Thread by @PeterGelderloos

Ranking, expertise, hierarchy: a thread

Liberals like Peter Coffin and pop philosophers like Ken Wilbur think they've come up with an answer to anarchism when they conflate expertise and hierarchy. Would you let your neighbor perform brain surgery on you? Hierarchy must be good.

That's like going up to a mathematician before you've even gotten to negative numbers, thinking you can disprove their system because 2 - 3 just doesn't make any sense to you. Must be broken. Math sux. On to magnets.

Psychologists w/ an individualist framework and animal behavioralists who created simplified schema by studying animals in captivity have also muddied the waters, making it hard to apply the concept of hierarchy to human society, which was in fact the concept's original purpose.

Anarchists have actually been thinking about these things for hundreds of years. Everyone is invited to join in, but they might want to get up to speed.
It's useful to differentiate between rank, expertise, and hierarchy.

Ranking is simply a comparative, linear ordering of elements. This could range from someone having favorites, to an athletic competition, to rating people's skill in a specific activity. The criteria are infinite, so being #1 at something doesn't give you an advantage elsewhere.

In the absence of a social hierarchy, ranking does not confer you *power over* anyone else. It is related to status, which can play a role in true hierarchies, but is not in and of itself a hierarchy.

Expertise is the social recognition of knowledge and capacity. That recognition can be informal--you ask your neighbor to help fix your car cuz everyone knows she's a great mechanic, or it can be formal, as in the licensing of doctors. When it's formal, that means a group of...

...experts has organized themselves to confer recognition and maybe decide who can practice the profession. This recognizes that knowledge is collective and expertise takes a lot of work. It also contains authoritarian possibilities, depending, again, on other social hierarchies.

In a communal society, we can imagine scientific associations that take charge of their own education and certification processes. But nowadays, people essentially buy university degrees and the gateway to expertise is fully inflected by race, class, gender, and more.

Finally, hierarchy. It's original meaning is "rule by priests". It's a social order in which a closed organization with internal ranking decides who can join and how they must ascend the institutional ladder. The higher up, the more power they have, over both initiates and...

...the masses of people outside the organization. In other words, it allows a small elite to control an organization as well as the values of broader society, getting everyone (inside and outside the org) to participate in their domination, including the elite who must uphold...

...the logic of the institution that produces the power they wield.
To read more about how hierarchies produced some of the first states, and how they have continued to evolve, check out "Worshiping Power" @AKPressDistro
akpress.org/worshipingpowe…

And a brief tangent on ranking and expertise, this shows why equality is such an awful idea. Boo liberalism! The fact that the opposite of equality conflates difference and inequality is problematic. Equality must be guaranteed by a higher power, and requires a universal...

...yard stick (or should we say ruler?). On the contrary, free people develop their difference to their maximum delight, peers one moment, then teachers, then learners the next. If coercive hierarchies are abolished, equality is a meaningless concept.