this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2025
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Inevitably, all hierarchical organizations end up on the wrong side of history.
In hierarchies, people compete for position.
People with principles, morals, integrity and/or empathy will have choices that they simply will not make.
People without those things are not constrained. They can and will make whatever choices might benefit them, with no regard for the consequences to others.
So all other things being more or less equal, psychopaths actually have a competitive advantage in hierarchies, and hierarchies end up effectively rewarding and thus selecting for psychopathy.
And in turn, breeds more psychopathy. I'm fairly convinced psychopathy is, at least partly, explained by epigenetics.
And if there is one uniting principle in conservatism, the singular reason why religious dirt-poor common-clay-of-the-West support billionaires, is that they all deeply believe in hierarchies.
Why do they go after trans-women but not trans-men? Because men are naturally higher in the hierarchy than women, thus wanting to exist in male spaces (but not actually crossing into them) is seen as the proper order, whereas wanting to exist in female spaces (read: lowering yourself in the hierarchy) is seen as unnatural.
Why do they fellate the rich? Because the wealthy are better people, which is tautologically why they're rich.
Why are they racist? Because white people are better than not-white people, natch.
Why do they hate atheists? Because the very concept of religion implicitly enforces hierarchy. Sectarian disputes are just an offshoot of this.
Progressives are much the same way, but with different hierarchies. Progressives seem to love big government hierarchies which a strong executive branch enforcing a bunch of regulations.
That's what you get from a two party system, you get two groups with a fetish for different types of hierarchies.
Reject hierarchy and push for local rule, it's what we in the box like to call liberty.
You're conflating two unrelated things to make some weird anti-government point.
Conservatives believe that hierarchical structures are the natural order of things. That is, things on top of the hierarchy deserve to be there, because otherwise they'd be at the bottom. Conservatism as a political philosophy requires the belief that some people are just better than others.
A belief that a strong government is required to enforce equality in the population is nothing like that.
Progressivism is the other side of that coin, a belief that we need strong hierarchy with the "right people" at the top to have a functioning society. It's the same basic idea that we either need or deserve strong leadership.
For some reason those two are being pitched at the only valid ideas, probably because those at the top benefit from people believing that. There are other ideas, they just don't have that "quick solution" people seem to crave that only comes from top down control.
Just because one side of the coin is bad doesn't make the other side good. Get a better coin.
How in the hell is wanting strong regulations the same thing as believing in racial suppremacy?
Also there are endless examples of countries with strong regulations and more than two parties
I didn't say it was. I said it's a similar fetish for hierarchy, just a different kind.
There are some offsetting factors that also prevent the "best and brightest" from rising to power: https://dealbreaker.com/2007/10/icahn-explains-why-are-there-so-many-idiots-running-shit
He moves up the corporate ladder, without a single original idea that might make his boss feel threatened by his potential.
Eventually, he gets to be the #2 guy at the company. He's a little dumber than the C.E.O., but the board likes him, so he eventually gets to be C.E.O.
Of course, he assigns a #2 who is a little dumber than he is. "And eventually, we're going to have all morons running our companies," Icahn concluded. "We might not be that far off from that right now."
That sounds vaguely like The Peter Principal.
It is, but the tellings I have heard of the Peter Principal generally have the incompetence leveling off at some lower strata where they can no longer do the job well so they don't advance any further.
The unspoken implication of Icahn's advancement theory is that management doesn't really do much of importance in these companies, basically any idiot can rise to the top. Of course that's not true, people can always actively undermine their own success, so they at least have to be smart enough to not do that.
Highly successful CEO I met over dinner once had this to say about his outstanding company growth performance: 1) it wasn't him, it was luck of being in the right place at the right time and not screwing it up too badly. 2) The hardest thing was choosing who to hire. If at least half of his new hire choices didn't actively make things worse, he considered that to be a good batch.
This seems relevant here…