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Good evening. This is
Radio Free Beszel.

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I am Alphonse. Tonight:
hierarchy versus

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centralization. In the
first year of the

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French Revolution, one
of the revolutionaries

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wrote secretly to the king,
and told him that

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the revolution had strengthened
the monarchy

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more than years of absolutism
could. He explained

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that by wiping away the
aristocracy and many

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of the feudal structures
and local governments

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and assemblies, that it
had centralized power.

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He said, and I quote,
"Equality

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facilitates the exercise
of power."

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It is often said that hierarchy
is centralization,

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as though the two were the
same. But often in fact

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they are not. Often
these two things

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tend to be opposites
from one another.

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Consider a firm before
the era of cheap

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telecommunications. You're
a company operating

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across the United States.
with a headquarters,

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say, in New York City, and
you have operations

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in states around the country.
Well, you're

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going to have a hierarchy.
You're going to

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have regional heads in places
like Ohio perhaps

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or California. And those
heads have the ability

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to make decisions on their
own because they can't

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always refer back to
headquarters. And when you

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give them instructions
they have to interpret

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them on the ground according
to local conditions.

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But consider afterwards,
when that hierarchy

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is removed as many management
positions were

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removed in the 1980s
and the 1990s, and

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instead of having layers
of management

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instructions came directly
from headquarters,

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instructing the workers
what to do.

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In this case you have
uniformity. There's the

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same thing done across
the country. Commands

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are direct. There's no
possibility of local

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mediation or interpretation.
Even if you're

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a worker and you want to
change something, whom

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do you talk to? Your local
manager doesn't exist,

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and is the head of the company
going to listen

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to you? Consider the situation
of Amazon today

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where operations are uniform
and centralized to

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the point where workers
are actually monitored

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and even fired by artificial
intelligences.

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Hierarchy, in other words,
introduces the

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possibility that the layers
of the hierarchy will

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interpret and change the
commands from the top.

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I think the mistake
we make is because

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when we imagine eliminating
hierarchy

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we imagine eliminating control
altogether. But if

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you have an organization
that is pursuing goals,

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that needs coordination among
the people working

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in it. That coordination
has to be organized

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somehow. Hierarchy is one
way. Central control

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is another - and it's not
necessarily better,

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but then it's not necessarily
worse either.

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I'm not really making a
moral argument here.

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I mean, consider the Civil
Rights movement in

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the United States where
you had local police

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chiefs and local governors
in the south who were

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racist. And the Civil Rights
movement therefore

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appealed to the center.
They appealed to

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the federal government
to step in and ensure

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the constitutional rights
of black people. And

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this was hardly a new
phenomenon. For centuries

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peasants appealed to the
king over the heads

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of the nobility who were
oppressing them.

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But the real point
here is that you

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can't really eliminate
structure.

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If you remove it in one form,
it tends to pop up in another.

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There's a famous paper
from the early 1970s

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by a feminist who went
by the name of Joreen,

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titled "The Tyranny of
Structurelessness."

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I highly recommend looking
it up and reading

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it on the Internet. She
had experience with

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feminist activist organizations
in the 60s and

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the early 1970s. And what
she said is that most of

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these organizations attempted
to be egalitarian.

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Instead of having a leadership
hierarchy,

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they allowed everybody
to participate

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as equals - at least in
principle. That was the

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formal structure, but informally
what happened

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was that leadership arose
anyway. There were

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individuals with more
influence, groups and

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cliques within the organizations
that ended up

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leading them the way they
wanted them to go.

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But now the hierarchy
the structure

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was informal instead
of formal,

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and this meant the other
people, if they

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weren't happy with what
was happening,

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they couldn't necessarily
see how it was

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happening. There was
a smoke screen - the

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myth that there was equality,
that there

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was no structure. And
even if they could

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see what was happening,
there was no mechanism

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for pointing to it and trying
to make changes.

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She compared, in fact,
the lack of hierarchy

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in activist organizations
to the idea of

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laissez-faire economics
- the idea that the

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market if left to itself
will produce equal or

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at least fair results. But
that's not true. There

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have been experiments since
then with markets,

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models in fact, which simulated
a market, in

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which all participants
were initially equal.

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They had the same resources,
and all could

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engage freely in trades.
And the idea of

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trades in a market is
that if two parties

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engage in a trade, each
must benefit somehow.

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And yet as this simulation
iterated, inequality

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increased until eventually
all nearly all the

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wealth was concentrated
in the hands of one

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simulated participant. This
is a fairly general

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pattern. Very often we have
structures that appear

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to be equal, and in fact
in some sense are equal,

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but that produce very unequal
outcomes. This is

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true of the Internet as well.
In the early years,

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in the 1990s in the early
2000s, it was believed

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that the Internet was incredibly
egalitarian,

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because after all anybody
could create a

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website and anybody could
link to other sites.

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But in fact the power
in the Internet

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has become concentrated
in the hands

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of companies like Google
and Facebook. And

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this isn't surprising.
I would even suggest

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that the easier it is to
make links, the easier

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the communication, the
more uniformity and

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equality there is,
the easier it is

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for a hierarchy of this
kind to emerge.

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The question then isn't so
much whether you have

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leaders or elites or people
with more influence,

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but who they are and
how you choose them.

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The same pattern that
Joreen described

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in the 1970s actually
did take place during

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the French Revolution
Augustin Cochin,

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writing in the early 20th
century, describes what

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happened with the philosophical
societies - talk

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shops that had existed
for decades before the

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revolution. Now like modern
activist groups these

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philosophical societies operated
on the principle

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that everybody was equal,
everybody participated

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everybody got to vote.
But that's not what

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happened in practice -
because, Cochin says,

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before each formal meeting
of the society there

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was an informal meeting
where the most active,

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most enthusiastic core got
together, discussed

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the issues and decided what
their position was,

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and then contacted other
people in the

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group and put pressure
on them to go along.

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And then when the group
met it appeared as if

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the consensus arose organically
that the people

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in the group already wanted
the outcome that

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the secret elite had decided
on ahead of time.

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And it would often arise
without their action.

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And when this same activity,
this same model of

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governance, was applied
at the level of the

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entire country of France,
the result was,

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Cochin says, the revolutionary
terror. Now as I

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say, I'm not making a moral
argument about when

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hierarchy is beneficial or
when it is not. What I

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am saying is that the choice
you have is whether

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you choose your structure
of your organization

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or your society, or whether
it's chosen for you

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in ways that you may not
understand and may not

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have influence in. It might
be good sometimes

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to choose less structure
and less hierarchy;

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it might be good other
times to choose more.

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But the idea that we
can just avoid the

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choice altogether, that
we can just leave

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it up to what happens
spontaneously, will

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often produce outcomes
that we don't like.

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This is Alphonse for Radio
Free Beszel, www.beszel.ca.

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Good night.