About Hierarchy

In my article, Revolution 2.0 , I said in item 3:

Revolution 1.0 was in accord with concentrated and centralized power and authority, for it sought to storm the capital's buildings and replace one group of authorities with another group of authorities. The same basic style of system would remain in place, a system of concentrated and centralized power. 

What I failed to mention there is the word ‘hierarchy’. I so much take it for granted that concentrated and centralized power is almost always organized hierarchically that I failed to even mention this. Rather than editing the article and adding words about how centripetal political power almost always occurs in a hierarchical arrangement (and thus re-sending this to any subscribers), I decided to make a short article now on the topic of hierarchy in relation to centralized and concentrated power structures.

Albert Einstein is often quoted as having said that “fish will be the last to discover water”. He actually never said that, and this is a paraphrase of what he did say, but if you want to learn more about what Einstein actually said I will point you to your nearest web search engine with these as your search terms. I’ll just use the paraphrase. What Einstein meant is that those who are immersed in something, such as fish in water, will actually often not even acknowledge or perceive what it is they are immersed in, because they have so little experience with any other context for their being and experience.

I grew up in the United States of America, and have always lived within its geographical (to distinguish from cultural) national boundaries. I suspect my cultural experience of political hierarchy (and economic hierarchy, which is profoundly related to political hierarchy) would have been quite similar if I were born and raised in Australia, the UK, Canada…, or any other relatively well-to-do representational ‘democracy’ (which I put in quotes for reasons I may get to in another article). It has been my observation and experience that most of us who grew up within political hierarchies generally have very little understanding about what these are and what their alternatives are. The reason for this lack of imaginative, critical awareness is, of course, that most Americans (and citizens of other similarly structured nations) have never experienced anything OTHER THAN social power relations (which is to say mode of politics) which are structured by centripetal hierarchy — which is to say in a pyramidal form with a ranking system. Ironically, these same people tend to believe that theirs is a democratic society of “liberty and justice for all”.

Everything I just said is politically taboo.

It is taboo because it departs from the very heavy enculturation and indoctrination we have been subject to in what I call pseudo-democracies.

If you doubt me, read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, or The U.S. is Not a Democracy, It Never Was, by Gabriel Rockhill. I recommend beginning with Rockhill’s short article, as you’ll get the basic idea pretty quickly that way. Zinn’s book will take a lot more of your time.

To call a pseudo-democracy a pseudo-democracy (a spade a spade) is like playing the role (in real life!) of the little dog, Toto, in The Wizard of Oz, at that moment when Toto pulls back the curtain and reveals the great and powerful Wizard as a con man. And yet not everyone will believe the little dog! Hardly anyone wants to believe that their emperor’s new suit of clothes are weightless, invisible, and purely illusory.

What I’m getting at here is that a genuine democracy would not be arranged to concentrate political power (authority) into a hierarchical, centripetal form, as is the case for pretty much any government which has the audacity to claim it is a democracy — or even a ‘republic’.

But we who live in the USA (which I use as an example only because I have always lived within its natural borders) have almost no idea about any of this, on average, because they’ve had almost no experience of power-sharing outside of a centripetal system arranged into a hierarchy. We, most of us, truly do not know that we are fish in water, or what the water is, or what air might be. We cannot, most of us, imagine either the system we’re embedded in nor the alternatives it may have.

And now I’ve done it, haven’t I? I’ve pulled back the curtain and exposed what we’re going to be talking about here in The R-Word for years to come.

It’s a terrible task. It’s anything but easy. And one cannot simply pull back a curtain. One has to reveal in language what is to be found there, and what might be instead.

But when you see what our liberty may look like, you’ll happily embrace the R-word.