No More Hierarchies. Top-Down is at its end | Principles | A Community Route

Whilst some of us will understand the concept, none of us alive today have known a world without hierarchies.

Yet hierarchies are one of the most effective tools that exist for the dehumanisation and distancing of humanity and human relationships.

Hierarchies are the reason that societies and industries ultimately fail.

The intrinsic reason for the failure of all hierarchies – which can take centuries to reach those at the top – is because they instantly make decision makers out-of-touch.

The system that is failing and collapsing around us today is a classic example of a hierarchy. It is a textbook example of a system that operates from the top-down.

Today’s system is so complex, that the tiers or levels of the hierarchy are not only top-down. The way that we have evolved culturally has meant that we have also extended these tiers or levels from side to side. This means that the responsibility for decisions that affect our daily lives are not only made by people and organisations or bodies that we will never have contact with. It also means that their role, responsibilities and influence are also heavily – and all too conveniently obscured from our view.

Leadership has become synonymous with hierarchy. Yet the interchangeability of the two words or terms does not and should not be considered as meaning the same thing.

We most certainly need leaders to shine and take responsibility for leading us. But leadership does not come by right. It does not appear through career progression. It certainly doesn’t come through position or assumed power – even though the elites want us to believe this – try as they might.

Poor leaders who have no appreciation of the mechanics of leadership, nor any understanding of what leadership genuinely is, usually surround themselves with leaders who are even weaker, who then do exactly the same thing when it comes to their turn to lead.

Likewise, the accumulation of wealth or apparent success with a certain kind of business is no guarantee of anyone’s ability, the ethics or the morality that would drive them if they should find themselves in a position where deference and the way that society works would enable them to take a lead.

Today, we have reached a position where everything we know in terms of governance and the way that the rules governing the way society, business and culture functions has such people at the top and intrinsically involved.

We must do away with these hierarchies. We must do away with everything that functions in the sense of decisions being made with power and influence that is remote and that we can identify in any way as being top-down.