Small-scale hunting and gathering societies do have a hierarchy, but the difference is that it’s not imposed and because they are egalitarian, anyone can opt out of the hierarchy by simply leaving. Because private property doesn’t really exist in nomadic hunting and gathering societies --you only really own what you can carry-- influence over the group is determined by merit rather than by control of private property and resources.
This is the system that humanity evolved to live in over hundreds of thousands of years, and that’s why we like it so much and why you never see people deliberately leaving small egalitarian societies for larger hierarchical societies, though we do have hundreds of historical examples of people doing the opposite.
That said, agriculture is a trap in the sense that once we adopted it, we could and can never go back for a set of reasons that should be obvious. The task then is to most nearly recreate the system we lived in for 99.9 percent of our existence as a species, while still accounting for the fact that we live under a new set of parameters and can never go back to those that existed before.
As I understand it, this is the puzzle that some forms of anarchy set out to solve.
Small-scale hunting and gathering societies do have a hierarchy, but the difference is that it’s not imposed and because they are egalitarian, anyone can opt out of the hierarchy by simply leaving. Because private property doesn’t really exist in nomadic hunting and gathering societies --you only really own what you can carry-- influence over the group is determined by merit rather than by control of private property and resources.
This is the system that humanity evolved to live in over hundreds of thousands of years, and that’s why we like it so much and why you never see people deliberately leaving small egalitarian societies for larger hierarchical societies, though we do have hundreds of historical examples of people doing the opposite.
That said, agriculture is a trap in the sense that once we adopted it, we could and can never go back for a set of reasons that should be obvious. The task then is to most nearly recreate the system we lived in for 99.9 percent of our existence as a species, while still accounting for the fact that we live under a new set of parameters and can never go back to those that existed before.
As I understand it, this is the puzzle that some forms of anarchy set out to solve.