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Comment by tycho-newman | Hacker News Reader

Vanguardism on the left has been heavily critiqued by the Left. You should read Peter Kropotkin on mutual aid. We do not need to depend on public spirited pigs.

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Depend on, in the sense of hoping they just magically turn up and make everything right, no. But you cannot have a well working society without them.

The key is, then, to set up a system that improves the chances of having them in charge, rather than selfish ones.

Or don't enable institutions that attract the worst elements of society and put them in positions of power over others. The nature of hierarchies is that they distill the power hungry at their top, and lust for the subjugation of others is fundamentally at odds with effective leadership. The taller the hierarchy, the greater the distillation, because those not driven by an intrinsic desire to hierarchy-climb will be weeded out.

The problem is that the nature of non-hierarchies is that they inevitably allow the power hungry to establish hierarchies of their own design.

I would recommend reading The Tyranny of Structurelessness. It's a great analysis of the feminist movement of the 70s by one of its members. Specifically it critiques the push to avoid explicit hierarchies within that movement as inevitably enabling implicit hierarchies that favor the in-crowd

A more recent case study would be Valve: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/30/no-bos...

Guess the moral of the story is hierarchy will always exist - it can either be visible or invisible. People who want power will seek it. Inevitably people will end up following/obeying them for one reason or another … and we have a person in power.

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