Marx said “religion is the opiate of the masses”. Religion can convince the downtrodden (exploited) masses that their allegiance to the ruler is required by God (who rules by divine right), and distract them from their miserable conditions by promises of a far better life after death (if they are only obedient to God).

If I justify hierarchy in general by reference to hierarchy in general, that’s circular. If I justify hierarchy A by reference to hierarchy B, it’s not.

Moving into the meat of things, I would propose the following devil’s advocate argument…

(1)Given a world of relatively high social diversity (i.e., foraging cultures), with the standard run of human personalities, given a sufficient span of time some group of people will, for whatever reason, elect to assume a hierarchical structure. (We can assume that there is a probability >0 for this happening, since it has happened before; stipulating for time-span, we can say that it will almost certainly happen again.)
(2)Given that such a structure allows for the organization of more people than an egalitarian structure allows for (your own assertion), given a sufficient span of time some such hierarchy will eventually build numbers significantly greater than that of any egalitarian structure.
(3)Given that hierarchies must expand to support their aggricultural bases; or even if they are somehow not aggricultural, given that human beings are sometimes aggressive; given a sufficient span of time such a large hierarchy will eventually aggress its neighbors.
(4)And given that such a large, aggressive hierarchy has the numbers to easily overpower a smaller egalitarian society, we can say in summary that over a sufficiently long timespan, any society that chooses to remain egalitarian will eventually be overcome by some large hierarchy.

Since there is no assurance that this will be a “benevolent” hierarchy, why not create the best possible hierarchy now? If we cannot stay egalitarian forever, best to adopt a hierarchy of our own choosing, than to have one forced on us later, with no say regarding its setup or structure.

Basically the claim here is that a large, aggressive hierarchy will “always” be selected for in much the same way as a highly proliferative species variant - because it has a much greater ability to spread and perpetuate itself than does an egalitarian group. If we’re going to be stuck with hierarchy anyway, might as well pick the one we like most, or at least dislike least.

(Though I should at least add that where civilization hides from dealing with the full complexity of the world with tricks like hierarchy, it requires a hunter-gatherer approach to really deal with the fully “confusing and frightening world.” It’s civilization that demands less—less security, less community, less art, less culture, less knowledge, less interaction, less relationship—and hunter-gatherers that demand more. Your statement could hardly be a more perfect inversion of the actual situation.)

You force me to repeat myself: You may not care about those things, but it’s hardly ‘no reason’. It isn’t a reason to you, because you want _less_ - less creativity, less technology, fewer people, fewer complications. You want to see a confusing and frightening world so simplified that you can understand it. A hunter-gatherer lifestyle may offer this.

> That’s the Julian Simon argument isn’t it?
> Human ingenuity will surmount any problem?

No, that was not the point I was making. It’s also untrue; if it were, we would have no old problems and few new ones.

> Calling something ‘rose-tinted’ is hardly a
> reasoned refutation. Cite examples of how it is
> rose-tinted - or if you can not concede that the
> point is made.

I’m not required to do either. The argument for the superiority of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle has not been made to my satisfaction, nor is the initial burden on me to refute it.

Agriculture is simply more efficient than gathering. If a certain edible plant grows naturally in the conditions of one’s environment, then the number that one will find by chance is necessarily less than the number that will grow if additional plants are deliberately planted. Where Y is positive, X+Y > X.

Further, people work for more than four hours a day now because they expect, and get more than food for their efforts.

Calling something ‘rose-tinted’ is hardly a reasoned refutation. Cite examples of how it is rose-tinted - or if you can not concede that the point is made. It’s been said that we rarely believe based on reasoned arguments but more commonly on our desires, obviously this cuts both ways, but in this case examples are cited and an argument is made.

The rose-tinted view of hunter-gatherer societies some of you seem to have is surreal. This ‘four hours a day’ figure is like a religious mantra.

It would seem that the came considerations apply within a given society as well as between socieities. That is, limited functional hierarchies are tolerable so long as they exist within an overall framework of an egalitarian society. For example a hunting party, planning to take down a large animal, might agree that one of its members is “in charge” during the hunt. Usually this role falls to the most experienced or the person with the successful track record.

BUT: in a society where divisions of labor are not absolute, i.e. where everyone does a bit of everything, functional hierarchies can’t metastasize into structural ones. The person with good distance-vision and ballistic sense may not be particularly good at close-range vision and fine hand/eye coordination needed to make spears or arrowheads, and the person who is good at working with stone may not be so good at making herbal preparations for medicine. So long as all of these roles are considered equally necessary, none of them come to dominate the culture. This of course is terribly painful for those lazy souls who would constitute themselves as elites in order to live off the labors of others.

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Hierarchy in defense against other hierarchies: There is also the scenario where a village is attacked by a ragtag band of “mutant zombies” i.e. outlaws who aren’t particularly well-organized but are driven by some need e.g. hunger or greed for loot. I’m still working on the issues raised by Vail’s concept of rhizomatic defense, to the issues of community defense in a post-collapse scenario, and I haven’t reached any conclusions in this regard. However it would seem to be necessary at minimum for there to be some kind of lateral communication among nodes, and some way of passing information that enables nodes to act effectively.