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Comment by demosthanos | Hacker News Reader

> It is so robust it outlasted the centralized government of Somalia and democracy, and even outperformed it.

This is a pretty rose-colored way of putting it. Put another way: Somali society has a long and deep history of decentralized clan-based organization which, for better or worse, was deep-rooted enough that replacement with a centralized democratic government failed.

The system you describe didn't merely survive the failure of centralization, it was one of the existing Somali institutions that resisted centralization and won out in the end. Which depending on one's perspective on Somalia's current state could make it deeply problematic as a local maximum that makes the current status quo unassailable.

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shrug clans are small states (or whatever label you want to put on the organization that starts with small family tribes and scales to multi-continent empires), that kind of society organization was more or less everywhere in the history of every human society. There is a tendency everywhere towards larger, more complex states and a path up and down the scale locally as the bigger ones are created and fall.

> clans are small states

Nope, clans are definitionally not states for several reasons. A state has definite territory, whereas clan-type structures have tended to overlap with each other geographically because they're usually embedded in some larger society. A state by definition has centralized authority whereas clans may not.

> or whatever label you want to put on the organization that starts with small family tribes and scales to multi-continent empires

There is no such label because these organizations are not just shades on the same theme at different sizes, they're fundamentally different in character.

> that kind of society organization was more or less everywhere in the history of every human society

True, but there are wide variances in how long in the past that form of organization was dominant.

You won't see Egypt reverting to decentralized non-state clan-oriented governance any time soon because they've been ruled by one state or another for 5000 years.

Why do you consider this problematic? Especially if a "centralized democracy" undermines the social structures that are known to work

This is what I said:

> Which depending on one's perspective on Somalia's current state could make it deeply problematic

It's pretty hard to look at Somalia's current state and say that their current social structures are "known to work" by essentially any metric.

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