I Am Obsessed

I am obsessed with and keep reworking my definition of how hierarchies operate among humans and how we should react to this organizational too utilized by all people over the thousands of years. Any reader of my blog site would realize from earlier renditions of my effort to define what hierarchies are and how they influence us is in reaction to Jordan Peterson's emphasis on hierarchies in human society. Let me start by my laying out Peterson's characterization of hierarchies as I understand it. Peterson defines hierarchies as a stratified social structure (The hierarchy can be people in Academia, in the military, in government, among plumbers, artists, experts and players of any sport with a few geniuses rising to the top based on superior competence, intelligence, conscientiousness, merit and hard work, and 95% of the rest of us, of lesser talent and ability, end at the bottom of each hierarchy, with less money, power, status, wealth and authority than the few at the top. Peterson says that is how it has to be, should be, and inevitably will be). He lambastes the Left for equating hierarchies that are hereditary or modern but corrupted by tyrants that have gotten to the top and stay there by brutal power plays: they are corrupt, their dominated hierarchy is corrupt and will collapse or be overthrown by the dispossessed and frustrated masses at the base of the hierarchies. He excoriates the Left for conflating tyrannical, corrupt hierarchies based on power with biologically instantiated hierarchies that have guided humans and creatures for 350 billion years. To equate modern Western hierarchies with corrupt, male, heterosexual, capitalist, Christian oppressors and exploiters of the dispossessed and oppressed masses and victims in a myriad of victimized identity groups at the base of each hierarchy is untrue, unfair, poor science and impossible to make sense of. Where hierarchies have been corrupted and become tyrannies based on power accumulation, not cooperation and competency, the solution is not Marxist revolution to overthrow the capitalist West, but to find ways to make the hierarchies competent, cooperative and based on merit, rather than to overthrow them. Jordan Peterson has a point here, but I would like to look at hierarchies a bit differently He is correct in postulating that the hierarchy is a biological, social living arrangement, millions and millions of years old. Ants, wolves, lions and humans all live in hierarchies. Because animals are guided by instinct, their hierarchies will tend to be based on competence, merit and justice, over all, versus non-functioning, dying, incompetent, corrupted, power-based hierarchies with the oppressor and exploiting oppressors on the top holding down and back the oppressed, huddled and exploited, terrorized, brutalized masses on the bottom. Since we are born depraved, our natural instinct to build hierarchies to live in and to run our social arrangements by will lead usually to hierarchies becoming corrupt, non-cooperative, with brutal competition based upon raw power grabs and struggles between warring interest groups. We see this dysfunctional war of all against all revealed in social hierarchies (rankings by social status and popularity from who is not the top and the most in versus those on the bottom of the heap and the most unpopular), in government, business, military, educational and religious institutions. We need the Great Chain of Being model with Fate at the top, with the Mother and Father against Satan and Lera next, and then the angels of light versus the angels of darkness, etc. all the way down to a proton or molecule. This hierarchies, spiritual, physical and biological, are inevitable natural and supernatural realities, but for humans, they must be set up the right way to we can be well and live well. I am for each individual living as an individuator anarchist and supercitizen, individual-living, in a bunch of countries around the globe that are constitutional democracies with a free enterprise economic system. In this way, each citizen is the one that rules society, and is to obey societies legal, ethical and social expectations for and from him. In whatever social, spiritual, natural, supernatural, governmental, business and corporate setting, or any other institution, that each person participate in, he has those above him and those below him, but his self-love and his wondrous rational intellect, his developed talents and his wondrous products of such talent expression are so empowering, that God and the angels above him will be his democratic bosses, and he will be a democratic boss towards those of less talent and rank below him. In this way naturally occurring hierarchies can remained based on competence, healthy power-wielding per citizen, on dignified respectful power arrangements in competing and cooperating that benefit all humans in ways that fulfill, satisfy and complete their needs and wants, without group-living nonindividuators falling into the non-meritorious hierarchy of elites and aristocrats of various ilk having all the power, education, adulation, say, wealth, authority and status at the top, while most are victimized, exploited and oppressed at the bottom of the heap. In this way, we do not fight our need to live in hierarchies, but also are able to keep the hierarchies healthy and wholesome, with wealth, power, status and talent-expression maximally dispersed among the common people, each one a super-achiever and just one of the people at the same time. Another way to keep the need for hierarchies positive and helpful is for each individuating supercitizen to develop her talents over a period of years, ratcheting herself up her personal hierarchy of competence and sure, able expression of her talents so she become better, smarter, more creative and loving over time as she self-realizes. This hierarchical development pleases God, and is good for her and society.