this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2025
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Those aren't exclusive. Collaboration and leadership can coexist, especially when the leadership is accountable to the led. Differences in skill and experience exist, period, so acknowledging this and accounting for it is the best way to meet everyone's needs best from everyone's skills and talents. It also allows those that have less skill to gain guidance and training in a less directly responsible manner.
It's not even just differences in skill and experience. The person who is busy cutting a path through the first necessarily cannot also see the entirety of the forest. The person who is taking the aerial view of the forest necessarily cannot be cutting through it.
There is a hierarchy of scale and complexity. It can be solved with voluntary hierarchies of work, but it cannot be ignored. Consequences of actions can take minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, or decades to emerge. The people worried about the immediate consequences of individual actions are not going to have the capacity for also worrying about the long-term consequences of collective actions over time.
We know this. We see this all the time. And yet this axiomatic-bordering-on-religious stricture against hierarchy chooses to believe there's some way to handle hierarchies of complexity without hierarchies of coordination.
Yes, fantastic way to put it, again further illustrating why complex society requires different positions of focus, including different levels of organization. You cannot have local governments functioning properly without a cohesive central government, and a central government cannot properly handle or comprehend the complexities of local life without strong local governments. Democratic centralism and whole process people's democracy are proven tools of meeting the needs of the people.
I like to think about this in terms of levels of abstraction. People deep in a specific domain master its details, but those operating at higher levels need to understand how that work fits into the bigger picture. That’s where mediators come in. They're necessary to bridge the gap between specialists focused on implementation and leaders orchestrating many projects toward a shared vision.
Incidentally, you see the same dynamic in software development. When you assemble libraries into a project, you interact with their APIs which are the interface that defines what the library does, not how it works under the hood. Management, in this sense, functions like that API layer where it surfaces the essential functionality of domain work while shielding higher-level goals from unnecessary complexity.
Ultimately, human cognition has limits making abstractions a necessity for large projects. They let us focus on what matters at each level without drowning in details we can’t possibly hold all at once.
Yep! Another analogy I love is the tactician and the strategian working hand in hand to come up with a multi-sided and complete solution to a given complex problem.
Yup, another great example. I feel like people have a knee jerk reaction to the idea of authority without actually spending the time to think what problems authority addresses, and why it consistently emerges in different domains.
A big part of it is how overwhelmingly negative the use of authority is within capitalism. This is a deeply pervasive issue because the ready-made conditions of capitalism make all authority seem to be inherently evil.
Absolutely, authority under capitalist relations necessarily implies subjugation and people who've grown up in this environment have a hard time imagining how authority can function in a different way.