I’m not an anarchist, I’m a no-hierarchist. They’re the same you say??? Well yeah, whatever. Someone else decided to poison the term anarchy and there’s not much I can do about it any more.

But I definitely like to look at things in terms of no-hierarchy. Friendship has no hierarchy. The only kind of capitalism that works has no hierarchy. The one where there lots of small companies competing and there is no profit to be made. The butcher and the baker works, the butcher and the investment banker doesn’t. Startups have very little hierarchy. Your local sports club has very little hierarchy.

Responsibility

The higher (greater? larger?) the hierarchy, the less responsibility that each level holds. The bosses are not responsible for the work, the workers are not responsible for the orders. The middle managers are the worst. All they want to do is avoid responsibility and move up the hierarchy. Adolf Eichmann the middle manager of the Final Solution, did nothing but try to please his boss. People will massacre, but they’ll massacre a lot less when instead of giving the orders they have to do it themselves.

I think the people at the top and bottom probably wouldn’t mind if the organisation collapsed, but the people in the middle want to keep it going.

Low

But no-hierarchy doesn’t quite capture it fully. The family group still works, the butcher’s shop still works. So I want a world where there is as little hierarchy as possible.

Even in an ant colony there is relatively little hierarchy. Almost all are workers, there’s no managers that I know of. But still I don’t want to live in an ant colony, and mostly they only work because they’re all family. I want a world where ant colonies can get along.