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Comment by moloch-hai | Hacker News Reader

There have been myriad societies that consciously chose to dispense with hierarchy, others where hierarchy applied only to one sphere (e.g. religion) and nowhere else, ones where different hierarchies applied in different spheres, and many where hierarchy comes and goes, with no continuity with previous hierarchies.

To be human is to have the power to consciously choose behavior.

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Almost every single group I've been part of had leaders. They may have been elected by the group, or more often, appointed elsewhere. The ones that don't have leadership tend to be temporary and disorganized. In situations where this is less temporary, leaders often emerge naturally, as that's how humans typically organize themselves.

We have conscious choice, sure, but that doesn't change the fact that we're part of larger systems that we only have some influence over. It also doesn't change the fact that conscious choice is somewhat biologically driven.

How many of these groups were of people who did not grow up with fixed hierarchies, and so had developed organizational skills that did not rely on one?

A hierarchy is the laziest choice among ways to organize.

Hierarchies are places where one relies on many. That is the point of a hierarchy... so that a few can control and rely on many. It is the most unfair way to organize.

It is thus very, very convenient for the few that people are conditioned from childhood to believe it is the only way to organize, and announce it freely in print.

A child is well aware of the parent-child hierarchy that is more or less universal across all modern cultures. You've been conditioned by this book to follow a fringe belief.

First, I suspect that every group you've been part of has been composed of mostly or entirely white people around your age who speak English. The contention of the book, and from what I understand that of many anthropologists and archaeologists, is that this is atypical, or at least not all that typical.

Also, the book makes a point about ephemeral leadership, either leadership (and the corresponding organization) that is seasonal according to the needs of the time of year, or temporary for a particular task (house building, field clearing, hunting...). Which may be what you're saying in the first paragraph about temporary groups, but they're saying this is the normal--or even only--situation in some cultures, and that furthermore it works just fine.

As for biologically driven choices, I suspect the authors would say that the range of choices is far greater than you might think.

Only English speaking white people tend to be hierarchal? What BS is that? Have you ever been to Asia (or most of Europe)? You think Africans, Middle Easterners or South Americans don't have hierarchies? You think only white people tend to select leaders in groups without one? That's ridiculous and simply wrong. And civilization didn't begin in Europe anyway, it was the Middle East, and then cropped up in five or six separate locations across the globe, including the Americas.

> Only English speaking white people tend to be hierarchal?

No. But all your experience in the world is in hierarchies. You have no relevant experience to draw on.

That would apply to the large majority of the people on this planet for the past few thousand years.

The "past few thousand years" is a tiny fraction of the human timeline. And, the overwhelming majority of even the "past few thousand years" is obscured. What remains is a poster example of selection bias: hierarchical organizations depend more on writing, so the written record is of hierarchical societies.

I think those societies are rare and observations of those societies are inaccurate. There must be hierarchies in those societies, it's just misreported.

More evidence of the relationship between hierarchy and biology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXxKBiidbeo

Serotonin is the biological chemical that is linked with hierarchy in biology and we are awashed in it.

This sort of argument--that those reports must be inaccurate, because--well, I'm not sure why you you think these reports are inaccurate, except that you think they must be. And that's not a reason.

I'm also pretty sure any linkage of serotonin to hierarchy is unproven.

>This sort of argument--that those reports must be inaccurate, because--well, I'm not sure why you you think these reports are inaccurate, except that you think they must be. And that's not a reason.

It's happened before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Mead and not just with her. It's more prevalent in anthropology then in other sciences.

This is just an educated guess. If you provide actual sources I can verify what the academic community thinks of these reports or findings, and really that's the only best available metric I can go off of.

>I'm also pretty sure any linkage of serotonin to hierarchy is unproven.

Science cannot prove anything. Be very careful with your language. Especially in the social sciences where things are less quantitative... proof is fundamentally impossible. There is only evidence in favor of and evidence against.

Evidence in favor of serotonin and hierarchy: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-022-01378-2 https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Anna-Ziomkiewicz-2/publ... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09594...

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