Everything can be misused, that doesn't make everything bad per se. Saying that hierarchies must be mitigated (because they are bad, I assume) is unreal.

Good thing I didn't say that, then. What I said was that we must look at what's natural and decide which bits require amplification and which require mitigation.

And of course saying that hierarchies should be mitigated is far from unreal. It was the central message of the people who started America. They put a great deal of effort into checks and balances on power both at the federal level (between the 3 branches) and in having local, state, and federal governments, none of which have a hierarchical relationship. They put a strong emphasis on individual rights, which are counter-hierarchical as well. And let's not forget the freedoms of press and political speech, first among the Bill of Rights, which is very much a check on hierarchy.

I'm not from the US, so excuse my ignorance.

I was under the impression that US federal law trumps state law. Is this not the case? And wouldn't that imply a hierarchical relationship?

Federal law does not a priori supersede state law. The Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution reserves _all_ rights not explicitly granted to the federal government to the states and the people. The Civil War was fought, in part, over this contention between the power of the federal government to emancipate slaves and the power of the slaveholding states to continue to allow the practice of slavery. In more modern times, certain aspects of the constitution have been interpreted more and more broadly to allow e.g. the regulation of medical products under the auspices of regulating “interstate commerce” (even if said products are only ever sold in a single state — they can be transported across state lines).

From this system design, you can deduce that there _does_ exist a hierarchy in the theory of US government — the Constitution is the law of the land and all other actors and subsystems are subordinate to it. Modifying the Constitution requires significant effort at multiple levels of government usually including (by state law) extensive popular support and supermajorities of representatives.

The answer from silentOpen is excellent, but I wanted to add a few things.

Hierarchy is the rule of men, not of laws. So even if there were a hierarchical relationship between bodies of law, that doesn't require a hierarchical relationship between people.

In the US, federal law can supersede state law, and state law can supersede county and city law. It does have to be written that way of course. In practice, many laws are written to allow jurisdictions to self-regulate within broad limits. For example, in California it's legal to open a marijuana store. But localities get to decide whether it happens in their city. And it's technically illegal federally, but that's currently unenforced.

But the president has no direct authority over governors, and governors have no direct authority over mayors. However much Trump dislikes a variety of San Francisco policies, he cannot just order them changed. Instead he would have to persuade both the House and Senate to pass a law, and San Francisco could challenge that law in the courts.

> I mean, just to pick one enormous historical trend, there's a reason the world has mostly gotten rid of monarchies, and it's not because we thought crowns and scepters were maybe a bit tacky.

How did that work out for them?

* The abolition of the English monarchy led to the brutal military dictatorship of Cromwell, which ended only with the reestablishment of the monarchy.

* The abolition of the French monarchy led to the military dictatorship of Napoleon, which ended in a cataclysmic continent-wide war and the reestablishment of the Bourbon monarchy.

* The abolition of the German and Austrian monarchies led to Hitler.

* The abolition of the Russian monarchy led to the Soviet Union and the mass murder of tens of millions.

* The abolition of the Chinese imperial monarchy led to a half-century-long civil war between Nationalist, Communist, and warlord factions, leading ultimately to a Communist dictatorship and the mass murder of tens of millions.

Hierarchical power is a human universal, and trying to abolish it without recognizing this fact only leads to its reemergence in even more violent forms within the space of a few years, decades if you're lucky.

The Rhetoric of Reaction Albert O. Hirschman [1]

Hirschman describes the reactionary narratives thus:

- According to the perversity thesis, any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy.

- The futility thesis holds that attempts at social transformation will be unavailing, that they will simply fail to "make a dent."

- Finally, the jeopardy thesis argues that the cost of the proposed change or reform is too high as it endangers some previous, precious accomplishment.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rhetoric_of_Reaction

Which is not what I'm doing at all.

If we're going to talk about the abolition of monarchies, how is it that some of the freest and most prosperous countries in the world today are constitutional monarchies? Norway, Australia, Sweden, Netherlands, Denmark, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Japan, Luxembourg, and Spain all rank within the top 25 of countries by HDI as well as the top 25 of countries by Democracy Index. All of those countries are monarchies.

And you still haven't addressed the historical fact that the styles of radicalism that led to the abolition of monarchies in England, France, and Russia utterly failed to make things better and, in fact, largely made things worse. That doesn't mean it's futile or counterproductive to improve society, but merely removing the existing hierarchy and attempting to install something bespoke in its place has historically been a failing proposition, while reforming and improving an existing system has historically been much more successful.

When I said "mostly gotten rid of monarchies", I include constitutional monarchies in that. The monarchs in at least most of those countries have approximately zero power compared with their historical antecedents.

If anything, they're a fine example of the kind of dealing realistically with our heritage I'm talking about. Actual monarchies have a track record I would generously call mixed, and perhaps more properly call horrific. But being half-evolved primates, humans seem to like having an officially recognized big monkey to rally around. So we keep the Queen of England around as something akin to a hood ornament on the car of that nation. It works, even if it's not particularly rational. But then, neither are we.

Thank goodness I'm not talking about abolishing hierarchies, then.

>* The abolition of the English monarchy led to the brutal military dictatorship of Cromwell, which ended only with the reestablishment of the monarchy.

And now that monarchy has a lot less power than it did.

>* The abolition of the French monarchy led to the military dictatorship of Napoleon, which ended in a cataclysmic continent-wide war and the reestablishment of the Bourbon monarchy.

And now France is a roughly-democratic republic.

>* The abolition of the German and Austrian monarchies led to Hitler.

Same for Germany.

>* The abolition of the Russian monarchy led to the Soviet Union and the mass murder of tens of millions.

Not so much the same for Russia, but I'd take the Russian Federation or some parts of the USSR over the Tsarist dictatorship.

It's worth a strong mention that many countries which freed themselves of imperial control by the monarchy or republic of another country didn't end up in a disastrous state. The United States, Ireland and India are good examples.

>Hierarchical power is a human universal

Some kind may be, though it shouldn't be confused with monarchy. Hierarchy is not equal to a monarchy, and modern republics show that power can be distributed at least a little better, with success.

>its reemergence in even more violent forms within the space of a few years, decades if you're lucky.

And then the emergence of freedom, apparently - when most monarchy is abolished or minimized to the point of being powerless, we benefit. Arguably, the abolition of monarchy is not sufficient to do away with the unjust power of the state, but it is sufficient to do away with a certain unjustified power of man over another man.

The opposite of hierarchies is not some blissful state of civilized anarchy, it is chaos, violence and free for all. If you think some leftist state is the solution, sorry for breaking it to you but they are highly hierarchical if not more than state tending toward classic liberalism. Most experiments in this vein have ended badly (millions dying), see communist China (now a hierarchical dictatorship btw), USSR, Cuba, Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil (thankfully steering of peril right now).

So, Bolsonaro is "thankfully steering Brazil of peril"?

I agree that left-wing authoritarianism is as bad as right-wing authoritarianism. But thinking that the only alternative to hierarchical power is chaos is going to be one sort of authoritarianism or another.

As I explain elsewhere in this thread, one alternative of hierarchical authority is carefully limited, distributed power. There are historical examples of it working pretty well for hundreds of years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22415807

A society with hyper exaggerated social classes, with voting rights only for property owners, indentured servitude, slavery and all that was "carefully limited" in its hierarchical authority?

Sure. Which was mostly way better than what Europe was doing at the time. And which, more importantly, led us to keep seeking that "more perfect union". Where each generation has said, "Maybe we could do yet better. And here's how." And where quite often we have done better.

You're just thinking about one edge case. Any child is born into a hierarchy if they have a guardian of any sort. If you want to learn from a teacher you have to enter into a student teacher hierarchy. Any engagement with other human beings results in a formation of some kind of hierarchy. We all have different minds, bodies and skills that lead to different natural hierarchies.

I deeply disagree that "much of human government through most of human history" is an edge case. I do agree that families are somewhat naturally hierarchical, and that can be good. However, there are plenty of examples of that being taken too far. I disagree that teaching and learning can only be accomplished through hierarchy, although that's certainly the common mode in industrial education.

So it's as I said: we have to look at our natural heritage and decide which parts are good. Natural does not equal good.

I think I misread the comment I was responding too.

I was more trying to say hierarchies are not always wrong, but I realize now that's not exactly what he was claiming. You're right they're often abused and should always be challenged. Nothing about nature is good or evil it just is.

Thanks for saying so.

Careful, you're going to hear some lobster arguments...

Is that what we're calling authoritarians these days?

It is a reference to one of the weirder bits of Jordan Peterson and his infamous self-help cult.

Think about captain on a ship.