aaronI'll share a troubling fact with you if you share one with me
Neuroscience shows that rulers will always become evil.
Getting more power actually changes your brain, suppressing your ability to use empathy. The very powerful will always struggle to remember that others are human and don't want to be hurt.
Humane behavior and hierarchy are mutually exclusive. Heirarchical organization encourages humans to hurt each other.
eightpixThe data is skewed. All of the functioning systems we use reward concentrations of power.
Thereby, systems of rule must distribute power and contest the concentration of power. It literally takes a village to save us from ourselves.
David Graeber and David Wengrow introduced me to historical examples of non-hierarchical societies in The Dawn of Everything.
The fact that power results in antisocial behavior has been understood for millenia.
Lots of societies have had cultural infrastructure of equality that attempts to mitigate this weakness in our biology and prevent harmful levels of power accumulation. The basque village layouts that Davids Graeber & Wengrove talk about, or the practise of 'insulting the meat' of successful hunters.
Which is why I feel that for humanity to succeed we will eventually need an entirely new form of societal governance to replace capitalism & communism, just as those systems replaced feudalism and tribalism. Something like technoism where decisions are made and enacted by machines, incapable of self motivation; or geneticism where leaders’ selfish impulses are either bred or edited out of them. We are still many, many years off from technology being able to accomplish this, but the only way to overcome the human factor is to… well… remove the human factor.