> From where I sit the conservative answer to that is that they want a society which enforces strict hierarchies such that each person's role and place is socie

> From where I sit the conservative answer to that is that they want a society which enforces strict hierarchies such that each person's role and place is society is pre-determined for them along traditional lines: I would say this is a symptom of what I said about things going off the rails when people no longer understanding why the system evolved as it did in the first place. I think one of the great dichotomies of our time (and probably any similar time of turmoil) is thinking about things in terms of value to present life versus thinking of things in terms of life over multiple generations. Both are valuable. Do everything in service of future generations and you miss out on living life and do everything for the current generation and you diminish what you could have bequeathed to the next generation. All these conventions such as hierarchies, places and roles have proven extremely useful for organizing society in the past to accomplish things. A lot of this was limited at the time, especially by communication. Before the advent of the telegram/telephone, a command and control hierarchy made a ton of sense as a scaling solution for a society, especially one in economic and sometimes wartime competition with other societies. It's something that worked and still works in certain contexts. As communication became easier, you needed less command and control hierarchy, but as competition became more fierce between societies, there was still value in centralizing things in competent "deciders" that looked at collected information and made decisions. A lot of hierarchy has proven for generations to be of value in bequeathing a productive society to the next generation. Sometimes some of it becomes outdated because of innovations like the telegram/telephone and most recently the internet, but there is still value in maintaining that previous hierarchy under you perform a careful migration from the first system to the second system while preserving what the first system did well. Sadly, most of society are not software engineers like you and I that have had the massive experience of working on massive systems that can be evolved in such short time frames with so much transparency. What we can learn about evolving, replacing, refactoring and migrating systems from large scale software projects can take decades to lifetimes to learn about in systems that are much slower to change as they deal with real world artifacts that can't be switched out with a git patch. When so much of society lacks the experience working with systems that can be modified so readily and which have much more rapid and accurate observability, logging, metrics and alerts, it's not surprising that in that lack of experience that provides that understanding that some people would cling to possibly outdated ideas like hierarchies and roles.