Hierarchy absorbs violence. Equality releases rivalry. Energy delays the reckoning; information accelerates…
Hierarchy absorbs violence.
Equality releases rivalry.
Energy delays the reckoning; information accelerates it.
Unpacking this key to understanding civilisations…
/1 https://t.co/0ERRxaBh2v
Hierarchy seems an evil when our belief is that groups of people somehow spontaneously self-generate social order.
If you believe that, any sort of hierarchy seems like a minority suppressing the majority.
/2
In reality humans are social animals, and never spontaneously cooperate. They fight for status, because status is identity, for social animals.
Meaning the natural, default state is hierarchy. Try to ‘flatten’ hierarchy and humans will restore it in any number of ways.
/3
That flattening, the pursuit of equality, releases uncontrolled mimetic rivalry. People compete for status, in social groups or teams, against other teams.
Each team is hierarchically organised around status leadership of some kind. The true rivalry is between these ‘elite’…
What we’ve come to call ‘democracy’ is really the injection of fossil fuel energy into hierarchical forms. Energy abundance allows:
•welfare buffering
•bureaucratic mediation
•delay of rivalry consequences
•tolerance of inefficiency
•pluralism without starvation.
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Information speed then destabilises faster than energy can compensate, by:
•destroying symbolic distance
•collapsing status hierarchies
•accelerating imitation
•removing cooling-off time, and
•turning pluralism into rivalry.
/6
The recent shift to more hierarchical forms of governance only appears a shift to ‘authoritarianism’ within the incredibly historically brief, fossil fuel-generated ‘democratic’ form.
In reality it’s societies returning to their historic equilibrium, accelerated by information…
In this way, bizarrely, Trumpism is ‘fixing’ America. It’s a perfectly natural response to historically anomalous social forms, enabled by the use of fossil fuel energy.
Information society is re-balancing energy society, by restoring hierarchy and distance, to suppress mimetic…