Human beings are instinctively hierachical like many mammals, its essential to survival.
And that social groups form and get their values/norms/behaviors from being explicitly against certain values/norms/behaviors.
According to them, human beings are not instinctively anything. Hierarchy is just one form of social organization. Due to the way history is made it seems to be dominant, but that may or may not be accurate.
It may be that hierarchy is easier to understand when you're dumb as a rock. And as any student of humanity knows, there are plenty of those kinds of people all over the world.
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.
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
Strong claim.
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."
If you're referring to the whole "alpha" thing, remember that was shown to be invalid and only occurred in captivity. Wild dogs are pretty communal.
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.
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.
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 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.
Edit: also interesting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterarchy
Tangent: Violence seems to be the only way to test and validate this hierarchy. That is, we haven’t found a way past it.
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).
Specifically, Primates species (that's us) very much do so. I've seen texts examining the similarities between Human and Chimpanzees in that regard.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeveryt...
any dog owner will know first-hand
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.
Graeber was a smart guy, but also had a pretty clear, and strong ideological position regarding power structures.
Hierarchy is natural because of natural limitations like "Dunbar's Number". The human brain can effectively track only so many relationships, and at some scale it is advantageous to consolidate them into abstractions like "authority" or "organization".
Maybe this is a case of the black swan disproving the "all swans are white" hypothesis.
Without the first, many large scale achievements of the human race would have been more difficult or perhaps impossible. Without the second we would have lost a valuable check on the power of the leaders, and a much reduced propensity to explore and experiment.