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Fascinating implications. The bigger the society, the more it needs "big gods" to encourage prosocial behavior. As the article says, "Watched people are nice

• danharaj 11y ago
  The bigger the society, the more it needs "big gods" to encourage people to accept the ladder of hierarchy and domination it has created. The most "successful" cultures have also been the most violent, vicious, and hierarchical. Perhaps it's time to move beyond big gods, big leaders, big masters, and big individuals.
  • qzcx 11y ago
    There is a good reason why successful cultures have hierarchies. Specialization and structure improve efficiency and standard of living for everyone under it. Do you think companies could do without CEOs?
    • JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      Absolutely. Worked twice at companies that lost their CEOs for months. Things ticked along very nicely, thank you. There are many forms of governance, and the autocracy is only one form.
      • sliverstorm 11y ago
        To my knowledge the temporary absence of the CEO is absorbable in the short term because the CEO is primarily concerned with things like strategy & the future, not the immediate day-to-day operations. You can keep ticking for a long time without direction or strategy. All the parts will seem to be moving. But you won't be getting anywhere.
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
      • qzcx 11y ago
        > Management versus worker is an adversarial relationship This is because the needs of a company are not the needs of an individual. >Management democratically accountable to labor seems perfectly reasonable Have you seen the US political system? Do you think if you apply democracy to management then it won't be corrupt? I only see people voting for the manager who promises the biggest benefits.
        • danharaj 11y ago
          Sorry, I deleted my message (don't ask how..) Prev message: " I don't think specialization requires hierarchy. It merely requires... specialization. Specialists require support from society. Where does hierarchy enter into this? I don't think it enters at all, merely on grounds of efficiency, nor do I think that if that were the case, that such a utilitarian mode of reasoning justifies hierarchy. If it were merely efficiency that justifies hierarchy, no one would need to fight to establish it. What we observe instead is that hierarchies are intimately tied up with the mechanisms that enforce them: Usually violence of some sort. It would not be hard for me to accept a line of thinking that started with the idea that an acceptable definition of violence is any force required to enforce a relationship of domination. > Do you think companies could do without CEOs? Well I think as a worker that I do best working with peers who value their relationship with me and respect my autonomy. Management versus worker is an adversarial relationship and its manifestation in my work environment is deeply rooted in a much more violent, oppressive relationship that persists to this day in some places. A CEO is useful. That does not mean a CEO cannot be accountable to their workers instead of to property owners (hierarchies upon hierarchies upon hierarchies). Management democratically accountable to labor seems perfectly reasonable, in fact, perhaps a desirable evolution on the model. The only problem is that it contradicts the hierarchical structures that shape our society. This isn't a meritocracy of ideas, there are a few ideas with all the guns that are actively hostile against anything possible outside of their paradigm. " New message: > Have you seen the US political system? Do you think if you apply democracy to management then it won't be corrupt? I only see people voting for the manager who promises the biggest benefits. That is because we live in an adversarial economic system where everyone is supposed to pretend they are an individual with needs that are at odds with everyone else. The only reason we need to accept this is because we want to 'reward' 'better' people with more resources, power, status, and ability to control our destinies. We don't have to accept that. A lot of effort is put into making us accept it. A lot of propaganda goes into teaching people that property is good and that the state is good, and that an individual exists without taking into account their social relationships with other human beings. We cut people up into individuals, tell them they have no common lot with others, then force feed them a lot of ideology in order to convince them that they are freer the less they care about others and the more they try to accumulate wealth for them'selves'. The system clearly benefits the fraction of a percent that reside at the top and steer it towards their own self enrichment far more than it benefits me, someone who is somewhere between the middle and the top, and far, far more than it benefits those at the bottom.
    • riemannzeta 11y ago
      The question of whether specialization requires hierarchies is kind of the question that Coase sought to answer in the Nature of the Firm. To make a long story short, Coase thought the answer was "no" so long as it was more efficient for the specialists to contract with consumers of their services on a open market than it was for them to work together in a firm under managers. I think Coase's answer seems more obvious now thanks to the Internet. Back when he published it was pretty counterintuitive for a lot of people. These days, I think hierarchy is required only where private information needs to be shared with the specialists in a carefully choreagraphed way. If we don't have to worry about who knows what when, then the specialists can synch up and deliver to customers just fine without managers. But if there's some super important private information that can only be shared in sequence with particular specialists in order to maximize a good result, then no hierarchy is a mess. In other words, human hierarchy now is almost entirely derived from the architecture of private information.
• riemannzeta 11y ago
  Great question. What if it's something like the Internet itself -- i.e., the potential that somebody will capture and share a private act in a way that will become completely public and forever.
  • orand 11y ago
    I think that would do it. The Ashley Madison leaks are just the tip of the iceberg. What if someone released a dump of _everything_ the NSA has captured about certain groups of individuals over their entire lifetimes? (assuming there are torrent sites with enough storage to handle it...)
    • riemannzeta 11y ago
      I agree. The Ashley Madison leak is a great example! It's almost like we have become our own super ego.