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| Pinnacle Rock Falls about 2 hours drive east of Kincardine |
This is the second of several posts that I'd have preferred to publish all at once, were it not for the extreme length of such a piece. I would suggest that you go back and read the first one, if you have not already done so. To briefly and inadequately summarize, I'll just say that overpopulation and overconsumption (and their consequences) are, in my opinion, the most serious problems we face. Overpopulation is going to take decades to solve, while overconsumption could be addressed quite quickly if certain obstacles could be gotten out of the way. By reducing our level of consumption, we could reduce our impact on the planet and give ourselves time to reduce our population.
The blame for overconsumption can be laid squarely at the feet of capitalism, with its insatiable hunger to accumulate wealth, its inescapable need for endless growth, its inability to tackle any problem that can't be solved by making a profit and its endless blaring marketing machine which convinces us that we must consume, consume, consume. It is important to note that the majority of that consumption is done by a minority of people, the top ten to twenty percent of the richest people in the world. Sadly, I am part of that group and I suspect that many of my readers are as well, even though we wouldn't call ourselves rich.
In a previous post where I looked at the problems with industrialization, I had also promised to have a more detailed look at our financial systems and our governments.
In this new series I am finally doing that, and last time we looked at our financial system and saw that money is a tool that facilitates the accumulation of wealth by the rich, and a mechanism by which they control the rest of us. It does this by making it possible to keep score in the complex game that is our economy. Unfortunately, our financial system creates money as debt, which must be paid back with interest. In order to do that, the economy must continually grow, or it will collapse. At the same time, the inevitable consequence of continued growth on a finite planet is also collapse.
I then asked if we could do without keeping score—without money—and concluded that we could indeed, and to the benefit of most everyone. Especially since the collapse we are facing will hurt people of all socio-economic classes.
Today I'll take a similar look at our governments (and most of the rest of our organizations), identify the problems with them and ask if we could do without them.
These days our families, communities, businesses and so on all the way up to our countries and the UN are organized as hierarchies, and most have been since they were first created. Like money, this sort of organization is a tool designed for the benefit of certain people (those at the top), to be used by them to secure their power, wealth and privileges, and to keep the rest of us in the position where we "belong"—lower down in the hierarchy. And in the process, to stop us from ever realizing that there is any viable alternative.
Inherent Failings of Hierarchies
We are told that a global civilization like ours is so big and complex that it simply couldn't function without a hierarchical organization. I would say just the opposite—that our civilization is so big and complex only because it has to support hierarchies. If we didn't have to maintain hierarchies for the benefit of those at the top of them, we could adequately take care of ourselves with much simpler organizations, in smaller groups, at less expense—in other words, with less consumption.
I usually refer to this phenomenon as the "diseconomies" of scale—the opposite of economies of scale. Economies of scale do exist, of course, but beyond a certain point the organizational costs swamp out the advantages of size. And that point is surprisingly small.
In a small group, say 200 people or less, no formal organization at all is required. With little effort, everybody gets to know each other, and to know what's going on. Decisions can be made by direct democracy, where the whole group gets together, talks things over and a consensus is reached. I'll be talking about that at length later in this series, but the thing to realize here is that even in small organizations, if there is a hierarchy, it introduces problems.
In a hierarchy, even one that is ideally organized and where everyone involved is a willing participant and eager to do their part, information must flow upward from where the actual work is going on to the appropriate decision making level, and decisions must flow down to where they will be actually implemented. This involves a lot of non-productive effort done by people who must be supported by those who are productive.
Of course, real hierarchies are far from ideal. Things are done in unnecessarily complex ways just to support the hierarchy and in many cases to make it look more impressive. The people at the top are inevitably isolated from the rest of the organization and rarely have the information they need to make good decisions. I was a supervisor and then a manager, after years of being a worker, and I was shocked by how quickly I lost touch with things at the workface. And I was trying very hard not to be influenced by the bullshit flowing down from higher in the hierarchy. Often, low level managers wallow in that stuff enthusiastically.
Many managers are not particularly capable of making good decisions. And even those that are frequently focus on their own benefit, with little concern for anything else.
But beyond all this, there are other problems that result from how hierarchies have to be established and maintained. In real hierarchies most of the people involved are not there willingly and are not particularly eager to do their part. They must be forced to do so, which is another cost of running a hierarchy. To be absolutely clear, inequality is an inherent feature of hierarchies, and can only be maintained by exploiting and oppressing those in its lower classes and blaming that situation on those same oppressed people. Let's have a closer look at how this works.
There are three basic mechanisms for establishing and maintaining a hierarchy—physical coercion, bureaucracy and charisma. Any one of these mechanisms can be used to build some sort of hierarchy, any two can make a pretty solid hierarchy, but when all three function together you get the situation we have today—that of being firmly stuck with our existing hierarchies.
One assumes that physical coercion started with a leader simply forcing his will on his followers. The next step would be surrounding himself with some bullies to who he could delegate that job. One suspects that this was not too effective for the rulers as their control wouldn't extend much beyond their own physical reach. Even with henchmen, this improved only a little, since those guys had their own interests and spent much of their time seeing to them. And there were always a few who, when the opportunity arose, were willing to step into their leader's place. Killing him, if necessary, to get rid of him.
Actually, this sort of organization wasn't too onerous for those being ruled. You had a number of options—quiet disobedience or just leaving, possibly to set up your own more agreeable organization in another location.
But since then, the techniques of physical coercion have been considerably refined. Today, states claim a monopoly on violence, which they implement through police forces and the military. If this is managed with a light enough touch, the populace may well be willing to go along quietly. Or, in totalitarian states, there is little alternative and people suffer under a much heavier touch.
Bureaucracy amounts to a state monopoly on information. Everyone in a hierarchy needs information and controlling it is an effective way of keeping people in line. Much of how money and debt are used as a mechanism of control falls under this category.
Charisma is a way of influencing people without using force or bureaucracy. It is easy enough to imagine how charismatic leaders may have taken over small groups. But even in our supposed democratic countries, what is an election but a popularity contest, whereby the most charismatic leaders are chosen. Often with little thought as to their effectiveness at governing. And while using charisma to influence people may seem like a pretty benign way to run a hierarchy, it is still a form of coercion. And just as onerous as any other form, especially if you are not blinded by your leaders' charm, which can happen if things don't go well under their rule.
Beyond the three basics, religion has long been a way of getting people to willingly accept their placed at the bottom of hierarchies. And, in our modern world of mass media, propaganda has become an extremely effective way of controlling the population. In both cases, as Voltaire noted, if you can get people to believe in absurdities they will be willing to commit atrocities.
Because of all this, the bottom of a hierarchy (and that's where most people live), is not a very pleasant place. And in our modern hierarchies, for many people, there is simply nowhere else to go. You can't even head for the hills, as they are already occupied by people also living in hierarchies.
Another problem with hierarchies is that they love to grow. Even taking into account what I've said about diseconomies of scale, the people at the top still benefit by having more people below them, more people to tax. Living, as we do, on a finite planet this leads to trouble. First, hierarchical countries, with their drive to expand, do not make good neighbours, and this leads to conflict. War is expensive and destructive and for the people actually doing the fighting, pretty horrific. Second, the inevitable has finally happened and we as a species have grown to the point where we are running out of room, depleting non-renewable resources and destroying the bio-sphere on which we rely for the necessities of life.
Co-optation of Our Hierarchies by Capitalism
If all this wasn't bad enough (and it certainly is), most hierarchies on the planet today have been co-opted by capitalists and are devoted to the goals of capitalism—the accumulation of ever more wealth into the hands of the capitalists. Which is bringing us up against the limits of life on this finite planet even quicker and harder than otherwise would have happened.
Capitalism goes hand in hand with industrialization and really came into its own during the last couple of centuries when heat engines, driven by burning fossil fuels, made possible production at much higher levels than when most everything had to be done using human or animal muscle power. This lead to a time of unprecedented material abundance in what we now call "the developed nations."
There was a time, not too long ago, when this looked like the greatest thing that had ever happened, but burning all that coal, oil and natural gas have had some negative consequences. Beyond climate change and resource depletion, the primary consequences result from the fact that fossil fuels are non-renewable resources. We used the "lowest hanging fruit" first. By the early 1970s the energy cost of accessing what was left had increased to where it started to cause problems for our economies. Capitalism soon found itself in the early stages of collapse. Since then things have grown continually worse—the middle class has continually decreased in size and economic inequality between the bottom and top of our hierarchies has increased to an unprecedented degree.
Still, capitalism has managed to maintain its hold on our governments, and I think that deserves a closer look. You might assume that your government is at the top of the hierarchy you live in. That has been true at many times in the past—with aristocracies, for instance. But today the situation is more complex.
Representative democracies are a prime example. They are a particularly clever tool for giving the people the illusion that their government is for the people, by the people and of the people, when in reality it serves mainly the plutarchs—wealthy capitalists who sit quietly above the supposedly representative government, exercising a great deal of influence on its policies, solely for their own benefit.
Pretty much everyone is supposed to have a vote in representative democracies, so how can this be? Easily—election campaigns are huge popularity contests. The way the mass media work today this makes them expensive endeavours and while politicians do accept donations from the working class, most of their financial support comes from the wealthy. Those donations come with strings attached, and politicians are expected to rule in such a way as to benefit the wealthy people who support them.
Politicians do make election promises to attract support from the majority of voters, who are not rich. Once they get elected, the trick is to spend as little money and effort as possible on keeping those promises, keeping the voters somewhat happy while changing not the systems that support the plutarchs. Who, of course, provided the majority of financial support for their campaigns, and hopefully will continue to do so in the future.
Another mechanism used by capitalists to increase their control of our societies has been to organize their businesses as corporations, and then gain those corporations rights similar to, and in some cases exceeding, those of people. This makes it harder for governments to regulate their activities.
Over the last few decades "neoliberalism" has become the standard ideology of the great majority of governments the world over, be they democratic or totalitarian. The Wikipedia article on Neoliberalism says it is generally associated with policies of economic liberalization, including privatization, deregulation, globalization, free trade, austerity and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society. Through these mechanisms our governments have been even more thoroughly co-opted by capitalism, giving businesses much more freedom to do as they will.
Neoliberalism has been sold to the people by convincing us that whatever is good for business is good for us as well.
There was a time, in the 1800s and early 1900s, when there was a very clear distinction between the working class and the upper classes. Working people knew quite well where their interests lay. But in the mid-twentieth century when the economy was growing very fast, some of the vast wealth that was being accumulated was allowed to trickle down to the working class. The result was that many people in the working classes came to see their interests as lying with the capitalists. They came to see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires", expecting to strike it rich "any day now". And so they began to vote with the rich, even though that is clearly not in their own best interest. And thus neo-liberalism was able to triumph. This continues even until today in some countries.
But despite the neo-liberal propaganda that we all benefit, economic inequality has continued to grow, and more and more people are falling out the middle class, and out of the bottom of the economy altogether, first to become jobless and eventually to become homeless and often suicidal.
Social Injustice and Structural Violence
The inequality that is inherent to hierarchies results in social injustice and structural violence.
Structural violence refers to "the avoidable limitations that society places on groups of people that constrain them from meeting their basic needs and achieving the quality of life that would otherwise be possible. These limitations, which can be political, economic, religious, cultural, or legal in nature, usually originate in institutions that exercise power over particular subjects. It is therefore an illustration of a power system wherein social structures or institutions cause harm to people in a way that results in 'maldevelopment and other deprivations'."
There always seem to be groups of people in any hierarchial society who aren't really welcome and who are forcefully kept at or near the bottom level. These include the poor (working, jobless and homeless), women, BIPOC* and LGBTQ* people, those with physical and mental challenges, the aged, and probably others who I am forgetting. And of course, that's just what the rest of us are supposed to do—forget about these people and leave them to suffer.
You can recognize structural violence when you see people at a higher level in a hierarchy complaining about just not being able to understand what those below them are complaining about, while the people at the lower level have a keen understanding of those above them. This occurs because those who are above have power over those below, and can simply tell them what to do without having to know anything much about them. Those at the lower level have no choice but to serve those above and, in order to do so successfully, have to understand the people above them very well.
One clear example of this is when you see men saying that there is just no understanding women or keeping them happy. At the same time it is clear that our wives, mothers and daughters do a great job of keeping us happy. They put a lot of effort into understanding us in order to be able to do so, largely because they have no choice in the matter, while we, sitting at the top of our little family patriarchies, can easily get away with just not making the effort. Of course, this situation has improved quite a bit over the last century or so, but there is still a long way to go.
Summing Up
This has been a whirlwind tour of the issues with hierarchies, but I think I've hit on the high points:
- There is a great deal of waste involved in running a hierarchy and this makes our overconsumption problem even worse, while only benefiting those at the top.
- Our modern hierarchies are enabling capitalism, which is the main source of our overconsumption problems.
- Economic inequality and social injustice are inherent to hierarchies and prevent the realization of billions of peoples' potential, which is much needed if we are to successful face the challenges ahead of us.
Many people in the "collapse sphere" feel that we should not worry about "minor" social injustices, and instead focus on preparing for and adapting to the economic, resource, and environmental problems that are already far along the way to causing the collapse of our society. I disagree. Both social injustice and collapse result from the same issues inherent in our hierarchies and in capitalism. Any adaptation that doesn't address them both is sure to fail. Anyone who tells you different is playing "divide and conquer" games, and whether they want to admit it or not, what they really want is to keep the existing system going as long as possible—business as usual and damn the consequences.
So, it's clear to me that hierarchies, especially when combined with capitalism, are not a good thing. Would it be possible to do without them? I think so, and in my next post I'll go into the details of how that might work.
For those who aren't up on the jargon I've been using: *BIPOC = Black, Indigeous and People of Colour *LGBTQ = Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual and Queer
During the last few months I've been reading a number of very interesting books, which bear upon what we are discussing. Here is a list of those books, along with a few that I've read previously, but that also have been a help.
Debt, The First 5000 Years, by David Graeber
Hierarchy in the Forest: the evolution of egalitarian behavior, by Christopher Boehm
The Art of Not Being Governed, by James C. Scott
Against the Grain, a deep history of the earliest states, by James C. Scott
Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid, by Andrej Grubacic
The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow
Links to the rest of this series of posts:
Collapse, you say? / Time for Change
- Collapse You Say? Part 1, Introduction, Tuesday, 30 June 2020
- Collapse, you say? Part 2: Inputs and Outputs, Wednesday, 30 September 2020
- Collapse, you say? Part 3: Inputs and Outputs continued, October 7, 2020 /li>
- Collapse, you say? Part 4: growth, overshoot and dieoff, January 2, 2021
- Collapse, you say? Part 5: Over Population, January 8, 2021
- Collapse, you say? Part 6: Over Population and Overconsumption, Februrary 21, 2021
- Collapse, you say? Part 7: Needs and Wants, Human Nature, Politics, March 8, 2021
- Collapse, you say? Part 8: Factors which made industrialization possible, May 13 , 2021
- Collapse, you say? Part 9: Unintended Consequences of Industrialization, May 20 , 2021
- Collapse You Say? Part 10/Time for Change, Part 1: Money, January 5, 2022
- Time for Change, Part 2: Hierarchies, Februray 16, 2022
- Time for Change, Part 3: Without Hierarchies? April 23, 2022
- Time for Change, Part 4: Conclusions June 22, 2022
