Excellent point. Some of us are referring to hierarchy as a human constant, which implies that given three people, they never individually cooperate, but rather, one orders, one works, the other enforces. Much less efficient.
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Also, as per natural hierarchies, humans have artificially created one in nature itself with livestock, dogs, cats, parakeets, etc. If the fences and shepherds were gone tomorrow, it would cease to be a human hierarchy. It is entirely voidable.
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Sorry…what I meant to say…and if a mod would delete my last post, I’d appreciate it…
Let’s see…I usually hang out with 3 (sometimes 4) friends…friends A, B, C, and D. Friend A usually decides what we’re doing, but if I protest, he’ll usually change his mind. Friends B, C, and D don’t usually argue with him. They’ll come to me with their problems with his plan, and let me point them out to friend A. When we debate politics (which we do pretty often), the group listens to me, Friend A and Friend B. Friend C sometimes has some good points, and everyone ignores Friend D. So, it looks like we have a dominance hierarchy…it goes A, me, B, C, and D, and you’re right…we don’t produce much technology, science, or art (Friend A sings karaoke…badly, and I dabble in poetry) We don’t wallow in self pity, though…we usually have a good time.
I give up…just pretend my last post isn’t bolded.
There are a number of advantages that a group provides that allow it to out perform an individual in almost all tasks that are relevant to the propagation of a species, hence the tendency for most animals to develop sociological groupings. The only mammalian exceptions I can think of are Bears and Orang-utan
The more diverse the members of the group the greater the advantage becomes as each member can specialise and thus hone their skills. This also the makes the co-ordination and control of the group more complex, leading to the need for an individual to be in control and thus keep all of the efforts of the group focused in one direction.
Finally if an animal develops sentience (or some power creates them that way in the first place), they can start planning for the future and protect themselves from the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’. This now involves the group making sacrifices in the present in order to improve the overall position of the group in the future. Decisions here and when these sacrifices are profitable has to be made from the perspective of the group rather than the individual, however in order to be effective it needs the centralised control of individuals, who naturally attempts to avoid any sacrifice themselves.
This combined with a belief that 'All individuals are created equal…’ Leads to a very complicated balancing act.
Human society has developed to try and optimise this balance, we are still evolving our social structures and have yet to achieve anything approaching a perfect balance, but most people would agree that we are generally trending in the right direction.
So are hierarchies inevitable.
No, Orang-utans seem to manage without them. There are however a number of advantages that they bring in terms of specialisation and planning.
There is however a seemingly unsolvable paradox between: All individuals being equal, the self serving nature of the individual, the common good being served by sacrifices made by individuals, and individuals being required to make these decisions on behalf of the group.
Finally some situations require hierarchies to be formed, while others would be better treated by a group of individuals. We have yet to develop a mechanism for identifying when to use social structures and when not to, yet alone a way to insure that appropriate form is taken at the appropriate time.
hi•er•ar•chy ( , -), n., pl. -chies.
**1. any system of persons or things ranked one above another. **
2. government by ecclesiastical rulers.
3. the power or dominion of a hierarch.
4. an organized body of ecclesiastical officials in successive ranks or orders: the Roman Catholic hierarchy.
5. one of the three divisions of the angels, each made up of three orders, conceived as constituting a graded body.
6. angels collectively.
Now I think we can dispense with 2 thru 6 as we aren’t particularly talking about anything based on the church or the christian/catholic idea of heaven.
Therefore this discussion is about definition one in regards to humans.
Brian, while the example you give is indeed a heirarchy
isn’t it also a heirarchy if it’s phrased “given three people, they cooperate, one works and manages the effort, directing the efforts of the other two, the other two work and defer to the manager’s direction so that all three work with the greatest efficiency”
When more than one person work at accomplishing a given task, there is always one providing the majority of the direction, and the others providing less.
Bolding problems aside, Captain Amazing’s second post ilustrates this in a small group dynamic.
aynrandlover, from reading this part of your post:
whether it is a firm or permant heirarchy, I believe you still described a heirarchy with:
If two of you want the same position, doesn’t one of you defer to the other?
Your post does add another good term, which may be something i have been confusing symantically, for me, structure and heirarchy are synonymous. If there is a structure, there is a heirarchy, it may be permanent or fluid, it may be an absolute dominance/subjigation or simply a “you do this better, you lead”.
amarinth definitely has one of the strongest points, in so far as cooperative existance is certainly plausible in small groups, and someone may yet be able to provide a small group example that I can agree is not a hierarchy, but keep increasing the size of the group, and I believe you will always have to end up with a hierarchy in order for there to be structure. Anarchy’s always a possibility, but then you really have difficulty producing technology, science, or art.
Uhh…right. And your point?
ARL
I usualy find myself enjoying your posts and coming down on similiar sides of an issue with you. I can only guess that we are working off two different definitons of hierarchy.
Either that or one of us is tripping on acid right now:)
BB
::banging my head against a brick wall::
This is GD. When you make an assertation of fact, you need ot be able to back it up. If we were talking about whether or not a particular movie was entertaining, then we have a subjective issue and cites are largely irrelevant. You may find that you belong in MPSIMS or IMHO rather than GD.
However, when you make a statement of fact, like you have in this thread, then we have an OBJECTIVE issue before us.
Specifically, whether or not:
Hierarchies produce little or no technology, science, or art, and spend the extra time wallowing in self-pity.
Then asking for the basis for this statement is reasonable.
While you are off looking around for your bogus foriegn language cite page, would you mind answering any of the other questions I asked?
The “bury-my-head-in-sand-and-pretend-nobody-said-anything-approach” gets old real quick around here.
ps. Did you steal ARL’s password?
Sure, one defers to another, but there is no ranking involved. No one had more power than another in any sense.
No, “you do this better, you lead” is specialization. “You do this better, you ARE better, you lead” is a hierarchy. As well, we can create an artificial hierarchy by limiting the context of ability to one thing… that is, if we limit the context to our (my friends’ and I) ability to drink beer. If the context implies a valuation on the individual, then we’ve created a hierarchy; “I can drink more than you, so I should choose where we have dinner, and generally run the evening.”
Simply placing an order on something does not make it a heirarchy; only when we place value on that order through where something is in that order do we create a hierarchy.
Consider chess pieces. Is the queen better than a pawn because of
a) where she’s placed on the board during beginning gameplay
b) the method of movement available to the queen
c) she’s taller (I don’t know, I couldn’t think of anything else)?
Truly, there are times in a game where the queen is blocked and worthless, but we still value her higher than pawns because we value the method of movement available to the queen. In addition, this method of movement is the extent of the queen; we can attribute nothing else within gameplay to her, so the distinction between hierarchy and order is blurry.
Not so when we all sit down here to discuss things. There is clearly an order to the posts; beginning with the OP down to the most recent addition. Is the OP better than your post due to the order of the board? Hardly. The mere existence of order does not imply a difference in valuation. A difference in valuation does imply an order, though.
I will admit, though, after looking into a few other definitions, that many imply that order itself implies a hierarchy. Semantics indeed. My position is somewhat weakened by that 
Does this mean that slaves in America were just “lazy”? Or the Native Americans who were pushed off their land? Am I lazy for doing as my boss says at work? I don’t think use of that word, which tends to imply judgement, is appropriate here.
**
But that’s not true if we consider that we have an innate drive for some to be dominant due to biological pressures to be “on top” of the reproductive and food chain. What natural resource were natives divying up when they elected a chief? Your statement would mean that people of the same social class and economic background would never form a hierarchy among themselves because it’s not necessary.
**
No, it’s not necessary. And lots of times, humans work to eliminate hierarchy in every possible way. We also develop more or less equitable, agreeable hierarchies. Again, I don’t believe this negates the notion that creation of them is a biological drive in some ways.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by SexyWriter *
Your statement would mean that people of the same social class and economic background would never form a hierarchy among themselves because it’s not necessary.
[quote]
I didn’t say they would disappear, they would just take a new form. If people want power over you it doesn’t take a class structure to show it, classes just make it easier.
I don’t consider this to be a dominant trait. Perhaps I AM tripping, eh freedom? Haha.
I think that values are implied in hierarchies whereas order does not imply valuations.
ARL
I own a small contracting company.
When we are on a job, there is a distinct heirarchy at work.
First, the customer is on top.
Then comes me. Right or wrong, I make the calls.
Then comes the foreman. He defers to me (because he likes his job:)), and when I’m not around he is in charge.
Then comes the individual workers.
I make no value judgement about each human being’s life here, but as far as work goes, we have a ranked heirarchy.
aynrandlover
That’s obviously where our opinions on this differ then, which certainly makes agreeing on the OP question on hierarchy’s being inevitable rather difficult.
From the dictionary defintion
I think that equating “ranking one above another” with “you ARE better, you lead” is adding something to the definition that’s not there.
In any company I’ve worked in, I have a project lead, they have a manager, on up the line to the company president. this is pretty obviously a hierarchy. Does this imply that my project lead is “better” than I am, or that their manager is “better” than they are? Not in my book. It just means that their skills happen to lend themselves to managing people, and their respective abilitys within that field (along with seniority and experience of course).
-Doug
As I cleaned the moldy stuff out of my fridge, I was thinking about the OP.
The thing is, my original statement, which was used for a quote therein, was taken out of context. I originally did not suggest that hierarchy was inevitable.
My comment, taken out of context here, was that people who seek to play out certain roles (sexual in this case) perhaps do so because we have been seeking to fill those rolls for biological purposes since we crawled out of the primordial ooze.
Now that we are “civilized” (or some of us are, anyway) I do NOT believe it’s inevitable that we form a strictly tiered hierarchy. And of course, we don’t have the same pressures to continue to vie for reproductive dominance. Though, I do wonder about those affecting us in some ways with regard to this subject.
It’s true…discrimination comes about only when we assign a VALUE to a particular group’s assigned chore in the division of labor. This is NOT inevitable (I believe) and we certainly are intelligent enough creatures to keep it from happening.
In the book Genome Matt Ridley says that when we take sides in the “nature vs. nurture” debate, we’re missing the point. He suggests that instead we take a look at how we’ve used our innate abilities to affect our environment so that it suits our nature. I believe our social structure can be seen as something that fits into his argument well. Does that mean we inevitably carry on like something from “Lord of the Flies”? Of course not.
-L
I can think of lots of examples of hierarchies in nature and society but none without one therefore even if they do exist they are not common.
I think its an offshoot of specialisation to be honest and that has so many benefits to a group that hierarchies are bound to develop around that.
At work, the BOSS is called the boss because he has more power than the rest of the employees. This is more than just order, wouldn’t you agree? The customer has some contextual power over the business as well.
Isn’t that a hierarchy?
Cause if it’s not, then I’m in the wrong thread:)
Yes, the Boss does have more power within the company than the employees that report to them. This was not the point I was trying to make.
The point I was trying to make was that their having more power does not necessitate that the boss is better than the employees as a person.
-Doug
Freedom, yes, that’s what I’m saying a hierarchy is. An order based on value. This most commonly finds itself lent to power in human relationships.
dublos
It was a simplistic explanation. It does not make them a “better” person entirely, but within the context it surely makes them have more value.
everyone
Are we, then, saying that hierarchy is merely a term implying order, period? I’m not sure I agree with that usage. My thesaurus had nothing to say on the matter. Neither did Merriam Webster.
:shrug: Don’t know what to tell you.
Does a corrupt third-world El Presidente born to his station have value and provide order, or does he provide disvalue and disorder? (This could take us to a discussion on perceived order versus perceived chaos).
…
Anyway, we should remember the fact that hierarchy formed as a religious definition, an legal artifice. Egypt was a prime example, where the Pharaoh had only as much power as the priests and their traditions that appointed him–who has precedence here? Nature or history does not provide the answer even in this circumstance. I would say that humans instinctively avoid hierarchy, and relent to it only under pressure of immense dogma and tradition.
Note: Asking a waiter for a clean spoon is not hierarchy. If it is, which direction is it? Hierarchy implies a divine or mandated station, not an arbitrary one, and that’s how it is commonly used. No one modernly pretends to imagine that daily living is contigently based on top-down hierarchal control. Control hierarchy is never credited with economic success, but blamed for the lack of it. Hierarchy is old hat. Economic anti-archy and freedom were demonized by hierarchists, and if we raise a kid apart from traditions of hierarchy, they rarely instinctively embrace it given the chance because hierarchy is conveniently artificial, and increases itself in the vacuum of economic decline and mass ignorance, not the other way around.