Hierarchical Structures without Superiority

[rva_jeremy]

one thing I have been struggling to terms with is the notion of 'hierarchical structures without superiority".

It's something I've thought about a lot too, especially in my attempts to reconcile radical anarchism with Ra's message.  One of the most troublesome parts of the Ra material for me for many years was the  repeated descriptions of reality, entities, etc as inherently hierarchical.  As an anarchist, I have a very negative view of hierarchy, or rather, the motivations one would have in advocating for a hierarchical political system.

Hierarchical power structures concentrate control and power towards the top of the hierarchy. They are almost a structure functioning like a crystal that lets power and influence flow upwards from the bottom to the top.  This isn't dangerous merely because it hands enormous destructive power to fallible, flawed individuals.  It's also problematic because, in addition to concentrating power, it fails to concentrate other qualities of the collective, such as empathy, compassion, love, and especially wisdom.  In other words, it doesn't hand Obama 330 million times the wisdom or love he'd otherwise have.  It doesn't make him 330 million times better a person.  It only gives him enormous power, without the means to honestly and effectively exercise it on everybody's behalf.

If a structure could magnify the wisdom and compassion of those at the top--if it could somehow magnify not just their authority but their "total humanity" 330 million times--it would be the greatest invention in human history.  This describes, to my mind, the social memory complex: a builded structure of interpersonal relations that magnifies the totality of the individuals, not by concentrating power but by diffusing identitarian distinctions between members.

Hierarchy isn't even a problem per se.  It's clear that there are many things that benefit for hierarchical organization.  It's a kind of formalization of the "categorical mode" we already engage in when we perceive reality. You can have hierarchy without power (think about the organization schemes for biology or how a computer file system is arranged), so the fact that reality has a hierarchical structure to it isn't itself problematic when it describes an existing reality.  It is problematic when it prescribes a reality.  When entities with agency are the subjects of this organizational agenda, hierarchy doesn't describe a reality usually--it creates one, and becomes a legitimating principle for exacting compliance by progressively limiting the agency of each lower level.

To address your point directly then, Plenum: to have a hierarchy without superiority defeats the purpose.  Hierarchies shift intelligibility/agency towards the top, the more general, and away from the bottom, or more specific.  But this only has moral implications if the things being organized hierarchically have free will.  The superiority you decry would actually be welcome if there were a way we could transfer not just power but the full scope of agency and desire of all constituents to the top position.

So I'm struggling with the notion of 3d societal organizations (which include money), where superiority is not present.  

* charitable groups - where they are ostensibly there to serve others.

* volunteer groups - who give their time and efforts, not seeking a material return for themselves

* companies/corporations with strong ethical considerations encoded into their operating/decision making process.

I get where you're coming from. The issue is whether there are ways of concentrating human endeavor and power without creating elitism. I'm not convinced there is in 3D. Note that there is no example you pointed out where, regardless of good intentions, the politics inherent in hierarchy cannot make each of those organizations toxic.

As an anarchist I've often preferred to give up on large scale organization altogether, to describe it as itself an undesirable mode. Better to not accomplish great things than to yield to an authority who could just as easily use us to accomplish horrendous things. But I wonder if that's not simply some misanthropy and pessimism shining through. My kind of anti-institutionalism also lends itself to a kind of primitivist temperament in me, when maybe I throw out the baby with the bathwater out of conceptual streamlinedness.

It's hard to even imagine the concept of 'non-ownership' after having been implanted into a culture based on property rights that extend down to every last square foot/metre.

Once there is 'ownership', it creates a disparity between the person who owns it (has access to it, and defends those access rights - ie 'enforcement' of a physical/legal nature) and those who can't access it.  

Well, that's certainly how we define property. It's important to keep in mind that the characteristics of property are a kind of grab-bag of norms that aren't necessarily bundled together permanently. So, for example, there's the principle of exclusion: ownership of X means the ability to prevent anybody else from benefiting from X without your consent. There's also the concept of title: that my ownership of X is a condition others must respect. But you could have the former without the latter (who is excluded and included gets renegotiated or is apportioned out) or the latter without the former (I have title to X but you have some use right I can't vacate). So there's lots of different "kinds" of property possible, and property is just a set of arbitrary norms we all agree to.

If you think this way, it becomes a bit easier to envision alternatives that could be different and useful.

I'm not trying to throw our economic system out the window; I'm not fighting against it as such.  I'm just trying to grok or conceptualise a way of doing things (hierarchical structure) that assumes a greater amount of positivity.  And, of course, you can't have such a structure, unless the individuals within it are choosing, voluntarily of their own will, to align with those values and decision-making process.  So it's almost like a chicken-egg scenario.  Positive individuals, if grouped together, will form structures based on positive values.  They will just do it of a natural accord.

As somebody who's quite willing to throw our economic system out the window I think you might do better to look at non-hierarchical systems. There are consensus based models that, instead of concentrating power and authority, try to diffuse power and authority to ensure decisions meet the needs of the entire group. This is similar to what we used in Occupy. I highly recommend David Graber's "The Democracy Project" on this account, as he's very good at looking at non-western forms of democracy that stray from the formal procedural model we recognize.