Bulldozer00's Blog

Assume that you were totally free; an island unto yourself, independent of all other people and able to do whatever you wanted and whenever you wanted. In order to survive, you’d have to become: responsible for building your shelter, growing and hunting your food, making your clothes, and securing yourself from attacks by “other” people and animals. D’oh, that would suck!

Now assume that you wanted to be free, but you didn’t want to do all of the primitive “hunting and gathering” work required to survive. You’d have to become dependent on the skills and talents of a bunch of other people who can do the things you don’t want to do. How would you pull that off? You’d have to somehow make other people dependent on you, no?

The way I see it, there are at least three ways to become free while minimizing the effort you’re required to expend to survive:

1. you’d have to develop a skill of your own that is needed or wanted by others so that they willingly supply you with the basics for your survival.
2. you’d have to physically force others into supplying the basics for your survival.
3. you’d have to psychologically force others into supplying the basics for your survival.

Numbers 2 and 3 introduce a one way dependency into your self-centric “system” – with other people depending on you, but not vice versa. Whoo Hoo! Compared to number 1, no hard work on your part is required. You receive without giving anything in return – a pure consumer.

Now, assume that you pull off the one-way dependency trick via clever application of number 2 or 3. As the left hand side of the figure below shows, a star topology with you smack in the center of the one-way dependency system quickly becomes unscalable as the number of people you desire to be dependent on you grows. You’d have to use more and more of your time maintaining your physical and/or psychological control over the growing number of people who are continuously fulfilling your needs. D’oh!

One answer to the scalability problem is to recursively apply your physical and/or psychological coercion expertise to impose a hierarchical structure on your system – with you at the top, of course. A hierarchical structure would cut down the number of people you need to physically and/or psychologically track and coerce into satisfying your needs without expecting anything in return. Hence, the proliferation of hierarchies throughout the course of human history.