Connection Not Hierarchy

An answer to Jordan Peterson

Connection, not hierarchy, is the primary thing. While hierarchy does arise naturally, it must be carefully monitored and moderated for its potentially detrimental effects.

Traditional indigenous cultures worked very hard to counterbalance hierarchies. See Society Against the State by Pierre Clastres for further exploration of that idea.

Because inequality is so toxic to human flourishing we must be actively working against the Matthew principle that to those who have more will be given. In other sciences, we would call that a runaway amplifying feedback loop, and those lead to system collapse.

For the last 400 years we've been doing our damnedest to amplify those amplifying loops and to remove any correcting feedback loops or counterbalances to them. As Donella Meadows said in Thinking in Systems, we intuitively know exactly where the leverage points are and then push them in the exact wrong direction.

To solve our problems we're going to need all of our capabilities and all of the information and knowledge we have together. The sort of connection, communication, and community that requires is built on equality and diversity. It depends on the exact sorts of accommodations and courtesy which Jordan Peterson opposes.

Giving the already wealthy and the supposedly more intelligent more wealth and power does not lead to positive results. The Spirit Level by Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett documents this clearly. Instead we must be looking for ways to harness the knowledge, intelligence. and creativity of the widest amount of people. We must look to include specifically those people excluded by our current system.

We don't need to hear more from the people we already hear the most from. That said, another thing those people are excluded from is useful information with which to understand the world. In the '80s the hackers had a slogan that information wants to be free. As a society we need information to be free.

We need an opening of the rigorous information produced by science and academia, and a welcoming of new and different perspectives into those systems. A democratization of knowledge production and sharing. What we need is not to preserve existing power hierarchies but to reduce the barriers to participation in the solving of our collective problems.

With thanks to Some More News’s A Brief Look at Jordan Peterson for helping me put his argument in context.