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Comment by dpc59 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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