This is a claim so extraordinary you should at least have linked some obscure paper from a *-Studies department.
Every human has their own hierarchies. Hierarchies of need, of goals and of peers (this is basically each individual's social hierarchy). But when these people form large groups they are somehow able to blank the slate and not make it hierarchical?
All mammals that form groups instinctively form hierarchies and constantly validate their own and other's position in it (any dog owner will know first-hand). Arguably the first multi-celled organism formed a hierarchy and pretty much every animal with a few Neurons has Serotonin receptors, which can be described as a pathway to continuously re-order its hierarchy of needs.
The only way in which anything social isn't hierarchical is if you look at a tiny tiny cross-section. Otherwise any "egalitarian" and "flat" organization just swapped one way to determine a hierarchy for another. As a case in point, the Liberal model of the 19th century was a project to replace an aristocratic hierarchy (based on attributes that were no longer a good fit) with a competence hierarchy. This was often called egalitarian, but practically it was just a more adapted way of forming a hierarchy.
We are so adapted to hierarchies that 6-month olds understand physical dominance and 3-year olds easily form more complex hierarchies based on social support, resources etc.
edit:
Ironically calling other people "rock-dumb" is a way to signal ones own place in the hierarchy.
> All mammals that form groups instinctively form hierarchies and constantly validate their own and other's position in it (any dog owner will know first-hand).
Tangent: Violence seems to be the only way to test and validate this hierarchy. That is, we haven’t found a way past it.
Key point being "sometimes". Demonstration of capability is important because that capability will be tested.
Here's an example: The best way to do this is by constantly waging small wars and battles, which the US has done for decades. Now whether the US can wage a drawn-out war is a different matter; that hasn't been tested in a very long time (and for the record, that worries me).
You are confusing hierarchy with „social function“. You are describing humans as having different social functions. You are not describing that someone is above someone or a group makes the decision on basis of beeing above others.
What is a hierarchy? Broadly it's a ranking based on some criterion. As such hierarchies follow from a society's wants and needs (you could say it follows from the needs hierarchy of society itself) and shift all the time. As an example consider the rise of software developers which was based on the increasing need of society for software.
A hierarchy is necessary to allows society to adjust rewards to its needs. It isn't necessarily some oppressive force keeping people caged in their circumstances (though a dysfunctional one quickly becomes that, see the CCP aristocracy in China).
If we want more renewable energy installed, we necessarily have to adjust the hierarchy by increasing the rewards (status, money ...) for the entities and people installing it.
I don't quite get how you can reduce it to "someone is above someone". While that is obviously an aspect, you cannot have a society that does anything without having a hierarchy. If you can show me a society with no hierarchies I'm all ears.
I really understand your point. But still in my view you are describing how a society can function by hierarchy but it’s still only functions in society you are describing. Hierarchy can be also absolut senseless. For example: god told someone that this person is now king.
That hasn’t anything to do with needs. It’s only hierarchy.
Here the definition.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy
I Stil get your point and I sign that hierarchy is mostly needed to archive goals in society. But that most society’s rule on hierarchy is mostly coincidence in my view.
Without endorsing the book (which I have not read), the authors do at least have some academic standing and reviews of the book suggested it was tendentious but not trash.
Having trained working dogs and frequently having random mixes of dogs at home when friends go on holiday, dogs do have hierarchies but they are nowhere near as rigid and stratified as human ones can be.
It's your claim thats is extraordinary. Humans are beholden to a single form of organisation?
I feel that you are so stuck in this mode of thinking that you struggle to see these other forms of organisation despite the fact that they surround you.
Markets dominate the world, they are not a hierarchy.
Social networks form a web, they are not a hierarchy. If you try to organise any data, you will find it cannot be fit into a hierarchy, it is either relational or a graph.
Relationships dominate the world, hierarchy is an illusion
> Markets dominate the world, they are not a hierarchy.
Correct. But markets are downstream from hierarchy. The hierarchy determines the access to its rewards, those rewards can then be used to participate in the market, either by directly spending them or by influencing other to do so.
> Social networks
Social networks are most certainly a hierarchy. They distribute rewards proportional to a user's success and prominently show the metrics underlying that success. They are a kind of turbo-hierarchy where your position is always obvious to everyone and changes instantly. If everyone unsubscribes from your YouTube channel everyone will know, but if nobody reads your book you can still derive status from your 1982 bestselling book.
On a more general note, a hierarchy is just a mechanism for aligning an agent's actions towards group goals via the distribution of rewards. I don't know how or why there are so many people that associate it only with the Caste system or hereditary aristocracies. Funnily enough, the hereditary aristocracies were quite adept at changing their hierarchies in response to external events.
Nope, the bazaar does not need the cathedral. Example: "Silent Trade"
Group A would leave trade goods in a prominent position and signal, by gong, fire, or drum for example, that they had left goods. Group B would then arrive at the spot, examine the goods and deposit their trade goods or money that they wanted to exchange and withdraw. Group A would then return and either accept the trade by taking the goods from Group B or withdraw again leaving Group B to add to or change out items to create an equal value. The trade ends when Group A accepts Group B's offer and removes the offered goods leaving Group B to remove the original goods.
I don't mean facebook, I mean real networks of real people.
Relationships do not form hierarchies. Suppose I respect you, and you respect your boss. That does not mean I must respect your boss, maybe he lost to me in poker and I laugh at him.
Even when it comes to social networks, when researchers visualise what's happening on twitter, they don't a hierarchy, they use a graph. Social network analysis uses graph theory.
Even a family tree is not a hierarchy, and not a tree. Ancestry forms a directed acyclic graph.
Famously, humans are the only creatures on earth that do lots of stuff. Like talking, writing, drawing pictures, or riding rockets into orbit.
I don't see what's so unbelievable about our massively unique cognitive ability vs instinct ratio leading us to also have different forms of social organization, or that this could lead to our social organization being detached from instinct almost entirely.
I feel like this whenever people try to do that Lobster argument. "right, but we aren't lobsters."
Additionally, humans are unique in their ability to create complex social constructs and realities, which is a reasonable prerequisite for a potential to create novel methods of social organization.
This is a truism. Of course we could create social organizations that are totally unconstrained, but they will fail catastrophically.
We are (and will always be) constrained and as soon as we prefer one goal to another we want to bring that hierarchy to reality. To do that we necessarily need to adjust the rewards for working towards that goal, thereby creating a social hierarchy.
Even if that were the case, the "lobster arguments for social hierarchy" usually lean far more rigid and totalitarian than human history indicates. For every Roman empire you show me I can find you five cultures with fluid or nearly flat hierarchies.
Eh, the problem with social hierarchies beyond who's the cool friend is that they reproduce beyond one generation. People will delude themselves into thinking their position is a god-given right and violently defend that.
> Every human has their own hierarchies. Hierarchies of need, of goals and of peers (this is basically each individual's social hierarchy). But when these people form large groups they are somehow able to blank the slate and not make it hierarchical?
I'm probably being silly in doing so, but just pointing out that neurodiversity is a thing, and I don't know if you've noticed, but rarely do people simply do what they're told.
Every human has their own hierarchies. Hierarchies of need, of goals and of peers (this is basically each individual's social hierarchy). But when these people form large groups they are somehow able to blank the slate and not make it hierarchical?
All mammals that form groups instinctively form hierarchies and constantly validate their own and other's position in it (any dog owner will know first-hand). Arguably the first multi-celled organism formed a hierarchy and pretty much every animal with a few Neurons has Serotonin receptors, which can be described as a pathway to continuously re-order its hierarchy of needs.
The only way in which anything social isn't hierarchical is if you look at a tiny tiny cross-section. Otherwise any "egalitarian" and "flat" organization just swapped one way to determine a hierarchy for another. As a case in point, the Liberal model of the 19th century was a project to replace an aristocratic hierarchy (based on attributes that were no longer a good fit) with a competence hierarchy. This was often called egalitarian, but practically it was just a more adapted way of forming a hierarchy.
We are so adapted to hierarchies that 6-month olds understand physical dominance and 3-year olds easily form more complex hierarchies based on social support, resources etc.
edit: Ironically calling other people "rock-dumb" is a way to signal ones own place in the hierarchy.