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Comment by dandanua | Hacker News Reader

Humans are mortal. It doesn't matter if you are a dictator or a janitor - you will die anyway. But the institutions, the system, the culture - will stay for much much longer.

Those who build a centralized system that can control every aspect of humans life just don't realize they are building Hell on Earth.

Decentralization and fairfull consensus between every acting party, no matter how much power they have - this is the only way to build a great culture and a system.

Unfortunately, we are still too far from this. Too much people are still trying to build this ugly human pyramid of subordination, just like in a primal tribe or mafia organization.

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Note that institutions are shorter lived than one might think. If you have become 25 this year, you'll have lived for more than 10% of the US's entire lifetime. 75, and you'll have lived for a third of its existence.

Those institutions which are longer lived are usually subject to tons of change. Think of the imperial Chinese system with its many dynasties or the church with its schisms. And despite behaviourally modern humans having lived on this planet for tens of thousands of years, thousands of generations, you won't find any institution that has survived longer than a few hundred generations.

there is the icelandic althing which has been around since 930. but as per your point, no matter what, growth and change is necessary for the survival of an institution - especially one determined to last.

Institutions may change their form, but not their purpose. For example, in USSR the judicial system was basically a tool to justify decisions of prosecutors and party leaders. Nowadays the judicial system of the Post-Soviet countries remains the same. It's a servant of the current political elite.

I don’t know if that’s a great example because that just seems like all judicial systems across all of human history. The protoconcept of judicial process probably arose from subsistence farmer communities needing a way to hypocritically expel or kill people who did not conform to religious decrees, but without losing any social status, and in fact gaining social status by association with the judicial system.

What we have today is a tiny, tiny, tiny modification of that, where our savanna-adapted meat brains put in accoutrements of due process and fair trials, but it’s all just for show so that political elites can say one thing (freedom, due process, fairness) but do another (court packing, systemic racism, regulatory capture, corporate shilling).

> Note that institutions are shorter lived than one might think. If you have become 25 this year, you'll have lived for more than 10% of the US's entire lifetime. 75, and you'll have lived for a third of its existence.

Note also that the US has one of the longest lived current governments in the world. There are plenty of countries that have been around longer, but most of them have forms of government that came into effect there later than when the US got its current form of government.

Survivorship bias

Survivorship bias is a type of logical error that can be made when making inferences from data that has been filtered.

I neither made nor implied any inferences, so it is hard to see how there can be survivorship bias.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_institutions_in...

I think heirarchy is a natural human inclination. It's observed in every part of the animal kingdom. But it is possible to simultaneously have hierarchy and autonomy at the lowest level. Subsidiarity and distributism are the only things I am convinced will work. Every other endeavour ends up being a free-for-all (that ultimately is self destructive) or a dictorship (that eventually implodes).

> I think heirarchy is a natural human inclination. It's observed in every part of the animal kingdom.

I have two main objections to this line of thinking:

1. Even if a tendency or behavior can occur in "nature", that doesn't necessarily make it correct. By that measure murder, infanticide, rape etc. should also be considered acceptable since they occur in nature (both with humans and animals).

2. If you take a look at smth like The World Until Yesterday or other similar work it will become apparent that the kind of large scale hierarchies of power present in the modern world are relatively recent constructions. To me they're more a hallmark of contingency and deliberate human choices, not of "nature". If we want to make a less hierarchical society we can, it's in our power to change the design of society (to a significant extent at least).

1. Yes, agree, but this just depends on your opinion of what is "correct". Nature selects for survival, not correctness. I think rigid hierarchy is more advantageous for overall survival, but I am not advocating for that. I think there is something significant about the fact that humans almost always tend towards hierarchy (Lord of the Flies illustrates this).

2. I agree that large scale beauracracies are not in the best interests of humanity. I would argue for hierarchy, with less power the higher up the chain you go. E.g. Local governments should have more power than federal/national governments. But that doesn't mean there shouldn't be a national government.

> I think rigid hierarchy is more advantageous for overall survival

I can see how one can see it that way, it is probably what those who rigging the game were thinking when they first started, and like the saying goes "those who play a rigged game gets stupid over a long period of time". That's probably why empires collapse, too much corruption and too many people playing the rigged game. A rigged game kinda corrupt workability of the whole system. The short term advantage may not be so good in the long run.

Hierarchies are natural to everything, it's pointless to fight just them. I'm specifically against subordinate relations like master-slave. In a typical firm there is a boss that commands managers, workers etc. The boss has the most power. But he is still accountable to an agreement between him and workers. He can't do "whatever he wants".

In a very centralized government systems you can't make top management accountable. Moreover, in such systems top management actually support master-slave relations between people, like between men-women, rich-poor, etc. It's then easier to hold power.

> In a typical firm there is a boss that commands managers, workers etc. The boss has the most power. But he is still accountable to an agreement between him and workers. He can't do "whatever he wants".

This isn't really true for most large firms. Since people are dependent on their wages, they are generally subjects to their boss' whims. You just have to look at Amazon workers wearing diapers to realize that workers don't generally get a say, even if they are not technically slaves.

This is what I'm talking about. There used to be labor unions, also the right to strike and protest is a prominent part of democracy. But nowadays all those freedoms are oppressed. Those who are in power are trying to divide labor people and gain even more power over them.

I would be more specific and say that every worker should be at autonomous as possible. I am a big proponent of distributism. The means of production should be as widely distributed as possible. This does not mean they should be concentrated in the hands of a small number of individuals (capitalism), nor should they belong to the state (communism). A good example of distributism is workers who own their own tools (the means of their own production). Software engineers have it pretty good in this regard. But this can apply to tradespeople, factory workers that collectively own shares in machinary, etc.

The entire spectrum of human behavior is natural, as is any conceivable action no matter how immoral.

The observation of a behavior or inclanation in the wild is not a good basis for the structuring of a civilization.

Like I replied elsewhere, I think because nature selects for survival, there is something to be learned from the fact that human societies always tend towards hierarchy. I am not saying we should there have as much hierarchy as possible, but I am certainly opposed to any form of anarchism (which I don't believe would last long anyway). Give anarchy a month at most, and you'll have leaders with followers popping up everywhere, which will eventually combine into a smaller number of large hierarchies.

"are still trying to build this ugly human pyramid of subordination, just like in a primal tribe"

Well, there is a argument, that this is the case, because having leaders and followers is somewhat build in our DNA, if our ancestors lived like that for millions of years.

But the power structure in primal tribes were seldom true pyramidical. (That developed later in civilisation.) You had council of elders, the shamans, priests, etc. different kinds of power balance. Also the very important difference to civilisation power pyramids: in primal societies power was based much more on merit, not inheritance.

I thought that consensus rule was the dominant form of organanisation up to fairly recently, maybe 200000 years ago. This seems to work well for groups of about 50-70 individuals. Leaders and followers by that theory is something that comes with agriculture and trade and the larger groups needed for that. So I wouldn't be so sure that it's "in our dna".

I agree. On a larger base, I believe it to be mainly consensus, too.

But with (different) authorities. Organizing the hunt in bigger animals or groups seem to require authority. Alpha male who leads the pack.

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