Comments
Pop wrote
typical relations of dominance and hierarchy common in primates
Which primates? I know more about the more cooperative ones.
Maybe humanity (or any particular section of humanity) will be flipping between the most prevalent arrangement being hierarchy to being egalitarianism and back every few thousand years or however long, for as long as humans exist
The vast majority of human history we lived in largely acephalous societies with built in mechanisms to prevent hierarchisation, as hunter gatherers, so far as I understand. So it's more like civilisation(s) emerged sometime around the last 10 000 years and has slowly been infecting the planet.
[deleted] wrote
Pop wrote
Don't chimps and baboons have dominance hierarchies?
I dunno, I was asking you!
hierarchy will tend to breed resistance
I think that there is always resistance to hierarchy because hierarchy is dehumanising and people like to be uncompromised beings.
Yes there's a push and pull of forces. But currently we're in a situation where hierarchy will end with catastropic collapse and mass extinction, so there is that potential endgame.
existential1 wrote (edited )
It makes sense in a vacuum. But a lot of those changes happened pre-petroleum. Fossil fuel use is about to shit all over that theory, if it has any inherent merit. Well, fossil fuel and industrial agriculture.
rot wrote (edited )
Possibly, freedom has to be protected. anarchy cant exist alongside hierarchy so maintaining a free society will have to be a constant struggle.
I'm paraphrasing what I've heard before but the idea is that we cant just 'fix' everything with a revolution.