Why Are We So Comfortable With Hierarchies? Are Authoritarians Cozy?
In this essay I will explore why the our social and personal lives are structured as hierarchies. Why is the default mode of organization a hierarchical one?
Have you ever had a guttural reaction to something you heard—perhaps you scoffed derisively, rolled your eyes, lamented the stupidity of such an idea!—but then you thought to yourself later in the day, in the privacy of your own mind: “why did I react that way?”
Have you ever believed whole-heartedly in something that you cannot articulate? You have feelings about policies, laws, society, how things “ought to be done,” but when somebody asks why you believe those things, you can’t answer?
Or do you never re-consider your viewpoints on anything, assuming what you already think must be true?
Why are people so comfortable with hierarchical structures? Of thought, family systems, the workplace, and, yes, the government. Why do we want a president who is perceived as stubborn, disagreeable, and decisive rather than collaborative and empathetic?1
Maybe it starts from birth. Let’s follow the life of a baby—we’ll call him Ronan (because that’s the name my mom would’ve given to her next boy if she had another boy).
I. Authoritarianism starts at birth!
Ronan is born one day. Ronan leaves the womb and looks up into the world for the first time to see his new authoritarians—Mom and Dad welcome him as the doctor over their shoulder readies the absurd bill. “Don’t worry, Ronan,” they say, “we just know our healthcare company has our interests at heart!”
Ronan goes home and for the next eighteen years lives under the iron fist of his parents. Sure, I’m being quite flippant here, but think about it this way: most houses are still patriarchal. The father figure demands obedience and respect, whether they’ve earned it or not. Even in households without a patriarch, the leading figure(s) commands the children. Kids aren’t given a strong voice in the typical family structure.
I’m not saying parental figures or guardians should share an equal amount of power with children in a family structure. Of course parents and guardians should inform a kid’s behavior. Sometimes what’s best for a child does not align with that kid’s own wants.
But we should always question structures.
From the day kids are brought home, they are ensnared into a hierarchical system and taught that basic structure of society. Could too much inequality of power in family dynamics lead to ideological problems later in life? The dangers of such an unquestioned structure are made clear by psychologist Alice Miller in her book For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child Rearing and the Roots of Violence. She illustrates how the, in her words, “poisonous pedagogy” around child-rearing can lead to, and has led to, oppressed children repressing their feelings and abusing others later in life as a result.2
It’s important to consider how the structures we have at home inform a child’s outlook, even if it sounds silly. I’m sure some parents would scoff at the idea that there should be a more equal power dynamic in the household. And scoff they may! Ideas are meant to be challenged and constantly defended by those espousing them. But the troubling trend of younger generations being compelled by hierarchies and military-style leadership3 is a cause for concern. If authoritarian-esque home lives are impressing into the minds of younger generations that strong-arm, insensitive leadership styles are desirable, then we’re failing younger generations in an extremely personal way. We’re failing by example.
II. Ronan goes to school to learn about conformity
After about five years (though in an ideal world, shouldn’t we be teaching our kids much, much earlier in life?) of ironclad rule by his parents, Ronan starts to take lessons in an ugly, monotonous government building with metal detectors to pass through on the way in and armed police standing guard out front. Its a modern school. This is the place kids will spend 40 hours a week during their formative years learning how to fit into society. Ronan will be told where to sit, what to study, which classes he’s in, how to read and what to read; he will take standardized tests, get compared to his peers, and yelled at by teachers; and he will start to understand how he fits into the wider hierarchy, not just at home.
Ronan’s hierarchy at school goes like this: the students are told what to do by teachers, who are told what to do by the principal, who is told what to do by the superintendent, who is told what to do by the school board (who is told what to do by voters? You tell me who’s on your local board of education).
The key point is this: Ronan makes no decisions. Everything is decided top-down. This isn’t always and necessarily a bad thing; curriculums exist to set the guardrails on what policy writers think an educated populace looks like and what they should know. However, the hierarchical system rears its head yet again. Constantly. From the ages of (generally) 5-18 for 40+ hours a week.
Should we reconsider how we structure schools? Especially as schools become increasingly militaristic with top-down rulemaking?4
I think this hierarchical schooling system has created a subdued nation that is familiar with, and therefore more accommodating toward, authoritarian ideologies and regimes. As mentioned above, Alice Miller studied the roots of fascism in Germany and found that the educational system contributed to its rise. Another academic, Bruce Romanish, writes that students are taught early and often that they have no choice in the matter of their education because the important underlying lesson is conformity.5
There may be, and probably are, strong rationales for certain school policies—like the attendance policy—but those policies are subservient to the primary goal of teaching the importance of compliance with authorities.6 Building one’s capacity for learning and critical thought is not a goal at the forefront of schooling systems. Schools center around rote memorization and regurgitation of what is memorized. Schools provide knowledge in “preshaped forms” without signaling to students that those forms were themselves influenced by the assumptions and dispositions of the people handing the knowledge down (or their bosses).7 We end up with graduates who have learned how to accept rules and information from authority without question; we have graduates who don’t have the capacity for critical reflection of themselves or the institutions governing the world. In fact, such critical self-reflection is often viewed negatively, especially (in my experience) in the manospohere, techbro environment where the mythical, hyper-masculine man is imagined—wrongly—to always be right and victimized by a system of critical thought (this will perhaps be the topic of a later essay).
Standardized testing illustrates the truth of this primary goal. Students are diverse in ways of understanding, knowledge systems, and methods of absorbing what is taught. Yet, the “goal” and “measuring stick” of primary education is the standardized test—the statewide test, the ACT, the SAT, and more tests in secondary eduction like the MCAT, LSAT, Bar, CPA Exam, and on and on. School systems “appropriat[e] the language of individualized instruction” without actually offering individualized instruction, so the school winds up knowing nothing about what individual students know or need.8 And remember, those individual students don’t get a say. What results, as Romanish argues, is a school system churning out commodities—students who “internalize the purposes of their education” and “offer ‘employment’ as the reason they are in school.”9
The content of schooling, too, galvanizes hierarchical societies. Clinton Allison explains that schools have formal and hidden curriculums that contribute to racial biases, on top of funding disparities that strip opportunities and resources away from students from marginalized areas.10 The hidden curriculum refers to the fact that courses in history and literature are often “centered on the lives of upper- and upper-middle-class Anglo-European or white American males.”11 Content like this, which is considered the default in the US, cements institutional hierarchies like racism and misogyny.
The upshot is that schools inculcate a population with sympathies for hierarchical structures and dogmas. It’s not that the education system outright says its goal is to force students to organize themselves hierarchically, but that the mechanisms of education in the United States instill in people a familiarity and comfort with the way hierarchy works. This comfort with hierarchy manifests itself in elected leadership. It also subtly quiets any alarm bells that would ordinarily ring so that each new abuse of power or concentration of market wealth comes off as work that someone deserving has performed rather than the theft of public assets that belong to all of us.
III. Ronan becomes an adult—sorry, I meant employee
Ronan graduates from school and becomes Employee. He is Employee for Company. Company tells Ronan what day to start and what to wear when he starts. Company tells him that the workday is 8am-5pm with an unpaid lunch hour. It takes Ronan about 40 minutes to commute to work, but he doesn’t mind—he’s listening to a dungeons and dragons podcast on the way. Company also tells him that the work week is Monday-Friday. Hey, just like school! Ronan thinks.
Ronan wonders why it is that five days of seven each week are dedicated to work that benefits somebody else. And on those five days, nine hours (plus commute!) are taken.
Ronan makes widgets for Company. Company tells Ronan how to make widgets and with what material he should do it. Company really loves Ronan’s widgets. They match his retirement and give him a generous amount of PTO—two whole weeks! Company also has a coffee machine in the break room with generic tubs of coffee. Company says Ronan can only have two coffee breaks a day, but Ronan is more of a tea guy anyway.
Company has Meeting, but Ronan isn’t invited. Meeting is for special members only, members who bought Meeting tickets. The tickets are called shares in Company parlance. At Meeting, Company tells special members how much money they made from Ronan’s widgets. Then Company and special members decide how best to divvy up the profits from Ronan’s widgets. Ronan doesn’t get a say. Even though it was his labor that made the widgets, he’s not a special member.
Company told Ronan to work from home during the pandemic. Company made gross, unethical amounts of money during the pandemic.12 Ronan likes working from home though. He saves money on commuting and has extra flexibility to both do his work (and even more work, now that Company can reach him on his phone and laptop at all hours of the day) and take care of small household things. He also can workout in the mornings instead of commuting 40 minutes and keep his companion animals company.
But now its 2025 and Company orders Ronan to return to work—as if he wasn’t working during the previous five years when Company made gross, unethical profits. Company says returning to the office will boost the workplace atmosphere and productivity. Company ignores that they just made record profits, and continue to do so. Ronan understands that return to office mandates are not about productivity; he understands that they are about control. But what can he do.
At work, decisions are unilaterally made by the people at the top—the boss, the CEO, the Board of Directors, the Shareholders (most of which are rich people—the wealthiest 10% of people now hold 93% of stock market wealth).13 The workplace is a dictatorship. Each company is its own little kingdom.14 As Elizabeth Anderson highlights in Private Government, companies control our work lives and also have “the legal authority to regulate workers’ off-hour lives as well.”15 Employees don’t get to decide or even contribute to decisions about how, when, where, or why they do their work despite the fact that they spend at least five days a week there for nine hours a day, plus commuting time (and think about the many people who are forced to work overtime).
At no point in a kid-turned-student-turned-employee’s life do they assert control over the majority of their daily activities. They are given commands, expected to perform tasks, and have zero voice about how the fruits of their labor are to be distributed. And this is simply taken for granted as the default method of business organization.
The people who actually make the widgets or perform the services that make money have absolutely zero say in where that money goes or the means by which the products are made.
Our homes and schools create familiarity with and help us conform to our private governments: the workplace. How can we be surprised with the rise of authoritarianism and fascism across the globe when it’s the only method of organization we have ever experienced?
Richard Wolff, a world renowned Economist,16 hit on this issue in his book Democracy at Work (see Haymarket Books). He warns that a genuine democracy may be undermined by “a society in which capitalism is the basic economic system" because a genuine democracy would require that everybody receive the resources and access necessary to participate meaningfully in decision-making in the workplace and in all levels of government.17 In other words, the hierarchical structures in our workplaces disrupt and undermine the purportedly democratic institutions of public governance.
Hierarchical workplaces did not crop up incidentally. Business interests fought to concentrate power after the New Deal Era, leading to a stark decline in labor power over the last fifty years.18
The predominate power dynamics we are exposed to for most, if not all, of our lives is a hierarchical one. Those with authority send commands down to us. Abuses of such authority are common—so common that they are normalized (I’m thinking now of the episode of How I Met Your Mother where Barney explains the “Chain of Yelling,” in which a boss yells at an employee, who yells at their spouse, who yells at their child—and we’re all familiar with this sentiment).
So shouldn’t we reconsider workplace dynamics too?
IV. Conclusion
I’m not attempting to persuade anybody to quit their job right this minute and join a commune. This essay it designed to provoke thought and criticism about the unexamined structures in our lives. We are born into a hierarchical family dynamic, ushered through an authoritarian schooling system, and plopped out in the workforce where the next dictator will control what we make, how we make it, where we make it, and where the proceeds of that work go.
Are there solutions?
Sure, but it seems unlikely that any will be implemented without breaking the taboo on certain organizational structures and modes of thought.
Richard Wolff explains in a lecture how capitalists have manipulated institutions to fear monger about any economic system that is not capitalism. And capitalists have done an incredible job. Nobody knows what socialism, communism, Marxism, Trotskyism, and on and on, truly are, but everybody is scared of them. People still unironically say that capitalism is a good thing, a successful venture that has liberating powers. And people still proudly proclaim that their country is the best country (nationalism—another topic for a future essay.) These manipulations yield the incredibly powerful taboo around extra-capitalist discourses.
But take away the -isms. Take away the (largely false) historical allusions. Forget the names and emotions associated with ideologies we’re told are murderous and dangerous.
Wouldn’t you have chosen a school where you get a say in your learning outcomes? Where you had a voice in the methods used to teach? Wouldn’t you want to work in a place where you get to vote on how the work is done? Where you get to vote on where the profits go?
Do you think having such schools and workplaces would change how we vote and who we vote for?
Post Script: I want to make sure to acknowledge two things when I write my essays. First, it’s entirely possible that I’m wrong. My opinions, though I have done research and included citations, are not fact and should in no way form the basis of a person’s entire mode of thought. We see too often that the words a persuasive and charismatic person says are taken for absolute gospel (though I’m not saying I’m either of those). I’m a human and, importantly, a man—so I’m likely to be wrong about everything. Keep that in mind as you consider this essay and explore the sources I cited.
Second, I’m trying my best to use sources that are accessible to all readers. News articles are usually accessible at least with a free daily article. The academic articles and journals were accessed via JSTOR through my local library’s subscription. Please get a library card and check out academic journals for yourself! Note that Alice Miller’s book and Richard Woolf’s book are not generally accessible for free. If you decide to purchase them, please consider purchasing new from an independent bookseller or a used copy (not from amazon or other large book sellers). Used copies are cheaper and often have fun character quirks like the markings of some other thoughtful person!
https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2000/08/presidents
See Generally, Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child Rearing and the Roots of Violence.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/11/younger-people-more-relaxed-alternatives-democracy-survey
https://medium.com/swlh/the-dictatorship-that-is-school-223f972806fe
Bruce Romanish, “Authority, Authoritarianism, and Education,” Education and Culture, Fall 1995, page 20.
Id.
Id. at 22.
Id. at 21.
Id. at 22.
Clinton Allison, “Poverty and Education: Do Schools Reproduce Social Class Bias in America?” Counterpoints, 1995, page 101.
Id.
Examples here: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/amazon-and-walmart-have-raked-in-billions-in-additional-profits-during-the-pandemic-and-shared-almost-none-of-it-with-their-workers/
https://inequality.org/article/stock-ownership-concentration/
Elizabeth Anderson, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It), page 39.
Id.
Don’t let the word “Marxist” scare you; as he says, he “doesn’t have horns” just because businesses and politicians have made the word taboo.
Richard Wolff, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism, pages 147-48.
Id. at page 149.
Very true and also you’re very cute
True and also you’re cute