Hierachy
A dangerous way to organize our thinking and living
In general, I find hierarchies, as organizational frameworks, questionable. It is one, and not the most fruitful way, of understanding and presenting information and pursuing communal goals.
Our first step in organizing anything, a club, a mission, a speech, a class of students, has become virtually automatic, some alignment from top to bottom, from higher to lower, by category and subcategory.
The unintentional result is to create channels of authority, conduits of power. Importance is conferred. Decisions are made. There are chains of command. Chains, mind you, the association is apt.
Hierarchy is actually dangerous, I think, when viewed as “the natural” way to organize social and political structures, especially when it becomes the lens through which we view the past and plan for the future.
Economic, social, political, and intellectual structures have no default form. There is no one way of viewing and organizing the complexities of life.
To the degree that we value freedom, our own and that of our friends and neighbors, I think we should fear hierarchies and avoid making them our normal approach to building the frameworks by which we live.
Of course, hierarchies provide order—enforced rules. Actually, it is not the rule that is enforced, but people against which the rule is weaponized.
“Good trouble,” said John Lewis, disrupts imposed rules of order.
And not revolution, which is simply the overturn of order. It brings all too often a new hierarchy.
I am suggesting openness to ever changing environments, discovery as a communal experience, accepting and sharing the new and different and strange. I support structure, but not a fixed alignment that is insensitive to new circumstances, a structure that can take different forms, develop new roles and form new relationships.
This is not in my mind “disorganization,” just as it is not hierarchy. It is a different way of actualizing the energy, intelligence and knowledge of a group. And not the only way and clearly not the search for a new default.
And, by the way, some new scholarship suggests that it is the way humans have actually lived for tens of thousands of years.