Some time ago I wrote a post about the Occupy movement’s insistence on maintaining a non-hierarchical, horizontal organization even if keeping that kind of organization might not always be in its best interest. I pointed out that for thousands of years humans naturally have been organizing ourselves into hierarchies for good reason: a hierarchical structure brings with it a number of distinct advantages that consensus driven organizations just do not possess.
This afternoon, just to have something to look at while I ate my lunch, I randomly opened Jared Diamond’s fantastic book Guns, Germs and Steel and came across something Diamond wrote about social organization that seems to travel along the same line as my earlier critique. I’m going to get to Diamond in a moment, but first I’d like to tell you about All Thane’s Day.
