Towards A New Social Order? Real Democracy, Sustainability & Peace

By Patrick Holz

This contribution argues that a long-established social order has been in place since the first stratified societies in the Near Middle East which unavoidably comes with substantial economic, political and environmental repercussions. Part I of the book dissects the various facets of this order, which is termed the social dominance paradigm, whi

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vernon Art and Science Inc.
• Release date: Sep 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9781622738205

Book preview

Towards A New Social Order?

Real Democracy,

Sustainability & Peace

Patrick Holz

Series in Sociology

Copyright © 2019 Vernon Press, an imprint of Vernon Art and Science Inc, on behalf of the author.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Vernon Art and Science Inc.

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Series in Sociology

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017964066

ISBN: 978-1-62273-820-5

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Cover design by Vernon Press, using elements selected by freepik.

Rise, like lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number!

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you:

Ye are many - they are few!

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Table of Contents

Foreword

1. Introduction

Part I: The Social Dominance Paradigm

2.  Key Features of the  Social Dominance Paradigm

3. Government & Central Aspects of Minority Control

4. The Economy I: Ancient Patterns

5.  The Economy II: Modes of Power

6. The Impact of Power

7. The Romance of Leadership

Part II: The Peace Paradigm

8. The Human Condition

9. Nature as Precedent

10. Peace I: The Case Against Violence & War

11.  Peace II: The Case for Peace

12. Real Democracy

13. Sustainability

Bibliography

Notes 

Index

Figures

1.1 The Social Dominance Paradigm in a Nutshell

1.2 The Peace Paradigm at a Glance

Abbreviations

AI                  Artificial Intelligence

ANA            Alliance for Nuclear Accountability

AVATAR Automated Virtual Agent for Truth Assessments in Real-Time

BCE              Before the Common Era

BP                  Before Present

CCTV             Closed-Circuit Television

CEO              Chief Executive Officer

CPR               Common-Pool Resources

DoD               Department of Defense

EPA               Environmental Protection Agency

EPI                Economic Policy Institute

FEC               Federal Election Commission

FTSE              Financial Times Stock Exchange

GDP               Gross Domestic Product

GRI           Global Reporting Initiative

HGT              Horizontal Gene Transfer

HUMINT Human Intelligence

ICO               Internet Connected Objects

IEP                 Institute for Economics and Peace

IMF               International Monetary Fund

IIRC               International Integrated Reporting Committee

IMINT           Imaginary Intelligence

IoT                 Internet of Things

LDP               Liberal Democratic Party

LME              Liberal Market Economy

OECD           Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

OSINT Open Source Intelligence

p.a. per annum

PAC Political Action Committee

PPP Purchasing Power Parity

PTSD Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

SAPRO Sex Assault Prevention and Response Office

SIGINT Signal Intelligence

SWAN Service Women’s Action Network

TBL     Triple Bottom Line

TNC             Transnational Corporation

TNT             Teenage Nonviolence Test

ToL             Tree of Life

WB              World Bank

WBI             Workplace Bullying Institute

WHO          World Health Organization

WoL            Web of Life

UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific 

and Cultural Organization

Foreword

The social sciences have lost their visionary impetus. Increasingly, they adopt the standards of the sciences in terms of empirical claims, methods and criteria. In my own field, economics, this is evident in what I call the ‘naturalistic turn.’ Apparently, this results in great progress of our understanding how the different social systems work, the economy, politics, society. Economists employ rigorous methods in mathematics, econometrics or experimental approaches, and they eagerly import insights from the sciences, such as in neuroeconomics. Should we expect that therefore economics will also do a better job in designing our future institutions, organizations and ways of dealing with the environment?

I think that this development leads into the trap of the dialectics of enlightenment that was analyzed by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in the 1930s. In assuming that we can apply scientific methods on the objects of our research, we lose the perspective on the fact that the social sciences differ fundamentally from the sciences in shaping the object that we purportedly analyze by objective means. With reference to economics, recent research in economic sociology has promoted the idea of the ‘performativity of economics.’ This means, economics does not simply describe a ‘reality’ of the economy, but also creates the economy, together with many other forces and agents beyond economic academia. I think that this applies across the board to the social sciences: emerging mid-19th-century sociology did not simply discover, describe and analyze ‘society,’ but it also created this object. No society without sociology.

In Horkheimer’s view, the apparent ‘objectivity’ of social sciences hides the fact that these are part and parcel of the societies which they analyze, so that there is a deep and strong interaction between science and its object. Making this interaction explicit is the task of critical theory. Accordingly, the diagnosis of the enhancement and strengthening of scientific methods in the social sciences does not only point towards an achievement, but also to a loss: The loss of critical potential. Now, what is more important for improving our life? Knowledge about facts or critical thinking? Well, certainly both are necessary. But I am afraid that claiming that science is all about facts and objectivity will dampen the vigor of criticism. If social sciences are performative, criticism is not simply critical reflection about empirical results and hypotheses, but raises normative issues: Which kind of life do we want to perform? For which reasons? Can we reach an agreement about normative criteria by which we select conjunctions between theory and practice? These are deeply problematic and challenging questions.

What is the goal of critical theory? Eventually, the goal is to envisage alternative worlds via critical thinking, new ways of living, new forms of political and economic organization. Critical thinking in its strongest manifestations is always wedded to utopian visions of society. This is exactly what the scientific worldview rejects: After all, utopia is beyond reality. But without exploring what currently seems beyond reach and utterly unrealistic, we cannot understand what goes wrong in the world in which we live. An excellent example in recent social sciences was the almost total neglect of distributional issues in economics, and even in many neighboring fields. Only via the ‘big bang’ of Thomas Piketty’s book ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’ people noticed the fact that because of this neglect, the most advanced industrial countries have already gone a long way towards the reinstatement of stark social inequalities, not only in terms of realized achievements, but probably even worse, in terms of opportunities that people can enjoy. It seems that without upholding the utopian belief in a society of equals, we become insensitive to inequalities, since we lose a sense for the priorities, and end up in a world that is much worse than we would realistically affirm and prefer to live in. The realist ends up as an opportunist who finally even hurts himself.

Therefore, I think that it’s the task of social science to create visions and utopias. By this I do not mean to forget the facts: For example, Marx envisaged an utopia, but never made clear how it would really work, given certain constraints on organizing real-world economies, such as scarcity, information asymmetries, conflicts of interests and so on. Until today, communism seems an utopia that is unrealistic. Thus, when I talk about utopias, as I do in my new book ‘Critical Theory of the Economy,’ I refer to ‘realistic utopias’: These are utopias which are built on clear recognition of facts, but explore the possibility of alternative worlds. This is like technological innovation: Humans can invent the most amazing new technologies, which were deemed impossible for previous generations, but our creativity, combined with sound knowledge of facts, allows for breaking through the constraints and limitations of the present. Why should this innovative prowess of humanity not apply to our designs of society, economy, polity, hence our ‘social technologies’?

In this sense, this book by Patrick Holz is exemplary social science, despite not presenting ‘scientific’ research on his own, in the sense of doing experiments, analyzing statistical data, and checking specific hypotheses. The book achieves two main tasks. The first is to show how modern social sciences, as well as the natural sciences related to humans (such as biology), contributed to create and stabilize a particular kind of social, political and economic structure which has been dominant for thousands of years: This is what he dubs the ‘social dominance paradigm.’ This term denotes a performative structure, as it describes a certain analytical paradigm, but also a reality that is partly created by referring to this paradigm in interpreting social, political and economic life scientifically. This is the critical part in the previous sense. The second task is to define an utopia, dubbed the ‘peace paradigm.’ This utopia is identified as a ‘possible world,’ in the sense that we can identify scientific facts that show what conditions may need to be fulfilled, and to which degree they might already be met.

Scientistic social sciences tend towards TINA (‘there is no alternative’) approaches in pointing towards the reality of certain conditions limiting choices, and then identifying the optimum based on apparently objective criteria. Critical social sciences develop counterfactual worlds, however, building on real-world conditions. Therefore, they remain deeply rooted in the social sciences as they stand and build on their achievements. Often, a simple but radical shift of perspective on known facts is enough to open the view on alternative worlds.

There are many examples for shifts of perspective in this book. Probably one of the pivotal movements is to recognize the cooperative and peaceful potential of human nature, and the dilemma that once structures of power and dominance come into place, they also change individual behavioural stances and ways of thinking in a way so that these structures seem to be necessary to cope with the resulting challenges in organizing cooperation. Therefore, we need to start with debunking the anthropological assumptions in most of the social sciences, especially economics and probably political science. Once we realize that there is much evidence on human cooperativeness and peacefulness, we are enabled to envisage alternative institutional worlds.

This book is a long essay and aims at persuasion, not mainly testing hypotheses or developing theories. But that also means it is great fun to read. One important contribution is to pull together what we already have at hand in terms of alternative views on our current condition and possible alternatives. When reading the book, I was amazed by the richness of this literature across many fields and disciplines. In this sense, one of the most important conditions for achieving utopia may be already materializing, namely a consensus that ‘there are alternatives.’

The book is also close to most recent developments in global society and politics. I already mentioned increasing inequality. Astonishingly, the new presidency in the United States does everything to strengthen this trend. Everywhere, we observe a resurgence of authoritarian politics, accompanied with increasing defamation of science, the free press and a derogative attitude towards democracy. Do you need further evidence that Patrick’s ideas are highly relevant for us? Should we just accept this a being our nature? We are living in a time when the great achievements of the 19th century are endangered: The emerging social sciences, and their contribution to shaping our utopias. If we step down from the shoulders of giants, we turn out to be dwarfs.

Prof. Dr. Carsten Herrmann-Pillath

University of Erfurt, Max-Weber-Kolleg, Germany

1.

Introduction

The intent of this contribution is twofold. First, to show that there has been a dominant social order in place whose roots go back to the first stratified societies in the Near and Middle East (foremost Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia) about 5,500 years ago. Second, to put forward the notion that a fundamentally different social order is conceivable. The former is termed the social dominance paradigm while the latter is the peace paradigm.1

The social dominance and the peace paradigm are mutually exclusive as they very differently define the human condition, the relation to nature and nature itself as well as how to organize anything from the workplace to entire societies. This incompatibility determines the substantial contrast between which type of economic, political and social actions are respectively incentivized and inherently preferred. Discussing two complex social orders then inevitably entails a number of key disciplines including sociology, political sciences, economics, psychology and anthropology. The ideas advanced here are not based on the presumption to know better than the respective specialists but are rather rooted in more general, interdisciplinary themes that highlight the intertwined nature of social, political, economic and organizational factors.

The basic premise of the social dominance paradigm is that the first stratified, hierarchically structured societies not only broke with hundreds of thousands of years of how humans organized themselves but that this systemic shift institutionalized a set of key principles that negatively affect humanity to this day. The latter foremost include the defining reliance on hierarchic, centralized control and coordination as well as a negative rendering of the human condition; specifically how a dominant minority, in this case early democratic reformers in England in the 17th century, typically has viewed the people as mostly selfish, lazy and violent, as in grosse, being a monster, an unweildy, rude bulke of no use.2 Or, as Adam Smith reasons in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, the poor masses are ruled by their hatred of labour [sic] and the love of present ease and enjoyment, which he viewed as the passions which prompt to invade property.3

Fig. 1.1 A Brief Overview of the Social Dominance Paradigm (Source: Author).

fig. 1.1

In polar opposite, the peace paradigm relies on an evidence-based interpretation of the H. sapiens’ genetically manifested capacities and motivations (above and beyond self-interest), combined with the benefits of non-hierarchic, decentralized organization and control.

Fig. 1.2 The Peace Paradigm at a Glance (Source: Author).

fig. 1.2

The overarching argument here is that not only does the social dominance paradigm’s narrative incorrectly portray the (pre-civilization) natural state of human group living but also that a more precise understanding of the pivotal interdependencies between human nature and how human (inter-)action are organized allows for a fundamentally different and, as is posited here, better social order.

The notion of a new order is clearly not new. America’s founding fathers, for instance, envisioned a novus ordo seclorum (a new order of the ages). As such, this reading of an apparently new order allows for a precise location in space and time, indicating when and where the old order ended and the new commenced: Philadelphia (PA), July 4, 1776. The issue, however, is that even though it is patently true (and very welcome) that the American Revolution to a certain degree broke with precedent and brought forth crucial advancements such as the separation of powers, fair and free elections as well as a legal framework based on unalienable rights, it is the underlying contention here that the implied old order largely remained structurally intact and was merely modified in places.4

Typically, the presumed indicators of systemic change foremost include novel types of government that seemingly break with the past and go together with different economic settings. So far this, very broadly speaking, has mostly entailed moving away from nondemocratic towards representative democratic configurations as well as establishing economies that bear the hallmarks of modern, industrialized capitalism. Perhaps the best known classification of the shift from one order to another is Immannuel Wallerstein’s take on a 500 year old modern world-system, going back to the social and economic reorientations of Europe in the 16th century during the phase of proto-industrialization and the then growing unease with systems of feudal dominance.5

Wallerstein relies on the notion that the category of a world-system is not merely descriptive but rather functions as an appropriate unit of analysis.6 Echoes thereof can be found elsewhere including, for instance, the 20th century Industrial Dominant Social Paradigm and the dominant western worldview which inter alia rest on the conviction that the H. sapiens is fundamentally different from all other creatures on earth over which they have dominion, as Lester W. Milbrath and Barbara V. Fisher write in Environmentalists: Vanguard for a New Society.7

In extension as well as in contrast to Wallerstein’s proposed world-system the main ideas put forward here are more in line with Andre G. Frank and Barry K. Gills’ position foremost discussed in The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand? There they posit that the still dominant world system’s roots can be traced back to the first stratified civilizations in the Near and Middle East about 5,000 to 5,500 years ago.8 This order has remained highly influential over the course of more than five millennia as it continues to determine social structures that have been causally responsible for a broad range of economic, political, social and environmental defects ever since their inception. In many ways the principles, norms, value and evaluation frameworks of this order have continuously consolidated a specific version of reality that prevents the realization of something not only fundamentally different but also more advantageous.

As it is understood here the ruling order consists of several defining layers, the most fundamental of which is a particular mode of principal-subordinate hierarchic organization where control and coordination are centralized, and in any given population, rest in the hands of a small minority. By itself, this may appear to amount to little more than an organizational template. In fact, though, hierarchic organization inherently comprises specific values and evaluation principles that together forge a paradigm which consist of various forms of domination. The resultant social dominance paradigm rests on a number of sociopolitical and socioeconomic features which are very good at maximizing the self-interest of a small minority of powerholders who sit atop the social hierarchy, regularly to the detriment of everyone and everything else.9 The term powerholder is used here as a shorthand to indicate any combination of socioeconomic and sociopolitical power which typically, but not necessarily, comes with high social status.10

Despite of the H. sapiens’ individual and collective brain power, highly specialized knowledge and occasional wisdom humanity ostensibly faces deep and lasting social, political, economic and environmental calamities. The stance put forward here holds that many standard examinations of these challenges tend to be inherently flawed with respect to three key components. The first can be subsumed under the heading of government. As part of discussions of democracy, its weaknesses and even the complete lack thereof (there are, after all, only roughly two dozen fully fledged democracies in existence today), the democracies in question are representative democracies which are upheld as the non plus ultra.11 The problem, however, is that although in representative democracies politicians are voted into positions power this centrally continues to imply that there are few, if any, true structural differences between forms representative democracy and outright nondemocratic types of government: A (elected or unelected) minority rules over a large majority.12 As a consequence, both theory and evidence indicate that at least some degree of oligarchy appears to be a foregone conclusion.13 Real democracy in the Athenian sense where all participate equally, every voter simultaneously is a legislator and where the people actually (i.e., legally) hold the political power is virtually never considered.14

Second, when the economy is the focal point various versions of mostly capitalism are compared either with each other or with precursors such as mercantilism or supposed alternatives like socialism and communism. What is often overlooked, though, are ancient value and evaluation principles that ex ante determine which economic activities are incentivized, which are taken into account and how they are taken into account. The position put forward here holds that the common denominator throughout the ages has been the (near-)exclusion of social and environmental costs, as part of which, for instance, economic success measured in terms of, say, modern-day profitability can readily materialize on the back of substantial social costs and environmental devastation.

Peace, the third core aspect, is perhaps the single most significant while simultaneously being the haziest of the three, the simple reason being that we live in a world where violence and war consistently play a highly influential role. Lasting peace and the absence of violence of any kind often seems elusive. Even though peace is typically seen as desirable, violence and war are regularly accepted as unavoidable expressions of human nature. This tends to misconstrue not only the natural state of the human condition but arguably also ignores the specifics of a social construct that actively embraces the use of violent means as necessary and even rational in the first place.15

Combined, the factors of representative (or limited) democracy, unsustainable economic approaches as well as the inclusion of violence and war as legitimate options then create a particular version of social reality which, as is argued here throughout, appears to be regularly harmful with respect to its sociopolitical and socioeconomic impact. In addition, as Naomi Oreskes and Eric M. Conway exemplarily reason in The Collapse of Western Civilization, humanity even seems to increasingly move towards a state of total dysfunction, brought on by large scale environmental destruction.16

This book has two parts. Part I provides a comprehensive discussion of the defining principles of the social dominance paradigm and shows that a wide range of repercussions, inherently rooted in the defectiveness of hierarchic organization with centralized control and coordination, appear to be inevitable and unavoidable. Part II focuses on the core characteristics of the peace paradigm and introduces its three most important pragmatic applications: Real democracy, sustainability and peace. Peace not only gives the peace paradigm its name but is also understood as more than the mere absence of violence and war. Peace is a comprehensively complex social, political and economic concept which rests on specific values and rules. Peace is about positive, constructive relations among people and nations who all live on what can and should be a sustainable planet.17

It has to be emphasized that this contribution is necessarily very much incomplete and even the attempt to cover the disparate issues raised here comes perilously close to hubris. Still, this book is neither a detailed manual nor does it contribute any grand plans. Its purpose is to provide an impetus and as such it neither espouses any -isms nor does it adhere to a particular school of thought or political orientation. A key underlying assumption throughout is that any transformative change from one order to another would be part of self-selecting, evolutionary dynamics that are indicative of competence: The capability to devise political, economic and overall social systems that are sufficiently advanced for a complex, non-simple reality is the yardstick with which the achievements of the H. sapiens need to be measured.

Part I: The Social Dominance Paradigm

The overarching challenge when discussing a complex social order is that it is very easy to overlook its core principles, to miss the forest for all the trees. Perhaps the best question to ask so as to stay focused on what matters most is cui bono, who benefits?18 Who continues to thrive when the multitudes lose out, relatively and often absolutely? Especially those who on a pragmatic, action-based level may desire change for the better likely make one central mistake when they believe that dominant social, political as well as economic systems need to be and, indeed, can be fixed. This contribution’s central inference is, however, that despite the numerous defects discussed subsequently, nothing is systemically broken if viewed from the one perspective that really counts, that of the minority of powerholders.

Chapter two provides an introduction to the basic principles of the social dominance paradigm, succinctly covering its continuity over the course of roughly 5,500 years, mainly with respect to its key organizational, social, political and economic characteristics as well as its underlying justifications. After that, the next five chapters highlight the leading and ostensibly unavoidable repercussions of the social dominance paradigm.

Chapter three focuses on government and minority control, while chapters four and five concentrate on the economy. Chapter six shows that with respect to the cornerstone of hierarchically sanctioned positional power, the effects on individual powerholders as well as the groups which they dominate are almost always (highly) negative, inefficient and counterproductive. Chapter seven concludes the first part with a concise discussion of the unwarranted glorification and romanticization of leaders, as part of which the concept of leadership has been elevated  [...] to a lofty status and a level of significance that it does not deserve based on the available evidence.19

2.

Key Features of the

Social Dominance Paradigm

The social dominance paradigm’s core logic is rooted in the realization not only how widespread structures of dominance are today but also how long-established these indeed have been. The here proposed paradigm echoes a number of ideas subsumed under the heading social dominance theory, as put forward by Felicia Pratto, Jim Sidanius and others.20 One could argue that the shared insight is that both individual and structural factors have featured prominently within a world dominance system whose roots can be traced to the first stratified, hierarchically organized societies in the Near and Middle East.21 In that sense, the social dominance paradigm combines key aspects of a complex social dominance framework that tends to focus more on contemporary issues with Andre G. Frank’s and Barry K. Gills’ interdisciplinary ancient world system approach proposed in The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand?.22

Effectively in line with social dominance theory, the social dominance paradigm holds that under its auspices populations are essentially divided into those with positional, social, political, and/or economic power and those largely or even completely without it. This simple baseline differentiation subsequently allows for numerous iterations which readily result in a highly complex, intricate social hierarchy and various dominance systems in which personal/individual processes are interdependent with systemic/structural configurations. In extension, the social dominance paradigm also incorporates pivotal social, political and economic structures that have not only ancient roots but for millennia also have specifically determined the role and function of the dynamics unfolding between the powerful few and the many who are less or non-powerful.

The social dominance paradigm’s key principle of hierarchic organization divides groups into a minority of powerholders and a majority of subordinates. This informs a story of continuity in the face of superficial discontinuity. The pivotal point is that the contemporary world system has a history of at least 5,000 years, as Frank and Gills write.23 The defining features of an ancient world political-economic system not only long predated the rise of capitalism in Europe and its hegemony in the world but they also continue to determine numerous, seemingly modern social, economic and political dynamics. These are typically analyzed in isolation, even though evidence indicates that they are independent.24

The core characteristics of the social dominance paradigm are, given the presumed age of the H. sapiens of roughly 200,000 years, relatively recent phenomena. While political scientists, economists, sociologists and historians certainly have to provide detailed analyses according to time period, geographic location, as well as specific contexts, key socioeconomic and sociopolitical features have barely changed over the course of roughly five-and-a-half millennia. The original social structure of the ancient Near Eastern societies, once established, was perpetuated in the Hellenistic empires that replaced the old Near Eastern dynasties after the conquest of the Near East by Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C, as Norman F. Cantor writes in The Civilization of the Middle Ages.25 The Roman empire then continued to adhere to the same principles, after which European feudalism maintained the underlying social structure well into the 19th century. During the long feudalism phase the outright exploitation of serfs by their lords then, was not an invention of the Middle Ages but had been handed down over many generations.26

Cantor evokes the hypothetical example of a member of the Ancient Egyptian elite who would not have felt out of place in Europe’s feudal societies. Revived after several millennia had passed the Egyptian lord in question might have been briefly befuddled but the feudal systems of Europe would not have been alien to him. Although the mores were a little loser, perhaps, a bit more liberal, the social structure still was based on the same assumptions and facts.27 The key point is that the ancient social structure was elaborated or varied in different places at different periods, but mainly it was simply perpetuated for thousands of years.28

In many ways, the continuity from the first hierarchically organized and stratified societies in the Near and Middle East, mostly Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, is so obvious that it is easy to overlook. Over the course of about five-and-a-half millennia one can draw a direct line from the origins of the social dominance paradigm and a long period of some version of nondemocratic (often feudal, hereditary) rulership to not only contemporary forms of oligarchy, autocracy and even representative democracy as well as economic control in the form of plutocracy, plutonomy and kleptocracy but also to microscale features such as the standard, hierarchy-based (typically male-lead) chain-of-command control in the workplace.29

In order to better dissect the tangled web of dominance dynamics, perhaps the most straightforward starting point is to consider, in the most simple terms, what essentially characterizes human-to-human interactions. The basic challenge for human group living in any kind of social, political and economic context is one of coordinating and controlling the interactions of multiple individuals while answering the question how to viably bring together self- with group-interest. Virtually any human system requires humans to coexist, cooperate and collaborate in some shape or form in order to reach one or multiple goals. The social dominance paradigm addresses this challenge in a very specific way. Breaking with hundreds of thousands of years of precedent the highly influential cultures of Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt introduced hierarchic organization and, with that, planted the seeds of a more than five millennia-long continuity.30 The choice of hierarchy then institutionalizes a multi-facetted paradigm which rests on a set of values, norms and evaluation standards.

The hierarchy template is applied to social (e.g., class-based feudalism), economic (e.g., the workplace) and political systems (oligarchy, autocracy, representative democracy) alike. As argued subsequently in more detail, this tends to prompt a broad spectrum of political, economic, social and environmental repercussions. The hierarchy as an essential feature of the social dominance paradigm regulates how human-to-human actions and interactions are framed, how humans relate to non-human nature, and which value and evaluation principles prevail.

Strictly from an organizational perspective hierarchy means top-down, principal-subordinate command where control and coordination are centralized. A clear minority of principals possesses (positional) power over a clear majority of subordinates. Evidence shows such a setup often institutionalizes leadership inadequacies and, with that, information, knowledge, coordination, control as well as motivation bottlenecks that typically negatively affect whichever system is hierarchically organized.31 Barbara Kellerman in Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters, for instance, points out that [i]ncompetent leaders are ubiquitous.32 Kellerman also notes that not rarely are leaders so extremely incompetent that we wonder how they were able to assume leadership roles in the first place.33

As part of the social dominance paradigm control and coordination are concentrated in everyone who holds power, while the leader(s) at the apex, elected or not, more or less absolutely rule(s) over the entire system. Centralization arises in every position of power within any given entity, up to the top position. Both private and public bodies in themselves are also locales of centralization. This includes, for instance, government institutions as well as, in a contemporary context, massive transnational corporations that yield annual revenues the size of entire countries’ gross domestic product (GDP). In a geographic sense control and coordination are centralized by way of a capital city where the ruler(s), as well as the concomitant bureaucracy, reside. The latter, in turn, obviously also are hierarchically organized; notably, these rarely are well-oiled machines but rather tend to increase inertia, foster inefficiency and are regularly conducive to corruption, nepotism and related defects.34

In any type of human system "someone must actually execute the work," in order to reach whatever goal needs to be met.35 Work can be understood here in the widest sense as being equal to some sort of effort. Someone has to invest time and energy so that whatever work is required gets actually done. Early on in the evolution of the H. sapiens such work entailed hunting, gathering, making vessels and vehicles, the building of (permanent or temporary) housing, formation of settlements, horticulture, agriculture and so on. Today, collaboration is perhaps most obviously required in all types of workplaces, either in the private or the public sector with for- or non-profit goals.

As soon as multiple individuals interact, any collaborative effort requires