hierarchy – The Life and Times of Ben Weinberg

When you rise in the hierarchy of any company, firm, or organization, you are likely to be rewarded for it subsequently. It’s not just being rewarded financially but there are also the noted past benefits such as being the first to eat at a meal or having livestock awarded to you for leading the tribe or group. The leader, if he or she does a good job, gets first dibs on what they would like as a result whereas if it’s money, food, or what I think is the most common today as it was in the past: land or space.

In my view, there is a direct correlation between rising in the hierarchy and having more space or territory allotted to you. This kind of correlation has really stood the test of time when you think about the era of feudalism when there would be lords over the land and forts or castles would be built to maintain that territory, even if it was contested by outsiders. When you think of the rise of empires from the Ottoman to the French to the British whose kings, queens, emperors, or sultans who would make their royal palaces and compounds as elegant, grand, and massive as they could.

Even your modern-day Presidents and other heads of state live more lavishly than 99% of their population and while they may command a modest salary, they still hold the keys to a massive home and office where they have people waiting on them to make sure any of their needs are taken care of. Because of the way hierarchies are set up, the people who have the most power tend to get the most benefits in terms of taking up space and territory because of the office or title or family legacy that they hold.

While it would make sense that in a capitalist society, you must ensure lopsided rewards and benefits to those people entrusted with political or other forms of power. When you think of your average CEO or company owner, they tend to on average also take up more territory or have more space than your average person. As your status rises so does the amount of acreage or square meters you would like to claim as your own. While there are exceptions, popular culture encourages the acquisition of power and status to correlate with not only acquiring financial wealth but territorial wealth too.

You can even see this in terms of who gets the most space in the c-suite or in the average office. While the average worker may have to work in a cubicle or share a space with others at a lower level of hierarchy in their organization or company, the management or higher-level executive will often have the corner office or their own floor depending on the place of work. It is easy to see where your status in the working world is just by seeing who is taking up the most space even when the impact you or your colleague have on the firm, company, organization, may be different in terms of actual value provided.

The societal drive to get that corner office, or to get a bigger home, or to have a piece of land to call your own is an innate part of what keeps our drive to boost our economic means in life. Taking up territory and holding it is such an innate part of our caveman-like nature that even if we may have come out of the caves into homes, palaces, and offices, we still strive to show off to others where we are in the hierarchy by showing how much space we take up compared to the other guy.

While there’s nothing wrong with staking your claim, working hard for what you earn, and claiming that corner office or hectare of land as your own, it does not mean that you’ll automatically be happy or fulfilled. It’s likely you’ll be satisfied, happy, or content with how far you’ve come and how hard you had to work for your spot in the hierarchy, but it does not guarantee you long-term happiness or fulfillment. When you think about it, while you can get an office or a home or a castle to yourself, it can cause a tendency to isolate yourself, to think you know better than anyone, and worst of all, to lose a kind of empathy for what your co-workers, your compatriots, or your community is going through.

You may be able to stock more resources, live more lavishly, and show off to others, but it won’t fill our most basic need as human beings, and that is to connect with one another on a deeper level. You may have family or close friends but the higher you are up in the hierarchy, the tendency is there to ignore others’ advice, or to start thinking you’re better than other people even when you may not know what to do or what the answer is, and it may prevent you from being touch with other people are going through who are going through a tough time in life.

The more we seek to rise in a hierarchy, whatever it may be, the more likely it is to lead to isolation, loneliness, and even unhappiness if we use the territory that we have to shut the door on interacting with others around us or who work with us. It is tempting to let our success and our status get to our heads, but it can lead to increased narcissism, apathy toward what got you there in the first place, and an ego that can run out of control if it’s not checked by others.

When you think about a successful leader or executive, they let others tell them when they are wrong or show humility when they don’t know the answer. Instead of isolating themselves entirely, they make sure those people who helped them share in the success and are treated well. They share their space with others instead of hoarding it for themselves. They go out in the community to find out how they can help as a leader with more resources and knowledge. Instead of becoming a hermit with a lot of territory but no one around to help, a good leader will let people in to give advice, counsel, and to back down when he or she knows when they are wrong.

It’s the reason why dictators, kleptocrats, and monarchs can be so out of touch with their compatriots and why the CEO who has his own floor and never leaves his mansion are not long for staying in power. They neglect having people around them to be part of their apparatus and to tell them when the decisions they make should be rethought. It is also because when a leader hoards all the wealth, territory, or resources for him or herself and their family or close friends, people who are worse off tend to notice, can congregate, and organize together, and an overthrow of that leader is just around the corner.

A good leader makes sure that he does not hoard more than he needs to succeed in his role and that he or she relinquishes their title so a successor can rise whatever the vocation to share in the continued success of the company, organization, or firm. There’s nothing wrong with letting your rise in hierarchy allow you to acquire more land, territory, or money, but to hoard it all or to do nothing to let others improve their own lot in life to make sure they have the same shot at success is a recipe for disaster. You cannot take land with you after you’re gone so the priority should be on making sure you are a good leader first and also someone who uses their status to assist others, to make wise decisions, and to help give other people in their community or country a leg up so they can have enough territory to live a good life and share their own success with their family and friends.

Hierarchy is one unavoidable aspect of modern life that can be difficult not to clash with from time to time. The bigger the group is, the more necessary a hierarchy is in order to ensure order and compliance. For most of human history especially in the hunter-gatherer period of our ancient ancestors, there were no formal hierarchies as people usually lived, ate, and communed in small groups where decisions could be made collectively and were objections or differing opinions were more easily able to be heard.

If you have a group of 10 or even up to 100, which is what human beings are able to hold in their memories in terms of remembering names, faces, and details about each person, such small-scale organization did not have a need for a strict hierarchy where one person was in charge of making all of the decisions or whose voice mattered more than others. On the contrary, consensus involved discussion, debate, and a common conclusion at the end of the meeting or congregation. If enough people did not agree with the decisions or the direction of the group, they would often create their own group and go their own way.

These small groups dominated for a long time in human history, but their longevity in terms of collective group decision-making was upended by the agricultural age and when people stopped roaming around the planet. Instead of being hunter-gatherers, the majority of humanity shifted to being settlers and farmers establishing larger and larger groups to form a collective society or nation where you would not know everyone in your group because that group was no longer autonomous. Agrarian, industrial, and post-industrial societies are made up of thousands or millions of people usually brought together under one flag, one state, or one nation.

While this civilizational approach has outlasted our ancient past as hunter-gatherers, our inherent need to be part of a group, to be valued, and to have purpose within that group has not gone away. These small groups had a measure of equality to them with everyone having a key purpose and having a voice regarding what issues or opportunities had come up. In a larger society, cooperation is harder to come by, inequalities can be maximized, and hierarchies are much more common due to the need to instill order and discipline among people of that society even when they feel like they are being disadvantaged in some way.

Hierarchies are not necessarily natural to us as human beings given our origins and our way of life that lasted for thousands of years but to me and others, it was a necessity in order to organize a large-scale society of thousands or millions of people. Hierarchy is not necessarily a bad system, but it can be abused by those who have power who are not held accountable for their actions or who cannot be removed from their leadership role if they do not serve the society’s interests and needs. The fight for democratic governance, for basic human rights, and for equal opportunities in a society; those values are not guaranteed especially when we organize around a hierarchy and give people power over others.

Whether it is the President of a country or the CEO of a company, a hierarchy has to be kept in check and when that leader or ruler is not making wise decisions for the people he serves in that role, there has to be a way to remove someone from that role in the hierarchy. While hierarchies are necessary in our modern world, there have to be ways for those who are subordinate to voice themselves and their views without fears of reprisal or retribution for speaking out.

To ‘speak truth to power’ throughout history has been the exception rather than the norm but for those who did it even when there were financial or personal risks involved, the larger society benefited from the actions of those people who did not remain silenced but spoke out. If a leader is committing injustices, if a manager is doing something illegal, or if a principal is abusing their power, they have to be held accountable and removed from their position especially the higher up in the overall hierarchy that they are placed.

By raising our collective voices, abuses, inequalities, and injustices can be minimized as much as possible if there are democratic safeguards created to prevent a hierarchical order from being abused. There will be those leaders who do right by their subordinates and who make their hierarchy more democratic but in case that does not occur, laws and institutions have to be able to hold those at the top of their hierarchies in check.

Whether it’s’ allowing a few of your employees at a company to have voting rights on the company’s board of directors or making them shareholders or part-owners of the company, these are a few ways to make hierarchies more responsive and fairer. By establishing term limits for those who run for public office and prevent them from being in that office for the rest of their lives so that they aren’t able to have power for thirty or forty years straight is another concrete way to control a hierarchy by allowing others to take charge. When a President or Prime Minister does something illegal or cruel, that hierarchy is not absolute, and they can be removed from office or even be charged with a crime so that people in the society will know that they are not above the law.

It’s not that hierarchies are inherently bad or negative, but they must be actively controlled and made more democratic by those who participate in them. The people who are subordinate to others within a hierarchy should be able to freely voice their opinion, concerns, or dissent when they disagree with their leader. A good leader should take into consideration those stakeholders or constituents who they are responsible for governing over and they should not prevent people from expressing their dismay or disappointment because a good leader will admit when they make a mistake and try to do better for the people under him or her.

The notion of a hierarchy having been around for all of human history is a fallacy and while it is not an ideal way to form a group with one person having power over others by claiming it, it is the only way to organize large-scale societies and nations. However, hierarchies that are successful are responsible to the needs of the people living in them, who want to voice their opinion without fear of reprisal for having done so, and to be able to vote, change, or amend the leadership from time to time so that the hierarchy does not become above the people but rather part of them in a democratic system.

While hierarchy has to be respected, it should not be absolute, and it must be as democratic as possible. A hierarchy that is unequal, unresponsive, and meant to be permanent will ultimately fail because that kind of hierarchy will lose favor with the people under it and will eventually be replaced with something better. If you find yourself under a hierarchical system that you find stifling and demeaning, don’t stick around and support it. Find your own group or place in the world where you can have a voice that is listened to, where decisions can be made as a small group if possible, and where an absolute hierarchy is unheard of and frowned upon.