You weren't meant to have a boss (2008)
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
I've heard of "hierarchy-less" company structures being attempted before. I've also heard that each and every one of those attempts always ended up with hierarchies anyway, only now they became "shadow" hierarchies, unofficial and undocumented. Because that's just how human nature works. Not everyone can stay locked in on what every else is doing while still also keeping up with their own responsibilities, so other people get deferred to instead.
Is there happy middle-ground that can be found here? Is there any research out that offers tree-less company structures that might actually work in the real world?
I imagine that a cooperative can hire a person who measures the value generated by each worker/team, and then the cooperative members agree upon compensation readjustment.
Then each person/team can hire a manager to help them generate more value if they can't keep track of what's going on within the cooperative without that help.
This way you might get a completely flat structure where each IC decides if they need someone to boss them around or not, and to what extent. Or it might devolve into a typical hierarchy if every IC fully delegates their decision-making, priority-setting, and coordination to their manager, but that devolution will be a bottom-up process, not a result of top-down pressure.
Can this work? No idea.
Central governments should be emergent properties of local systems working together, not a choke point of all power and taxation revenue. The current system is completely backwards, if democracy and representation are truly the ideals that it embodies
How do we get from here to either new status quo? Bloody revolution. The powers-that-be have made it clear that they will only give up their control over their dead bodies.
The Federalist Papers talk a lot about factionalism versus tyranny. On a larger scale, look at how long it took what are now European Union members to stop warring with each other.
Assume members of parliament are chosen fairly (popular vote approximates number of seats etc). The winning party (or parties) form a cabinet - their own little hierarchy. What we tend to see is a majority of cabinet members voting in cabinet for a policy, a majority of their caucus voting to support their policy (relying on cabinet solidarity to get the numbers across the line), then a majority of parliament passing a bill (using the solidarity of the party to get it across the line). The agenda may have been set by just a few parliamentarians (say just 9 out 17 cabinet members in a parliament of ~100) and an unpolular policy comes to pass.
I'd fear having local representatives choosing state representatives choosing federal representatives would have even worse outcomes in terms of representing the individuals at the "bottom" of this process. There is a reason representatives are voted for directly at each level of governments in our democracies - this wasn't a "simplification" it was a deliberate choice by our forebearers who had seen how politics shakes out in practice.
You don't have to have that though. You can still have a local population electing local, state, and federal representatives. But you need the taxation, and thus the financial power, to flow upwards from local government, not downwards from federal governments.
In general, it's because it's harder for the larger entities to get away with playing favorites (I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I'm saying that it happens a lot more in smaller units).
Paying all your taxes to the corrupt local judge (county official) is in fact not a win.
Works well with Georgism. If all tax is land and resources, it makes sense to collect locally. If most of your tax is income and company tax, it's bound to be collected at state or federal levels.
I've always believed that power should be devolved to the lowest level possible, but you're right that powers-that-be will not willingly give up centralised power.
We've had plenty of intelligista think that it would just go perfectly we followed their 'rational' plans. It has been without an exception an exercise in hubris. These 'reformers' keep on stepping on the rake labeled Goodhart's law.
Edit spelling
Europe has some corpo-sized co-ops, and while they're not perfect they seem to function better than anything in the US.
It won't work in the US at scale, ever, because US business culture is fundamentally hierarchical, competitive, entitled, selfish, and extractive.
Cooperation at scale is a completely alien concept in the US. Expedient synergies can be workable, but free-wheeling open decision making to benefit customers is only viable in small companies. And often not even then.
So it's dog eat dog. If you're not one of the predators you're the prey.
"Being the boss" of any business that's heading for IPO becomes an attempt to avoid being prey - which implies becoming one of the predators, and being comfortable with that.
If you don't start there your investors will still drag you in that direction, and remove you if you're not willing.
TL;DR I agree with you re: US culture being too selfish and independent for that kind of thinking. It’s something that has had my curiosity for awhile and lends to another argument I’ve tried to make - that when people say collectivist economic systems won’t work because humans are “inherently selfish,” I think they’re confusing human nature with cultural conditioning. I don’t pretend to know how to change that cultural conditioning, but I think it’s narrow minded to assume that because one’s culture is perhaps selfish, then humans are as well.
Indigenous North American cultures, Amish cultures, medieval monastic communities, the list goes on.
Really, you can't just make blanket claims like that over _all of human history_ and expect to be right.
1930-s Gosplan, 1950-s Gosplan, OGAS, Cybersyn, they all failed. Come up with something new maybe?
“Come up with something new maybe?” Is a trite attempt at belittling a conversation that is seeking knowledge and frankly just annoying.
But apply this to something you understand in detail, unlike a whole society. “That guy has a bad heart, better fix it!” That’s something that doesn’t need to be said, never mind repeated like a solution to a hard problem.
"trading" was ideologically prohibited term which didn't help any.
And the whole centralized approach cannot scale.
So there you have it: it can't work, please bring new ideas.
China and the Soviet Union are the largest scale attempts to implement a cooperative system and they failed in spectacular and tragic ways. So you certainly need to consider why the new plan will be different and won’t meet the same fate.
For whatever it's worth, I'm not a communist or a Soviet apologist or what have you. I also just think it's incredibly silly that Westerners are so conditioned to jump at the hint of the Soviet's shadow when there's any suggestion that capitalism might not be the most effective economic system.
The common counterpoint to that is "capitalism isn't perfect, but it's the best we got!" And maybe I'm naive, but I can't help but think humans can do way better. Isn't capitalism supposed to be a bet on human ingenuity? Then why do we pretend that humans are inherently limited when it comes to creating a good society?
... because the planning and reasoning and vision aren't shared? As an IC - in small and large companies - I would often get this "you just don't understand" and "you don't see the big picture". Well.. because it's not shared. Decisions made in secret, or in boardrooms without any transparency... yeah - of course I don't have the full picture. I bet half the upper management doesn't either - they all just have their slices.
Some companies - typically smaller - sometimes have shared details on direction/vision/etc enough so that everyone could have a common shared sense of purpose and goals. But I've found that to be relatively rare.
I believe companies where ICs understand how their role ties into the overall success of the company will outperform other companies on average.
Closest thing I can come up with of one party having the authority of paying another party to act as if they were in a position of authority over tre first party.
BTW, seems like we think similarly regarding this. Wanna exchange contact info? my email is mclaren212@gmail.com if you're interested in connecting
The company acted high and mighty like they have principles, the most successful project that was bringing most of the revenue in got a lot of leeway to bypass all ethical review processes so that it could keep feeding the rest of the company’s more ethical but not very profitable projects.
I hated working there and left after a couple months only. Incidentally, that was my last job ever and the straw that broke the camel’s back: I’ve worked freelance ever since.
I wonder if a corporation type org could actually make this work by going all in on AI deeply integrated into everything, code commits, tickets, slack, emails.. directing everything. So basically one boss with infinite bandwidth, that foresees and proactively preempts shadow hierarchies that are bound to form. Would be an interesting experiment.
Marx apologists often point out he did not believe Russia could bypass capitalism on its own, without help from more advanced socialist countries formed by revolutions in the industrialized West. He also said the cotton gin was the engine of revolution and new technology has to come first before a new social system. The well known failures of command economies aside, arguably it did work with the right policies, especially when compared to other developing countries, it just didn't grow as fast as Western capitalism. The USSR didn't so much collapse as it was shut down by decree bc the leaders looked at the numbers and decided to give up.
Maybe the hypothetical bossless corp will be accidentally created by capitalism as more and more management positions are eliminated to save money.
Was it? Really? Doesn't sound like a commune to me. Sounds more like Walmart[0]. Marx did not specify a particular planning strategy; in fact, his co-author Engels said that "the time of... small conscious minorities at the head of masses lacking consciousness is past."
Peter Kropotkin envisions a decentralized, federated economy of communes. Murray Bookchin advocates for decentralized, directly democratic municipalities that federate and coordinate economic decisions from the bottom up. Rosa Luxemburg--co-founder of the Communist Party of Germany who famously warned "socialism or barbarism"--consistently critiqued centralism, asserting, eg "the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee."
"The essence of socialist society," Luxemburg declares in her 1918 What Does the Spartacus League Want?[1], "consists in the fact that the great laboring mass ceases to be a dominated mass, but rather, makes the entire political and economic life its own life and gives that life a conscious, free, and autonomous direction."
Whether or not that sounds particularly pleasant or effective, it's clearly not a proposal for central-planning.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Republic_of_Wal... 1. https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/12/14.htm
But this internal planning is not enough and comes up against the limits of capitalism: production for profit and not for need, the market and the nation state. All these contributed to create a system where "too much is produced", that is too much compared to what can be sold for profit, not what is needed.
Ultimately what was missing in the Soviet Union, the democratic aspect of planning, is also what is missing today (on top of the other issues that come with production for profit).
Explained here better than can be done in a HN comment: https://www.marxist.ca/article/the-need-for-a-socialist-plan...
For starters, you can understand that working for a large corporation will make you miserable, and choose to work in a small organization instead.
Even massive capitalist firms like Goldman Sachs or Exxon-Mobil essentially operate "communistically" internally to get anything done, ie when someone needs a wrench, a coworker hands it to them without asking what they get in return.
0. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-05-30/from-f...
Elinor Ostrom's design principles for managing common pool resources (2009 econ Nobel) indicate that nested enterprises have been necessary to scale throughout human history.
No matter how smart they are or how well-intentioned, it seems improbable that 10,000 individual contributors running around doing whatever they think is best will ever result in engineering a new airplane, for example. Even setting aside the thousands of integration points and schedule dependencies such a project requires, some person or small group of persons needs to decide what kind of airplane they're designing and force everyone to stick with that decision.
I think the solution, such as it is, might be in looking for the minimum amount of hierarchy necessary for the scale of what you're doing, and being honest with yourself about that scale. And that goes in both directions. Small startups shouldn't try to organize like big corporations, and big corporations should stop pretending they can behave like small startups while trying to conquer the world.
Individuals and small groups build new airplanes all the time. It's only large aeroplanes that require large teams of people.
I think they were specifically talking about those large aeroplanes
Well one thing is to break up large corporations into small pieces.
Disasters and the initial push of any war show what is possible. Like the playbook is already know. Strict hierarchy with decision making power at the bottom. This may sound contradictory, sure.
However, it works like this: the top sets a goal, the bottom decides how to get it done. Person closest to the problem then leads.
We know it works. It happens every time a large group -needs- to use it.
However, as soon as things get stable, large orgs go right back to rigid central control.
It's not about acting on your own or achieving something for yourself. It's about building something which is only possible with collective effort of hundreds or thousands of humans. The size of such organization needs hierarchy, management and process.
Think of what processes and management was used for pyramid building. And what would have happened if the workers worked without a boss and process.
For what, a glorified tomb?
I fail to find anything in history that advanced the sciences or the arts through "collective effort of hundreds or thousands of humans". It's only for war or to consolidate power in the hands of the ruling class, never for the benefit of society at large.
Consider Egyptian and Mesopotamian irrigation and flood management, Persian and Roman roads, Chinese canals...
This seems like an open-and-shut case of failing to look for disconfirming evidence.
Wikipedia is the opposite of a top-down process.
Aqueducts and railroads: responded on a sibling comment.
LOTR films: I don't even know how it relates to the point, but it's funny that you bring a cultural landmark that it's an adaptation of the works of a single individual.
> I fail to find anything in history that advanced the sciences or the arts through "collective effort of hundreds or thousands of humans".
> It's only for war or to consolidate power in the hands of the ruling class, never for the benefit of society at large.
I'm breaking it up into two statements because sufficient evidence has been provided to contradict the former, and some of your rebuttals did not align with the latter. Let's break those down:
> The moon landing is defintely a fruit of a war effort.
But is it only for war? Or did it "advance the sciences" + "for the benefit of society at large"?
> Wikipedia is the opposite of a top-down effort.
Your original statement didn't say it had to be a top-down effort. It's certainly "collective effort" + "not only for war" + "for the benefit of society at large".
> Aqueducts and railroads: responded on a sibling comment.
Scale and precision also matter and don't negate the fact that these are "something in history" + "collective effort" + "not only for war" + "for the benefit of society at large".
> LOTR films: I don't even know how it relates to the point, but it's funny that you cultural landmark that only worked because it's an adaptation of the works of a single individual.
I only picked LOTR films because they are notorious for being large scale and you never said it didn't have to be an adaptation. I could have picked The Simpsons, Star Wars, Breaking Bad, you name it.
No, but without it wouldn't come to existence. You can call it "moving the goal posts" if you want, my point is these efforts are not primarily motivated for the good of society and whatever advances we have are accidental, secondary effects.
> Your original statement didn't say it had to be a top-down effort.
I am responding to someone giving the example of the pyramids as something that could only be achieved due to "hierarchy, management and process", do I have to say it?
https://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-Richard-Rhodes/dp/...
Also, the Apollo lunar landing. 400,000 people worked on it.
The Manhattan Project resulted in nuclear power plants.
Don't take my word for it, Neil Degrasse Tyson says "The Apollo 11 Moon Landing Wasn’t Really About Science"
A few seconds of googling turned up:
"Robert Peary’s North Pole Expedition (1909): Backed heavily by the National Geographic Society and The New York Times, alongside wealthy private investors like J.P. Morgan"
Many other exploratory expeditions were funded by both private interests and governments, such as the first transatlantic cable.
Tyson: "when we learned the Soviet Union was not going to the moon, that we just ended it all."
I lived through those times. There were several followup moon landings, but the audience grew bored with it, and so Congress cut the funding.
Tyson is an authority on science, but for anything else he isn't more authoritative than you or I.
BTW, I've read multiple books on the Apollo program. The idea it was run or funded by the military is false. Yes, the astronauts were Air Force test pilots. You know why they were selected? Because test pilots have the perfect skill set to be astronauts. And it paid off handsomely as Armstrong saved two missions from disaster.
The Apollo program (even according to NDT) was geopolitically motivated which isn’t necessarily the same thing as being militarily motivated.
All our current advances are the direct result of working in large, communicating groups, which crucially need a way to transfer knowledge across generations. The YouTube channel “How to make everything” comes to mind, where the resources, processes, machinery… required make it tricky for something as mundane as a hairdryer to be built from scratch by a single person.
However, I also agree, to some extent, with the point the author is trying to make, even though the arguments and analogies are shaky.
I don’t believe the author is arguing the pyramids would ever have gotten built if everyone did whatever the hell they want. But I also don’t believe the pyramid builders were terribly happy.
In a world where we have solved (or have made significant progress to solving) big categories of problems, it might be worthwhile to consider what our “pyramids” are. Are you working on something life-altering? Some marvel which will stand for hundreds of years? Most people probably aren’t. I know I’m not.
So I find it easy to emphasize with the feeling that it’s more “healthy” to just make whatever the hell you want (be it as a programmer, or just as a human being). After all, a lot of innovation has been a direct result of people fucking around on their own. I’d enjoy a planet where potential Einsteins would not have to work two jobs to survive, in lieu of which they would have time to think, experiment, write, …
Maybe it comes down to: - Individual freedom is ideal to invent things (someone had to be Alexander) - Some pooling of humans is necessary to actually build said things
I don’t think the robots are at that point yet.
I’m not an economist nor well-read on the subject, so I’ll have to be hand-wavy on the specifics. But one alternative at least is to “live with less” as is sometimes said. To change consumption and our way of life so radically we just need less of everything (labour, material, …).
No mangers, no product managers, no appraisal (30% hike or out)
The rule was "I will treat you like an adult and you have to act like one"
Easily the best company I worked for and best Colleuges.
But I have seen this model hiccup once it reached ~70 engineers.
May be because of the structure or may be it's difficult to hire more such engineers India. Might scale better in SF.
Where things seem to break down is at the next level, if the teams (and their "bosses") need to coordinate but can't reach agreement and end up blocking each other. Sometimes the teams lack global information while the bosses (for some reason) are not interfacing well.
I don't know if Valve still has their "wheeled desk" system for self-organizing teams, but I would like to hear from anyone who has experienced it.
Unable to link a source right now but they have stopped doing that years ago. I remember the original article used to be posted as explanation for why CSGO wasn't getting any updates but it got debunked even then.
Some people (most people?) are perfectly happy with just working a stable job within a giant corporation. Either because they are capable of still finding fulfillment from work despite not having so much control (the kind of control that people who start businesses tend to crave), and/or because they find their fulfillment outside of work entirely.
Modern-day sophistry.
A far better approach is to start with theories from Psychology and Sociology and use them effectively.
One relevant theory is Self-Determination Theory (SDT) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory) which is about the intrinsic needs of an individual viz. 1) Autonomy 2) Competence 3) Relatedness. As long as an organization provides the individual with a position in which to express and exercise those needs, it does not matter whether it is a large/medium/small one. Since each individual has different combinations and intensities of the above three needs, their preferred environment will vary accordingly.
For an introduction to SDT see; Why we do What we do: Understanding Self-Motivation by Edward Deci. Highly recommended reading for everybody (especially managers/leaders). A review can be found at - https://thorprojects.com/2020/05/04/book-review-why-we-do-wh...
At first it felt unnatural. Doing something that most others are not feels wrong. Eventually, once I accepted the daily feeling of ambiguity created through exploring a limitless world, I knew I had made the right decision.
My advice to anyone navigating the transition is to ensure you first setup something for initial survival (e.g., figure out how to freelance, find a flexible job, learn a skill).
Having even a bit of money flowing in (irrespective of the amount really) while not being tied to a large Corp gave me that initial sense of freedom I needed to truly think big. It kept me from "giving up" and going back.
It's a slippery slope though, if you get too used to just doing freelance, you've built around yourself artificial barriers similar to those that exited before for you. You will gravitate to the easier projects because they will have the best ROI for you on your time.
Find the right balance. Just enough freelance to live, but not too much where you're not trying new things and truly learning how to build long term value.
Reading it now, I spot the reader-directed flattery much earlier (it literally starts in the title). I also have years of experience with a couple successful and even more failed startup founders behind me.
Maybe this essay was discussing narrowly the breakout YC company founders like Dropbox, AirBnB, Doordash, and the other top successful CEOs they saw. Most things in venture capital focus on the survivorship bias of the best companies and forget the others.
My experience with startups has been the opposite: The founders who "weren't meant to have a boss" either because they told you so themselves or they failed out of big companies due to being unmanageable or fighting their boss were the people who also had conflicts with cofounders and early employees. They'd get into fights with investors and the one or two board members you get after early funding rounds. Since they'd never successfully let themselves be managed or work as a team, they didn't know how to manage other people.
Some of them saw the founder role as equivalent to being king, with employees as their indentured servants who owed them 16 hour days in exchange for 0.05% of their empire, vesting over 4 years.
I haven't been lucky enough to be an early employee at one of the unicorn startups, but the successful startups I was part of had mature leaders who did well in other companies before founding their own. The "not meant to have a boss" founders I worked for are the periods of my career I wish I could go back and erase.
Also:
pg's "cliff notes"
https://paulgraham.com/bossnotes.html
And a standout comment from the original submission
> I've heard some Amazon employees say something similar (but maybe not as enthusiastically) about Amazon. One person described their structure to me as "like terrorist cells" [...]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=142210
The parent comment is an interesting read as well
> It was the wild west. We had different groups competing for the same government contracts. Managers and hackers alike got whopping bonuses for beating out other groups and they got to decide which contracts they wanted to bag. Entire groups were fired if they didn't bring in revenue. Fist fights, rancor and IP theft between teams were commonplace. But with all that they created some truly mind expanding tech for their time. They owned every angle of a highly lucrative market and showed no signs of slowing down... Until they got bought.
starting a business is agency-maxxing.
you trade that in when you're an employee for some amount of perceived economic safety. at least, that's supposed to be the deal. that's harder to come by these days.
But Paul Graham is right, you weren't meant to have a boss. In fact this is not unique to programmers either. Nobody is meant to have a boss.
I encourage everyone to read "The Dawn of Everything" by David Wengrow and David Graeber to understand the kinds of human organizational structures that are possible and have existed in the past.
This is why large corporations don't stay on top for long. They get out-competed by smaller, more nimble companies. You can see this in changes in lists of the top 10 corporations by market value, every 10 years.
I'm completely self taught as a software engineer. Since I started I had a passion for writing code every single day. My ideas at first were huge and ambitious but as time passed I noticed they became smaller and more "grounded". But that also correlated with my trajectory in my career. The first few jobs I had were small contracts. Working for myself and hustling against overseas engineers charging 1/100th what I wanted to charge. Then, I went to work for a government agency.
I had big ideas of cool solutions we could build to old problems they were dealing with. I implemented a genetic algorithm that reduced the time it took to estimate how to move water from one location to the next from 15 hours down to 30 seconds. But, we couldn't push the solution to production until several committees could meet and discuss it at length. I left that place after a year and now, 10 years later, they're still struggling with their old technology and slow paced processes.
I then went to work for a startup that wanted to do facial biometrics for fraud prevention. When I arrived they had 7 marketing people, a paying customer, but no actual software developed. Me and a few other engineers wrote the core of the application in a few days and then spent the rest of our time there fleshing it out into a real product. We were working 60 to 80 hours a week, nights, weekends, the whole enchilada. It was exhausting physically and emotionally but it was the best job I ever had. I had complete freedom to design everything from the ground up, got stuff pushed to production seconds after I committed my code, and got to develop some pretty innovative solutions for liveness detection and geo-fencing.
I then roamed around for a few years, salary hopping, from corporation to corporation until I landed at a big company. The work was easy and the pay was good. But year after year my love of software engineering started to die. There were no challenging problems to work on, the solutions were cookie-cutter implementations for every project, and the politics were exhausting. What should have taken 2 weeks of work would stretch to 2 months due to unnecessary meetings, and status updates, and leadership constantly changing their mind. And worst of all, I wasn't learning anything new or growing as an engineer.
Toward the end, every single team became a "modernization" team where all they would work on was updating legacy software to "modern" tech stacks. This was obvious busy work because leadership had nothing better to do with the hundreds of engineers they had hired. Eventually, when I had enough money saved up, I decided to retire.
But I always missed working at that startup. The rush, the challenge, the real world solutions we were building that were used by real people and making an impact on their lives was amazing. Now that I'm retired and get to choose what I want to work on I think fondly of those times and wish I could recreate that experience.
Some people want to try to die rich and unloved by 40. Some people work to be able to afford what they want to do. Different strokes, eh.
If PG thinks we weren’t meant to live this way, I’d like to see him out there fighting for universal housing, universal healthcare, universal education including no-tuition college, higher tax rates for billionaires and upcoming trillionaires, abolishing excessive wealth (e.g., we should tax all wealth and assets over $999 million 100% and/or force employee/community ownership of company shares of excessively wealthy individuals), abolishing for-profit prison labor, etc.
If you think this is extreme I would like you to explain how one person being a millionaire 300 times like Paul Graham is isn’t extreme. And then you realize that Elon Musk is as wealthy as 1000+ Paul Grahams.
I don't need to hear another VC giving a management seminar about how unnatural modern work is. I’d like to see them start changing people’s lives for the better, maybe they could start by advocating for the basic needs of the poorest people in our society or something like that.
[1] or maybe that’s not the right term
It's about balance.
> “Not natural, in my view, sah. Not in favor of unnatural things.”
> Vetinari looked perplexed. “You mean, you eat your meat raw and sleep in a tree?”
Not really? Historical life expectancies were low because it was so common to die in infancy and childhood (thus dragging down the "average").
For people who made it to 20, it was common to live past 60.
I'm guessing they are ignorant of historical facts and are just repeating what they heard from somebody else.
That doesn’t sound any better.
It doesn't, because "it was so common to", as OP stated, is not the same thing as "you were supposed to". There's no reason it should be corrected, it's accurate.
A reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers.
We evolved living in smaller cooperative groups, and spending most of our time in nature. The farther we move away from that the more we might want to question whether any individual change is actually going to make our life better. Likely some tradeoffs are absolutely worth it and some probably not.
Guess what? People weren't meant to live in stone houses and get cancer treatment either. Gathering berries all day sucks, that's why everyone abandons that lifestyle as soon as possible.
Life in a big company is very well-paid for very little work. You're pretty safe and can work part-time, raise kids, work-from-home.. and when you're on the office, are you really doing more than doodling during meetings and drinking coffee?
Not everyone, there are still societies doing that. The thing is, it doesn't scale. And the other ways of having a society do. Which, naturally, leads to a situation where the most of the population is not doing that, and keeps those who do that around just out of benevolent tolerance. It may even be a more pleasurable way of life, for all we know, than many others (such as one of a medieval peasant) but it can't ever be anything but a tiny minority.
http://web.archive.org/web/20130729210111id_/http://itc.conv...
http://web.archive.org/web/20130729231533id_/http://itc.conv...