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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

Yep. It only works as long as everyone knows each other. I've been arguing this point for years with my anarchist friends (both left and right varieties), who seem unwilling to grapple with basic concepts like scale and externalities.

I don't think straight hierarchies are the only possible organizational structure but it does seem like more people want to be told what to do than to think for themselves. .

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> but it does seem like more people want to be told what to do than to think for themselves

I just want to have some clarity around what my role is and where my responsibilities begin and end. Necessarily sometimes I'm required to reach beyond my regular duties.

In that context, then, being told what to do vs thinking for myself is a false dichotomy. The two are a nested-hierarchy, whereby I think for myself within the role required.

>I just want to have some clarity around what my role is and where my responsibilities begin and end.

This. There are two basic ways of looking at things when the organization is fluid. One, "everything is my job", which is a recipe for burnout. Or two, "I decide the boundaries of my job." That doesn't work very well either, because some people will draw the boundaries so small they never have to do anything, and others will draw them so large they don't do anything well.

My experience working with anarchist friends is that something as simple as leadership creates a certain hierarchy. Obviously if there's nothing formal everyone is pretty cool, but in the organisation of a society and a longer time frame I can see how it can lead to our historical material conditions.

If you're interested, I've been toying with the idea of an organizational structure that's loosely but explicitly modeled on the human body. My basic idea is that since bodies are complex interdependent structures that mostly Just Work, social structures that explicitly recapitulate human anatomy should be inherently more robust.

Would this open the social structure to all sorts of disease states in a similar way to the human body?

Then you would need teams within the social structure who's role it is to seek out pathogenic agents / sub-structures and terminate them. An immune system, if you will. Analogy could be a police force to deal with auto-immune issues, and a military to deal with foreign invaders.

Well, in a way, our social / structural systems already do mimic bacterial colonies: reproduce by consuming all available resources until the host system dies or the infection is cleared.

Voluntary association could produce hierarchies, and it's interesting to think about what sort of societies would result. But classically government is defined as a monopoly on violence, and that formulation essentially rules out the possibility of non-coercive government, at least so long as men are capable of violence.

I prefer hierarchy, because good boss is able to give me autonomy and responsibility without me having to constantly fight for it.

Leaderless means being bullied by the most controlling team member unless I constantly defend turf and permanently play politics.

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