Thesis #11: Hierarchy is an unnecessary evil
Egalitarianism is an essential part of human nature; it is the very thing that led to our humanity, and remains an undeniable yearning in the human spirit that continues to shape our political fortunes (*see* thesis #7. Hierarchy is the antithesis of that, and thus, we cannot avoid the inescapable conclusion that hierarchy itself is dehumanizing and maladapted to the human condition. It appears to suit many of our closest primate relatives just fine (chimpanzees, for example), but it denies the very thing that created us as a unique species–our egalitarianism. It squashes the vast diversity of possible social interactions into a rigidly defined structure, and thus, violates the principle set forth in thesis #1–making hierarchy “evil.” The question is, is hierarchy a *necessary* ”evil”?
First, you will recall that we defined “hierarchy” and “egalitarianism” in thesis #7 in terms of graph theory. Individuals are nodes in a social graph, and edges are power relationships between them; the graph as a whole becomes a depiction of a society. Power is an inescapable fact of life; even in egalitarian society, some individuals have influence over others. What defines an egalitarian society is that this graph has no particular structure. It can take any shape. The possible diversity of egalitarian social structures is limitless. The result of such chaos is that there is no single, dominant individual across every dimension of power. Hierarchy, then, is a very specific case, in that hierarchy is a kind of society with a very specific shape–a triangle. Hierarchy is when the graph of a society is triangular; egalitarianism is when the graph of a society is any other shape than triangular.
We can also speak of a continuum of hierarchy, as few societies have ever formed a perfect triangle with all power culminating into a single, apex individual. Contemporary American society is undeniably hierarchical, but its zenith is not a single individual, but a small, tightly-knit circle.
By itself, a hierarchical society would be another point in the diversity of social structures–and thus, good. The problem is when *all* societies are hierarchical. Hierarchy’s need to crush all alternatives is what makes it “evil,” because it is driven to wipe out all diversity besides itself. The ultimate driving force behind this is the simple fact that hierarchy does not work well for people. They must be somehow “forced” into it–meaning that all alternatives must be systematically eradicated, or hierarchy will be abandoned by the lowest ranks, the ones that are, simultaneously, most needed by hierarchy, and have the least to gain from it. Daniel Quinn raises the phenomenon of children running away to join the circus as a proverbial expression of this abandonment. Ancient Roman apprehension about the Cynics is another expression, as was much of the fervor generated in the 1960s against the hippie countercultural movement.
Baboons can be instructive to us on the effects of hierarchy on humans, so long as we keep in mind that we are dealing with a key difference between the two. Baboon males are roughly three times larger than females; human sexual dimorphism is nearly non-existent, one of the lowest in the entire animal kingdom. Baboons are well adapted to hierarchy; as we have seen, it was the rejection of such hierarchical lifestyles and the adoption of egalitarianism that created humans in the first place. But even baboons, as adapted to hierarchy as they are, are stressed by it. Robert Sapolsky, one of the world’s foremost authorities on baboon society, put it this way:
[M]y initial assumption that I sort of squandered my first 15 years on with them was dominance rank. That’s the thing. If you’re a low-ranking baboon you’re gonna have the stress-related diseases. And what I’ve learned since then is, yeah, rank’s important. Far more important is what sort of society you have that rank in. Is it a troop that treats its low-ranking animals miserably? Is it a troop whose hierarchy is unstable? Those are both much more stressful situations. And then even more important than your rank in the sort of society in which it occurs is your personality. Which is basically saying, What’s your filters with which you see the world around you?
This is very reasonable, particularly for baboons, who have millions of years of evolution adapting them to hierarchical social structures. We would expect hierarchy to stress them less than humans. That said, even among humans, we can understand the importance of personality types and the type of hierarchy on the level of stress we experience in that hierarchy–what we might call the perception of oppression. Some personality types can accept their circumstances more easily than others, and some hierarchies are much worse to be at the bottom of than others. This is why no hierarchy can ever succeed being *purely* exploitative. The most coercive regimes collapse almost immediately, e.g., the trend of fascism in 1930s Europe. Rome was incredibly exploitative, but succeeded by tempering that exploitation with the myth of legitimacy. Caracalla’s move to open citizenship to the provinces was key to Roman success, by making the exploited feel like they had a vested stake in the empire. It created legitimacy, and removed the perception of oppression.
So we see that not all hierarchies are created equal. Some hierarchies are more “evil” than others. The contemporary United States, for instance, is a case study in the attempt to create the least evil hierarchy possible–the playing out of what happens when the mutually exclusive concepts of “freedom” and “the state” are combined. And yet, even in the contemporary United States–the historical peak of prosperity and freedom within hierarchy–we cannot deny the chafing restrictions and insult to human dignity imposed by subjection to another human being.
In essence, we are dealing with shifting the mean of a bell curve. The distribution of personality types would naturally create a bell curve–some are very stressed out, and some are very relaxed, but most will cluster about the mean. Across this distribution, we can draw a line of the perception of hierarchy. Above this line, more stressed individuals notice the imposition of hierarchy; below it, the less stressed individuals do not. The more hierarchical a society is, the more that line shifts to the left–enveloping more of the area under the bell curve on the “oppressed,” right side of the line. There will always be individuals who are able to cope with any level of hierarchy–and there will always be individuals who chafe under even the lightest power relation. That is not important. What is important is the overall level of human suffering caused by subjecting increasing populations to the dehumanizing ordeal of hierarchy.
At this point, we should be able to clearly say that hierarchy is, indeed, “evil”–but that it also is a measure of degree, rather than kind. We can characterize a society as “hierarchical,” but we must understand that this means that it bears a greater resemblance to the hierarchical ideal than the egalitarian ideal, rather than to say that it is a perfect image of the hierarchical ideal. We might characterize such a society as “78% hierarchical,” for instance.
Jeff Vail has done an excellent job charting the gross inefficiencies of hierarchy. In perhaps his very best argument on this, Vail highlighted the complete inability of hierarchy to effectively process information in perhaps hierarchy’s single greatest achievement in this regard: the United States Air Force. Vail writes:
“Span of Control” is one term for the management concept that one person can only effectively control a limited number of subordinates. As a hierarchal organization grows, more and more intermediary layers must be created to keep this span of control within reasonable bounds. Let’s explore the (quite obvious) ramifications of this, as a means of better understanding RA Wilson’s SNAFU principle: As hierarchy grows, the increasing number of relays that information must cross, and the self-interested distortion of information at each relay ensures the inefficiency of information processing within hierarchy.
…
In reality, the number of staff tiers keeps increasing (for example, I’ve never seen an Air Force “wing” with only 12 wing-staff personnel, as the two-tiered staff formula would suggest). Wilson’s SNAFU principle would suggest that as the number of layers (and hence relays) increases, the number of personnel involved in information processing functions will keep increasing beyond the 76% suggested in the 6-layer organization above. In reality, this does in fact happen, as at each higher level there are additional staff functions that must be added (e.g. at the Flight level, the staff doesn’t include medical, but at the Wing level it may include an entire hospital). Additionally, the degree of autonomy is increased from the Group to Wing level, as necessitated by the sheer impossibility of maintaining effective communications through 5 hierarchal relays.
The “SNAFU principle” Vail refers to is the effect of message corruption through multiple relays in a self-interested system. It is exemplified by this “fable” from the hacker culture, which dates back to the 1960s:
In the beginning was the plan,
and then the specification;
And the plan was without form,
and the specification was void.
And darkness
was on the faces of the implementors thereof;
And they spake unto their leader,
saying:
"It is a crock of shit,
and smells as of a sewer."
And the leader took pity on them,
and spoke to the project leader:
"It is a crock of excrement,
and none may abide the odor thereof."
And the project leader
spake unto his section head, saying:
"It is a container of excrement,
and it is very strong, such that none may abide it."
The section head then hurried to his department manager,
and informed him thus:
"It is a vessel of fertilizer,
and none may abide its strength."
The department manager carried these words
to his general manager,
and spoke unto him
saying:
"It containeth that which aideth the growth of plants,
and it is very strong."
And so it was that the general manager rejoiced
and delivered the good news unto the Vice President.
"It promoteth growth,
and it is very powerful."
The Vice President rushed to the President's side,
and joyously exclaimed:
"This powerful new software product
will promote the growth of the company!"
And the President looked upon the product,
and saw that it was very good.
This little piece whimsically illustrates a very serious problem in hierarchy. The span of control limits how many subordinates a single hierarch can control through the same neurological limitations from which we derive Dunbar’s number (~150). Because of that span of control, hierarchy must create more levels to accomodate larger populations. However, more levels means more transmissions from the bottom of the hierarchy to the top. This is why we note the greater efficiency of smaller corporations over larger ones, or the eternal litany against government bureaucracy. Elsewhere, Vail has discussed the superior information processing capabilities of an “open source,” rhizomatic network:
Rhizome processes information entirely differently than hierarchy. It depends on the fusion of a regular network of local links between peers along with occasional, distant and weak contacts with a broad and diverse set of contacts. This “weak network” theory, and how rhizome can use it to process information more efficiently than hierarchy, is well illustrated by the classic example of the job search: in a traditional communications model (as used by hierarchy), you ask your 10 close friends for leads on jobs, and they each ask 10 close friends. The result—you don’t span a very large social network in your search. In the “weak network” model you ask 10 distant friends, and they in turn each ask 10 distant friends. With such a method you can span a far wider social network, and are more likely to locate a job prospect. Rhizome is defined by the non-hierarchal cooperation between peer entities, and this cooperation—the fundamental economic activity in rhizome—depends entirely on such effective forms of communication.
So, we must now return to the original question–is hierarchy a *necessary* evil? Must we adapt to this evil in all its gross inefficiency and learn to cope with it, as so many of our primate cousins have? Or is it unnecessary–and therefore, something we should work to reject once again, even as our first human ancestors did?
In thesis #7, we also touched on *why* hierarchy becomes necessary. After a discussion of Dunbar’s number, and the reflection of egalitarianism in the evolution of the human brain, I noted:
Here we see the essential problem with any large-scale society: we cannot conceive of so many people. It speaks to the very heart of Stalin’s cold truism: “One death is a tragedy, but a million deaths are a statistic.” Thus, for any society much larger than 150 people, we become neurologically incapable of maintaining an egalitarian society. Hierarchy becomes necessary, yet the human animal is very much adapted to egalitarianism–and in no way adapted to hierarchy. Cross-culturally, we all have some expectations rooted in that egalitarian heritage. We expect freedom, and we expect to be treated as a human being rather than a stereotype. We all feel some negative feeling of stress when these expectations are not met–as they invariably are not met in any large, hierarchical society.
Hierarchy eases the burden on our brain by dividing the world into neatly stereotyped classes. We do not need to know the bum on the street personally, because we know that he is “homeless,” and we know what “the homeless” are. We do not need to know our given Congressman personally because he is a “politician” and we know what “politicians” are. Hierarchy helps simplify the world, allowing our brains to function in a society of 6.5 billion. We may be academically aware that this is an abstraction and far removed from the actual complexity of our society, but we are neurologically incapable of actually understanding such complexity. Hierarchy provides us a model of a simplified world that is easier to understand than a complex world of 6.5 billion persons.
There are two elements here that make hierarchy necessary, and population is only the first. However, even a large population would not require hierarchy if it accepted fissioning. This is common among many primitive societies, and nearly universal among hunter-gatherers. When groups become too large (or often, when an individual aspires to power), the group fissions. The Bible contains a memory of this process in Genesis 13, with the fissioning of Abram’s and Lot’s groups. Tribalism, Balkanism, whatever we call it, even a large population can eschew hierarchy if it is prepared to break down into a sufficient number of small, autonomous groups.
However, this is possible only under certain energy distribution schemes–and agriculture is not one of them. Agriculture requires significant investment in a given piece of developed land, often requiring terracing or irrigation. This makes fissioning geographically difficult. As a more general principle, it concerns the distribution of energy. Vail writes:
Historically, patterns of energy usage can effectively predict, and are a useful tool in understanding societal structure and hierarchy. Ancient China and Egypt, home to the earliest and most centralized/despotic civilizations, can be explained in terms of an energy-dependence dynamic. The energy that drove both these systems was control of the periodic flooding of the nile and yellow rivers, used to irrigate the agricultural systems of the respective societies. The individual land control of farmers in both societies has mystified many historians as to why such despotic political systems were allowed to develop. This can, however, be easily explained by the fact that it required huge, often 100,000+ man work details to keep these “hydraulic” (see Wittfogel) agriculture systems functioning — something that could only be accomplished by a powerful, centralized authority.
Conversely, tribal political structures, epitomized by autonomy and individual freedom (if not material wealth) are examples of highly de-centralized energy systems — mainly firewood gathered by individuals at a sustainable rate.
Taking advantage of the distant mirror of history to examine our own society, it is clear that our dependence on petroleum-derived energy has led to a complete dependence on a despotic government-corporate complex that controls and ensures our supply of petroleum. Our society of “freedom and empowerment”, our vaunted democracy might, to those in a removed vantage point, look like the same superficial good deal as the pharoh’s providing and maintaining a complex hydraulic-irrigation network must have looked like a good deal to the ancient egyptian peasantry.
Thus, the question, “Is hierarchy necessary?” is actually two questions–“Is a large population necessary? And must this population depend on centralized energy sources?” It seems that centralized energy sources may be a prerequisite for such large populations, but the size of such populations are deeply ambiguous. There is no inherent value in having a large population. We don’t need to have a large population; we did well with a much smaller population for millions of years. Large populations must make frightening cuts into the ecology they depend on, placing them in a permanently precarious position.
In fact, the only thing that necessitates a large population is hierarchy itself. Hierarchy requires large pools of labor to provide for the nobility, and large populations that can be levied into large armies with which hierarchy can expand.
Therefore, hierarchy is only necessary for hierarchy. We gain nothing from it, but lose much to it. The only one who benefits from hierarchy is the hierarch himself. This makes hierarchy an unnecessary evil.