Forum Post: Anarchy vs. Hierarchy
Posted 11 years ago on Oct. 20, 2012, 8:44 p.m. EST by Phanya2011
(908)
from Tucson, AZ
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
I just found this link to a discussion of the above concepts and was, once again, amazed at my own ignorance about so much. The link is to the third part of a series, but it has links at the top to the first two, which seemed the easiest way to share it. So much to learn. The comments found at the end of each section are also informed, interesting and civil.
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2012/10/in-praise-of-anarchy-part-iii.html
The 1% doesn't want any rules, regulations, etc... You could call this anarchy. They made OWS inevitable.
They dont want that for themselves, but they want the people and the competition to be so buried in regulations that its almost paralyzing.
The only solution to this economic, big corporation mess is a total decentralization of everything.
Decentralize the power of Wall St, Big Business and DC.
If you really want to beat the corporations live debt free and within your means. Stop charging things you can't afford to pay for and stop buying houses that are too extravagant with no hope to ever pay them off. Not all the blame goes to the corporations, we as consumers had a large role as our debt grew out of control. Beat them by not paying them and only buy what you can reasonably afford. Not everyone can drive a BMW and live in a mansion. Stop whining about the rich and live your life the best you can. I will never be rich and that's ok, I know how to be happy even though I don't have alot of money. This is the problem with society today, everybody wants to bitch about something expecting to get a handout because your parents have coddled you all your life and you don't know how to do anything that requires maybe getting your hands dirty or taking a shitty job to make ends meet. Everyone thinks they are entitled to a high paying job where they basically do jack shit. It's a bullshit way to live. Learn how to fix something or build something and make yourself marketable to the general public and forget those jobs in a cubicle. Enough with my rant I'll always have a job and will not have time to protest thank god. God Bless America!
It IS all very interesting. It's also very complicated.
It is complicated, and of course, we want simple :) Now I'm trying to find research on WHY we seem to always develop fixed hierarchies. If we can avoid doing that, we could develop a truly cooperative world. I can't help but think it has something to do with the human ego.
How about hierarchies smothered in democracy?
We create a boss because we assume they know what they're doing, or that they have a more developed ability. Without democracy however, we have no way to stop them when they don't.
I'm pretty sure somebody in the military would say that you cannot question your commander because they know things you don't, and it's life or death. This is a different situation though, and we have the time to figure it out.
Usually our "boss" is created before we become their underlings. Because we have democracy, we can leave our bosses or find others or become one ourselves.
Our President is the person we "assume" knows what they are doing, and our democracy allows us to fire them and get a new one every four years as a way to stop them.
Dood, but that's the point. Democracy has been rigged, kidnapped, gagged and molested in ways i probably shouldn't describe in metaphores. This is why we're talking here on the occupy forum.
Besides, allowing people only one action every 4 years doesn't really sound like democracy. I feel like our collection of truth could be the top chain of command, over public servents, guarded by all people.
I'm really confused too, because i came here looking for a place to share and hear ideas about solving the problems we face. Instead the forum is saturated with such intentional recursion for the sake of miscellaneous banter.
I'll take a guess at it....human nature.
Human beings naturally learn by comparisons and differences. We categorize things. We learn that hot is the opposite of cold and warm is in the middle. We learn up from down and left from right and big from small etc. Everything in life we place in a category of hierarchy of some kind. Here's a list of synonyms of the word hierarchy:
branch, brand, breed, cast, caste, character, classification, collection, color, degree, denomination, department, description, designation, distinction, division, domain, estate, family, feather, frame, genre, genus, grade, grain, grouping, hierarchy , humor, ilk, kidney, league, make, mold, name, nature, order, origin, property, province, quality, range, rank, rate, school, sect, section, selection, set, source, species, sphere, standing, status, stripe, style, suit, temperament, value, variety
We place "value" on things. We "rank" things. We name things and put them in groups and classify them and divide them. We're taught this from early childhood on. Older vs younger, wiser vs not so wise. Father vs child. Human beings instinctively know when someone has more experience/wisdom/leadership/skills (or at least they usually do) and they "follow" such people if they believe that person will lead them in the manner that is in their own best interest.
But it's a paradox...what you wish for. If you created a society in which everything was peachy keen and wonderful for all-would you NOT classify it as "the best" society? The "highest most noble" type of society? In doing so...you would establish that society as the optimal society amongst all other types. A hierarchy itself. No?
Yea... very true.
When you say we place value, and prioritize, and categorize, what you are actually saying is that we require the quantitative measure of all things, for obvious reason. True, some of this is taught but some of it - like the ability to recognize the inanimate as non-living and to evaluate relative size, we are actually born with;- "instinctual" fails... it is actually innate ability as evolutionary, necessary from the moment of birth.
We are at the mercy of those older and wiser and larger and more experienced than ourselves from the moment we are born. We survive to adulthood based on that relationship. To think that we would or could structure our society completely outside of most fundamental relationship structures of our lives is absurd.
I don't believe it's absurd. It's like a box we can think outside of, and i've seen kids blow the minds of adults all the time with their fresh perspective. If we stay the same and cling to what we know it can only become a failure to adapt. And we are already crashing.
Kids blowing the minds of adults all the time does NOT automatically translate into "children should be running the country and our society". Please. You're reaching SO far.
They should be running the country, along with everyone else.
Well... in my mind (if you can find it), we are all but governments unto ourselves - individuals, sovereign entities, identities - in that contained within us are the executive, legislative, and judicial... and certainly there is power structure within families; this power shifts like a pendulum swings in accordance to circumstance and areas of expertise. I see the family as the basic unit of society, the extended family as community possessed of its own power entities, along specific lines which also shift in accordance with circumstance, as the product of genetically programmed "rules" of interaction, and so did the Fathers - US government, in its inception, was intended as an extension of family. In that sense, it is, or at least, was, theoretically, the highest attainable perfection of human nature itself.
And then we introduced corruption as forces in conflict - one against another, as one took from the other - and it has not been the same since.
When you look at a Washington, who lived amongst literally hundreds his entire life to grow into a supervisory role, and who lived amongst tens of thousands to command the Continental Army, we get this sense of a very intimate knowledge of human nature that few today possess. The same can be said to some lesser extent of Jefferson, or even, any of those ninety nine others who attended our constitutional conventions, as those who had lived and relied on community their entire lives.
This mandate to community service and reliance on status as part and parcel of a personal economic logic allowed them a vantage which no longer exists.
There are still places in this country were people do "live and rely on community their entire lives", and some in which people do it for at least a good portion of their lives.
They do in PA, this is true, and I am very much aware of that.
It's just a bunch of crap, an induced argument and not a deduced logic. It fails in that it does not recognize that all organisms occupy some relative niche; that all are communal - like ourselves - and require an evolutionary hierarchy.
I think many fail to recognize, too, what anarchy actually is relative to our conversation - it's a world without law, without central authority. And as such it is a strictly survival of the fittest environment.
When colonial towns were initially settled it was often by compact, and what these words on paper generally expressed was a desire for a world where "none shall place themselves above the other," meaning it was to be a world without hierarchy. Of course, in their initial inception, they were also devoid of law; in the Good Society there would be no need of law. With focus on the exemplar, they were not intended as a world without status, only a world devoid of power. But such ideals quickly fell by the way side when it became apparent that as communal creatures hierarchy, power, and law, were a natural occurrence that served all.
What modern cities actually are is financial centers; if one does not serve to manage regional finance, then one works to support the machine. So there is continual need to grow the money; as population grows exponentially, so must its primary resource.
I wouldn't call it crap per se. I'd call it interesting and complicated. One man's crap is......you know :)
If a bear sh*ts in the woods and there's no one there to smell it? Well, it just happens that I was there to smell it; oh well...
Some of what he is saying is true, but then he took off on a tangent intended as a polemic; not very scientific. That seems to happen a lot here.
You know what was interesting? It was that he stated on the molecular level all is egalitarian; on the human level there is hierarchy, and then the tangent... but I don't think he's correct at all in saying that at the molecular or microbiological level all is egalitarian - that is definitely not the case - if we were to conceptualize in this way, it would seem a survival of the fittest environment.