Do hierarchies lead to a stronger society? | Hacker News Reader

Do hierarchies lead to a stronger society?

ft.com

28 pointsahsoli13 comments

An interesting read, thank you. Interesting points are made- but very little attention paid to questions of checks & balances. In other words, I'm curious how they see their ideal systems remaining resilient when faced with bad faith actors in positions of authority. I may have to read those books and see if they talk about it more.

The standard issue answer is that corruption and incompetence in authoritarian societies is dealt with via Darwinian struggle between societies or by coups led by stronger factions within.

They never mention the instability this creates or the human toll it takes on regular people.

Democracy is not about always making the best decision in the short term. It's about long term resiliency and being "antifragile."

You can see a modern example of the alternative in Africa. Much of that continent's persistent poverty is due to the warring strong men system of governance. Why invest in anything when the next revolution, coup, or invasion will result in it just being looted or destroyed?

This is different from non-authoritarian societies how?

In non-authoritarian societies there are less disruptive mechanisms for change, such as party realignments and political (rather than violent) revolutions. These can be disruptive but nowhere near as much as being invaded or having a violent coup.

Also: http://archive.is/ukq7b

I think the one reason hereditary right for particular positions is good because it ensures stability, but means that people in power have the ability to learn and grow. They also have the power to ignore self interest groups from lobby because they don't have to worry about their money to survive.

I'm not saying traditional feudalism is good, but we're all lying to ourselves if we don't realize the concept still exists today. It's just been masked by a more complicated bureaucracy with a more stratified hierarchy. Everybody knows a Duke tiers above a count and a count above a baron. Nobody knows whether a senior accountant and ma and pas accounting is better than a manager at blank accounting firm.

Have you ever met an heir or an heiress to a large fortune? Most of them are coke heads. Without the actual culture of spiritual and moral training heirs would be incompetent and feudalism would quickly lead to anarchy. I don’t think modern society and culture could produce people like Alexander the Great. Non-western societies (e.g Asia/Singapore) have enough family values that feudal dynasties could work, but wouldn’t bet on it happening in the western world.

And those sort of family values come at other, massive societal costs.

However, oftentimes those morons aren't the puppet masters. Someone else is. But I know it's not a perfect system, nor is it "truly" better than elected officials. I just feel that a system of long term rule with at least a check on the executive similar to an elective monarchy.

Or we could do what the celts did and have a Tanistry system of inheritance. The heir is deigned by an election of the eldest/siblings of the current ruler (or if there are none, their parents eldest or cousins, etc, etc).

https://archive.md/ukq7b

"Democracy will die in silence, behind a paywall."

It's a very shallow article, as one would expect. Most committed liberals (in the classical sense of the word, NB that in the US both parties are liberal by this definition) can't conceive that there are any problems created by liberalism that might be addressed via illiberal systems, and therefore give both left wing and right wing critics very little hearing.

Despite not being a libertarian or (non-ironic) monarchist at the time, I found this to be an interesting and thought provoking book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy:_The_God_That_Failed

It argues for monarchism as a better alternative than democracy for libertarians. The premise, on it's own, is interesting enough and the author makes quite a case for it.

Sounds like the sort of author who is a regular on Russia Today.

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