe” neighborhood, you have to choose an area with good schools, you’re neglecting their development if you don’t provide computers for them.
I still somehow feel like that only provides a partial answer to why we seem so hardwired to accept hierarchy. Maybe it’s the easy way out. Maybe it’s actually entropic to move to a more hierarchical system. Societies don’t descend into chaos, but into hierarchy.
Again, this is something I’m really struggling with, so any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
Comment by Sam — 9 January 2006 @ 3:31 AM
As far as food supply goes the only thing agriculture gaurantees is famine. Stick with me here, this is very important. The idea that agriculture creates a more assured supply of food than foraging is one that is deaply ingrained and absolute, unmitigated nonsense. The reason this is is because agriculture relies a very few, closly related, grains that are primarily energy and little else. The effect of this is that several successful crops will cause a dramatic increase in population. And increase that exceeds the carrying capacity of the land, which is the exact conditions in which famine occurs. Since all the grains are so closely related, any problem that adversely affects one of them will effect all of them. Then you have crop failure and famine. Foragers do not have this problem because their population is never subject to uncontrolled growth and their food supplies are varied. Granted, during a massive drought they may have to eat less prefered foods, or work harder than they do during good seasons. But famine is almost unheard of for a forager, while it is a way of life for a farmer.
The single soul advantage, if you choose to thing of it that way, of agriculture is that it allows you to stay put. Another possible senario for the foundation of civilization is that at the beginning of our current interglacial there was a drastic increase in food supplies. This allowed previously nomadic peoples to stay put, there was sufficent food in the immediate vacinity to allow it. So they did it, which makes sense, moving is a pain in the butt. But eventually their population increased to meet supply. Now, when a forager group runs into this problem they split into two forager groups. But you can’t split a town into two and have half of the people take half the huts. So whoever leaves is at a disadvantage, which is not the case for nomadic foragers. Once they decided to stay in place, their only recourse would be to incurage the growth of the foods they liked closer in. And they would have to do this more and more, eventually passing the point of diminishing returns and developing agriculture. But before this point, their population would have reached a point sufficently high (probably ~150 or higher) and developed a hierarchal system of management in order to organize and deal with so many people. After a certain point of population people simply can no longer concieve of everyone as an individual. Once you reach this point you start assigning people to groups to handle the excess data. Then you are only a short step from social classes and a full-fledged hierarchy with all the bells and whistles.
By this course of events, we see humans doing very natural, and very tribal things, that lead to hierarchy because of a very specific set of coincidences. If the situation had been even slightly different it would have never happened. As it is, it is possibly the least likely event in the history of the world.
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 9 January 2006 @ 10:39 AM
Ben,
Good point about group sizes.
I think maybe agriculture is just something developed by elites to extract more from a horticultural/pastoral society. I don’t think these more geographically stable forms of food procurement arose by chance in just one area. Didn’t they spontaneously develop all over the world? The Chinese and Aztecs didn’t get their agriculture from the Fertile Crescent, after all.
I still think that, even if we know in retrospect that agriculture actually causes famine, it offers the PROMISE of more food stability. Now that I think about it, it offers more cultural stability, too. So to the extent you like and believe in a certain meme complex, it’s going to be telling you to stay put. In fact, maybe meme complexes only came into existence with geographical stability, since then their elements could survive long enough to amass into a complex.
Also, I still find it somewhat surprising and disturbing that people would seem to automatically revere organizations instead of people. I think true anarchy could be renamed “People-Centered Government.” In order to work, anarchy has to continually guard against organizations becoming the focus, instead of the people they’re supposed to serve.
Why do humans seem so willing to fall into the trap of thinking of the survival and needs of the organization as more important than their own?
Again, all I can come up with is the generalized security need.
Comment by Sam — 9 January 2006 @ 1:45 PM
Hey –
Sam wrote:
Oh, no not at all. Traditional H-G societies have memplexes also — they just say different things…
The whole ‘revering organizations rather than people’ comes back to the other on-going discussion about Dunbar’s number. People can only really conceptualize so many persons, so when there are MORE persons to deal with, we must resort to stereotypes and idealizations — organizations in your comment.
Janene
Comment by Janene — 9 January 2006 @ 2:00 PM
Approximately 5 times in fact…out of millions of cultures over 500,000 years in which we were capable of it. And all in locations offering very similar climates and species. Sounds like you have a better chance of winning the lottery to me. But just like the lottery, someone wins eventually.
It lies. Agriculture is grooling work, takes more energy then you can get out of it, and causes population explosions, environmental damage, and requires that the society that practices it continuously expand.
Like Janene said, a memeplex is a group of ideas and concepts that work together in a group of people. Essentially a culture. Tribes have cultures of rich diversity that puts out cut-and-paste McDonald’s world to shame. And as for stability, do you mean stable as in sustainable or stable as in resistant to change? For sustainable, not by a long shot. No system based on perpetual growth can survive indefinitly in a finite universe. Tribes are sustainable over the long term, at least hundreds of thousands of years. Civilization is about to finish running it’s course in less than 30 thousand. A blink of an eye. As far resistance to change, you would be correct, to a point. Civilizations are very resitant to change, this is a bad thing. Because civilizations, unlike tribes, don’t easily adapt they often fall victim to revolution. An unchanging system is impossible, so civilizations have to violent alter the status quo while tribes merely evolve.
Not organizations as much as stereotypes. You can’t deal with the idea of 6.5 billion people. So you assign groups of them a template that you can deal with. Instead of dealing with Arabs as the diverse (and not always cooperative) group it is Americans deal with them as “the bad guys”TM much to our determint. But we can’t deal with groups larger than ~150 in any other way. Our brains are just too limited.
I don’t think most of them do. We only support organizations when their survival is required for our own. Most Americans don’t care a damn about the constitution. They care about food on the table, heat in winter, and gas in the car. America seems to be getting it for them, so they’re patriotic. The company is getting them enough money to buy the stuff they want, they’re company men. If this changes for any reason watch them turn on a dime, and they would too. In a tribe this selfishness works wonderously, which makes sense, we evolved for it. In civilization is causes problems which is where we get odd ideas about “free gifts,” “charity,” and “universal compassion” from.
More secure in a tribe. Civilization puts you in an incredibly fragile position on the whole. This is from a lack of diversity, a fragile food supply, and wanton violence far in excess of anything tribes are even capable of. I cannot think of a single way in which civilization is more secure, or even would appear that way to tribesman. But, that could be a lack of imagination on my part.
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 9 January 2006 @ 2:27 PM
Non-hiearchial thinking is only a stepping stone and not a destination. Once you remove the colored lenses of civilization you realize that there are natural arising holarchies. The cycles of precipitation is something that at first resembles a hiearchy, but is actually understood systematically, wholly, as a holarchy.
When casting off hiearchy of civilization it is easy to discount organization itself, and see everything in a post-modern sbjectivity.
Hiearchies define for civilization relationships. Holarchies define for the functional world relationships. All holarchies are made of individuals, or holons, who on thier own accord are whole, but for them to be able to move through time, integrate with other holons and form relationships defines by the micro, meso, and macro states.
For instance, in hiearchical thinking, my self is greater than my heart, which is greater than my heart tissue, which is great than a heart cell, which is greater than a molecule, which is greater than a string.
And the problem with this definition, with the hiearchy, is that it is a system of deferrment and subjugation. With a holarchy, a molecule is seen as integral to a cell, not subjective or merely “a part” of a cell, so so on through the micro-meso-macro states of my being.
Here is a good Web site to help understand what a holarchy is:
http://www.worldtrans.org/essay/holarchies.html
Comment by TonyZ — 9 January 2006 @ 3:25 PM
A quote on the differences between holarchies and hierarchies:
http://www.holon.se/folke/kurs/Distans/Ekofys/Recirk/Eng/holarchy_en.shtml
Author Unknown
Comment by TonyZ — 9 January 2006 @ 3:28 PM
Tony, Ben’s posting this a series of articles on useful stepping stones to the destination. Not sure if you caught that. No one’s mistaking this as the final goal. This is a series to help people get from A to B.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 9 January 2006 @ 4:19 PM
The written word often leaves out such distinctions. It’s good you broght that up in case anyone had thought I was providing counterpoint to Ben’s ideas, as opposed to providing food for them to grow.
Comment by TonyZ — 9 January 2006 @ 4:25 PM
From “A Philosophy of Clustering“:
Comment by Jason Godesky — 9 January 2006 @ 4:57 PM
The image of the ouroboros comes to mind.
As for agriculture & religion, recently I found myself drawn to read Pharaoh’s dream and what followed (in Genesis). Very interesting.
Comment by speedbird — 23 February 2006 @ 4:08 AM
I have always had an equality complex which baffles both those with a superiority complex and those with an inferority complex. Those with a superority complex cannot understand my refusal to bow down to them while also maintaining my equality with those they view as clearly inferior. Those with an inferiority complex seem truly confused that I treat them, and in fact view them, as being my equals. Perhaps they aren’t as smart as I am, but I also see the areas in which their abilities exceed mine and accept that they are my equals. Far too many people in our society have been brainwashed into hierarchical thought and cannot comprehend egaliterian thought forms.
Comment by ChandraShakti — 2 April 2006 @ 10:42 AM
Have the same insight Chandra.
Comment by Rick Larson — 2 April 2006 @ 4:09 PM