John Abbe (aka Slow)
Reclaiming hierarchies, in four parts:
Hierarchies, like positive feedback loops. can be found everywhere. And whether strict/clean hierarchies or messy, can be as oppressive as any going down the drain, any downward spiral. Or, as useful and beautiful as any sunflower or virtuous circle, or other upward spiral!
1/4 #power #groups #communities #networks #activism #socialism #anarchism #systems
anderbill
@slowenough nice thinking here. in the organizational psychodynamics perspective hierarchies can act as social defenses. some are adaptive (as you point out) and others, well, no so much.
John Abbe (aka Slow)
Computer programming has relatively clean hierarchies of hardware and software dependencies. Physics describes layers of ~messy hierarchy where quarks make up protons and neutrons, which with electrons make up the few kinds of atoms like carbon and hydrogen etc., which in turn make up molecules, etc. 3/4
John Abbe (aka Slow)
We think of autocracy as being intrinsic to hierarchy, because we spend so much time in hierarchies of the sort that people essentialize as command & control systems. So every relationship is conceived of in those terms.
Yet phone trees are a classic hierarchical tool we use for systems of support, and for calls to action!
I see hierarchies everywhere. Most of the ones I like are messy. Do you see any hierarchies you feel good about? Other responses also welcome. 4/4
John Abbe (aka Slow)
Genetically, family relationships in most species, like us, are hierarchical, and over generations often get messy. (Some bacteria (& archaea?) do so much inter-critter gene transfer that's the more influential scene.) Families of languages, or schools of thought, or institutions, there are many fields where it helps to uderstand it when we use a hierarchical lens. 2/4
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