Hierarchies

I have many blog entries over Jordan Peterson's insistence that humans are biologically destined to arrange their lives to live in hierarchies, and he is correct in one sense, and mistaken in another. He is correct in that the tendency is there, and there are ways for good people to live in hierarchies. He is mistaken in that we should only live in hierarchies minimally and wisely. I wish to add that Peterson is trying to get it right concerning hierarchies, but he requires help from my Mavellonialist philosophy to sort out this tricky subject of hierarchies. I wish to remind myself, and the reader, that I will later need to go back and review all these entries of mine on hierarchies and Peterson's take on them. Somehow, I sense my fascination with and objections to his insistence, about the primacy of hierarchical living for humans going forward, is a subject of vast significance, and one that I must flesh out and resolve. I am optimistic that I am close to coalescing a strong argument in my various, splintered blog entries on Peterson and hierarchies. With this in mind, I likely have made points in other blog entries of importance that need to be added to what is written below. Stay tuned. As naturally wicked creatures, and group-living nonindividuators, people by instinct to tend to arrange their lives in hierarchies, and that proclivity is 350 million years old Peterson suggests, and it did previously contribute to our surviving and flourishing at prior, historical periods and levels of development. Jordan wants us to live in hierarchies today based on competence with the best and brightest like himself an elite on top with the bulk of societal power, wealth, authority, wealth and position granted to this elite, and the mass of humanity, the have-nots, are told how to live, and get what is left over in some mass poor class grouping at the base of the societal triangles. I have worked for 50 years in public and private domains as a worker within institutional hierarchies. Based on this vast real-world experience as a natural individuator and great soul in the making, I know first had how constraining it is for a maverizer to work or exist within assembled, established hierarchies at work, at church or socially. My hunch is that existing within and operating within existing hierarchical structures is not the best way to run society in the future, a world in which each citizen likely will be working to develop herself as a living angel. I instinctively have long rebelled against such existing. I feel to my toes that working, praying, soldiering, learning or socializing in hierarchies sickens, corrupts and makes lethargic, wicked, stupid, selfish, cowardly, herd-creatured lazy and powerless all in that hierarchy, regardless of rank. The future requires at least four changes: First, to eliminate, flatten out, democratize, minimize and make as few levels of occupancy for people to live at along the rungs of the ladder of the hierarchy as possible. Second, liberation is the future for humanity if it is to strive, thrive, evolve, survive and be happy. An anarchist society of individuating supercitizens is one in which hierarchical living is minimized. A society of lawful anarchists is one with healthy power relationships among the citizens and workers. A society with rigid hierarchical institutions for every aspect of society is one with tainted, destructive power relationships, and all are enslaved. Third, hierarchical existence prevents people from gravitating to individual-living, the social arrangement most conducive to people dedicating themselves to life-long maverizing. Anarchists individuators require individual-living as their primary mode of existing, with group-living coming in secondary. Fourth, hierarchical existing keeps people from individuating, as crowd pressure in all hierarchies that the individual belong to exert overwhelming pressure on her to keep her back, down, mediocre, equal and listless. A society of shrewdly, prudently deinstitutionalized hierarchies is the society in which living and growing up in a community of lawful anarchists under a free market constitutional republic dominated by and run by supercitizens. Returning to current hierarchies, work-related and otherwise, the tyranny, corruption, incompetence, vast waste of talent, the lack of shared decision-making powers throughout all levels of the institution, makes for a top-down model preferred by Peterson, essentially elitist and authoritarian though that is not his intention--I hope. We need to flatten out the hierarchy with not too many levels of performance and position within an existing institution. A society will not flourish unless things and each institution and each hierarchy is more lawfully anarchist, populated by great souls. These mighty individualists will cooperate give orders and take orders the CEO but the institutional will be run from the bottom up, not the top-down which is what will happen if Peterson's view of hierarchies is not revised. He does not intend for his proposed competent hierarchies to deteriorate into tyrannical, dying institutions, run on the old Soviet style command and control czarist model, but that inevitably will be the end result. Eric Hoffer warns repeatedly that totalitarianism is the social set of structures run by intellectuals (Peterson's peers and fellow professors): these cruel, terrible elites are vicious tyrannical, favor severely institutionalized working and living, they are incompetent, inefficient, and heaps truckloads of suffering upon its residents within each structure. I also sense that Peterson, though very much an individualist, is more popular and group-oriented than I am. He seems revered by people as a guru and that social popularity social clout and adulation could color his scientific appreciation of the value of hierarchies and the need for intellectuals like himself to serve as philosopher kings at the pinnacle of the hierarchies to run things for people. To provide Peterson with a general appreciation of Hoffer's optimism about the little people running everything without much in the way of elite bosses, coupled with my additional input from Mavellonialism, that each little person as individuating anarchist supercitizen makes all average and elitist (superior performer)—simultaneously at the same time within each citizen—and that this creative, paradoxical existential positioning creates a citizenry so powerful and self-regulating, that this new state of affairs largely eliminates the need for hierarchical supervisions of the masses by an elite group of philosopher kings like Peterson gone bad-(and let the CEO or President be an average person—that would be Hoffer’s suggestion. I am going to quote three paragraphs from The Syndicated News Articles (Edited collection of Eric Hoffer's newspaper columns, brought together by Christopher Klim in 2010.); these paragraphs do not directly refute Jordan Peterson, but they provide a sense of Hoffer's warning against elites running things, and the need for the little people to run things, and that they are able to do it well, with proper training and the right values: Reflections On America, April 19, 1970: "People who lust for power are not likely to be happy in America. Here neither money or education equip a man for the attainment of power. The opportunities in America are for learning, experience, money, achievement, comfort freedom, but not for power. One of the chief problems a modern society has to face is how to provide an outlet for the intellectual's restless energies yet deny him power. How to make him a paper tiger. The intellectual will feel at home where an exclusive elite is in charge of affairs, and it matters not whether it be an elite of aristocrats, soldiers, merchants or intellectuals. He would prefer an elite that is culturally literate but will put up with one that is not. What he cannot endure is a society dominated by common people. There is nothing he loathes more than government of and by the people." From the second paragraph of this quote is can be detected that Hoffer fears and dreads how dangerous and destructive intellectuals in power are to a decent, free, prosperous, happy, capitalist society like America. Hoffer has detected THE problem of the modern world: intellectuals in power cause war, civil destruction, and install collectivist economies ruled by intellectuals favoring totalitarian rule over and control of the masses. That is hell on earth, to be avoided at all costs. Hoffer offers a solution: keep intellectuals out of power. But, he does not provide an answer as how this is to be done. This is where I come in: by setting up a society of individuating anarchist superitizens, the problems created by excessive institutionalization of society, tyranny from the top down by power-mad intellectuals, and the historical dilemma of power, wealth and authority ending up in the hands of a few, to the detriment of the many, is solved. Under my solution, power is kept decentralized and distributed among the powerful, competent, power-wielding confident supercitizens that are willful yet very virtuous and principled, so they will not have a political structure that allows them to centralize power and nor do they crave to centralize power to themselves and nor will they tolerate anyone else grabbing their share of the power. Liberty (The state of existing in which the individual wields his share of societal power as is his natural right without willing or being allowed to amass and abuse power belonging to each and any neighbor.) is the individual situation, whether regarded as a worker, socializer, or political participant, under which every citizen is roughly equal in power, wealth, talent and liberty as an accomplished individuator. All are common people, but talent development and talent dispersal are so evenly shared and universal enjoyed, that each citizen is common and elite or aristocratic in performance and talent expression, that there is no way for any intellectual to be so superior that he is able to grab power and wealth to himself to abuse others, having snatched all the authority, power and money to himself. This is how I propose to answer Hoffer’s recommendation hat we keep the intellectual a paper tiger. If we as workers or in some other hierarchy (be it social, etc.), let us wield maximum power possible to run our own affairs for the sake of the employer or the social mission but in our own way and by our own creative decisions, that the scope, size, centralized power and influence of work hierarchies and social hierarchies are minimized.