Stability: order versus the hierarchy
Stability: order versus the hierarchy
Stability is not what your prefer it to be
In Agency I argued that freedom from/to is a dud concept. Medieval and bleh.
Ever since stratified societies invented the city or state order is a by-word for peace, where everything and everyone is in their good place, such that Order has become a synonym with Stability.
In many civilisations (city-ish-ness-es) Order is further assumed to reflect the native structure of society in urban centres (or sinks of economic activity). Stratification “orders” social differences into hierarchies.
This is a curious outcome as it is a throw-back.
To a time before the division of labour created in the long ages of the palaeolithic’s egalitarian re-set and overcoming of primate social hierarchies (like we see in baboons).
Not that the egalitarian Homo spp. were ever completely convinced, the variety and vagaries of survival preclude a complete re-haul. Parasites like narcissists and psychopaths being the most obvious examples, but it is a bit of spectrum.
Here I will focus on the conceit that order or structure equals stability, and that hierarchy is thus the best guarantee of stability.
I call it a conceit because often it is a lens that frames any and all relationships as a hierarchy, or at least, at a minimum, there is always a dominant and submissive role, and anything else is a variation of that foundation.
I call it a conceit because it is often seen as natural.
Using that lens, creates that framing. We use frames to fit everything into its place.
Hierarchists
Now hierarchies can thus maintain themselves as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy (a lived or embodied conceit). This stability can allow nurturing, but hierarchy does not nurture directly. In addition hierarchies will disrupt themselves, destroying stability, in order to maintain the hierarchy/ies (especially if narcissistic supply is better or more better made by disruption than by maintaining stability).
Hierarchists are not necessarily narcissists. Narcissists are parasites who will jump onto any passing human, regardless of the humans preferences.
Hierarchists love to promise stability via order. Order which can only be a hierarchy by definition, which is why some more insecure hierarchists regard claims that there are other types of order as existential threats.
Curiously, some share that bias even as they seek to overcome and replace the king with their own good selves, as holy symbol of god’s order and beloved of heaven.
Stability is a by-product of hierarchy. It is an outcome not the aim of hierarchy. If you believe that you are a mobik. If you are natively inclined to think that way as a intuitive bias, then reality will disappoint you every time you enter the marketplace. Hierarchists are not necessarily conservative, or traditionalist, thought he matter is much blurred by proponents of any or all of them.
As an outcome it is contingent on hierarchists not seeking, necessarily, to capture it for themselves, they can sacrifice themselves in its name. Hierarchists can and do have empathy. Note, this is not to be confused with ambition. Healthy ambition takes place in the world, that we world together, and not to take-over and become the world.
Those who do not have empathy, narcissists and psychopaths, will always try to seek the top position their pathology entitles them to, often using the name of stability order and hierarchy.
Their names, these conceits, these outcomes, are used to placate or corral the urge to world differently by peeps who have other inclinations or biases. I.E. are not hierarchist by nature.
But mind, they will do so as much as revolutionaries will cry freedom or justice or even equality, to install themselves at the top.
In any of these cases the urge to world/world-build/moralise/religion-along/ will be met, at least part way, by stability produced by any outcomes of the urge to world-build or moralise, regardless if it is a hierarchy or otherwise.
Stability helps us to nurtured, which allows us to survive and facilitate our reproduction, our future, our hope. A world looking forward into the unknown.
Stability is its own reward, but our preferences like to take the credit for it all, regardless of facts on the ground at the time. Regardless of the contingent reality.
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Hierarchists see the structure (in this case a hierarchy) as a cure-all for the problem of the future. Hierarchy solves the problem of tomorrow, by making it the same as to day, as the day I know and love should I rule the world in my image (hierachically).
This goes for all structures and their boosters.
Seeing any structure in alignment with one’s preferences is an error. But not all the time.
There’s the rub. Sometimes it works. Sometimes they are work. Sometimes they are all true. Sometimes they are all wrong.
This error is not restricted to hierarchists but to all of us. Hierarchists are just the most ancient pre-Homo example, or throw-back, if recently revitalised by stratified societies begining in the neolithic.
Hierarchies are also where narcissists and psychopaths often feel most at home, and least policed (they get to do the boundary rider/error-hunting/ obsequious work until they get on top when they can punch down on everyone).
Hierarchists are a problem not because their preferences are wrong, per se, but because the preferences allow parasites like narcissists and psychopaths to actively thrive.
The structure doe snot cause this. The structure as an outcome is an opportunity, just the way your intestines and its ecosystem of bacteria are an opportunity for tapeworm.
Others
It is always easier to notice the error (incompleteness) of biases other than one’s own. That log in our own eye thang.
However we cannot learn this lesson about ourselves by looking at others first, that’s how mirror-neurons work, at least, if you have empathy. We see errors or sins in others, even as we do not see the sins in ours, because in great measure the log in the eye is the eye itself.
In a sense, in order to overcome bias, we must remove the log in our eye, which means we must remove the eye itself. But to do so successfully means without going blind or even dying, to see without eyes, is this is very hard to do.
Methodologies like Pyrrhonism have a method to do this. As does Buddhism.
We can only learn these lessons about ourselves by seeing all this in great diversity in others, and comparing error/incompleteness/aporia in others and ourselves in the world.
(This is unavailable to narcissists who see everything like this as weaknesses to be exploited and buttons to be pushed).
Once this comparison is made, we can then move on, in enlightenment, to correct or re-frame the log in our own eyes, and not go blind.
It has been the greatest frustration since my late twenties to see this in others and then in my self and not being capable of successfully sharing all this.
And thus world better.
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Studies of bias, preferences, learning styles, inclinations, viewpoints can all help with this discussion in the world, despite any methodological flaws they will all have. The biggest danger is to move from an exploration of diversity and commonalities to prescriptive sets of boxes, classes, castes and other identitarian stupidities.
We need methodologies that not just discover and classify or identify the variety of life, and their points of strange attraction, but see how they work in negotiation with each other in producing our complex modern societies.
Currently our ideologies, even when not fixed on substitutes for stability, by confusing outcomes with causes (e.g. morality/ies), stop us from this next step of social enlightenment/engagement/worlding as conscious world-builders, in which the state is not a trophy, because we realise the trophies of war are an opportunity catastrophe, not just a cost of doing business by the family firm, to be defrayed from the profits of a narcissistic career.
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The world does not depend on you or you bias/preference/inclination.
If you can trust that you can world well, and if you know you are your bias, you can possibly do it even better, for conceit/s do not promise the world, for they cannot promise the world into existence.
Other biases are not the enemy. Other biases are not an existential threat to to you, stability, or the world.