🇺🇸 ❤️ Hierarchy

I’ve been finding it comforting, in recent months, to reread Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy.  Besides being a pretty good story, I love seeing how his First Hundred Mars colonists, as well as subsequent generations, approach building their new Martian society.  It’s reminding me that different, better worlds are possible, even within the messiness and oppression of our capital-dominated systems.

A few weeks ago, right as Trump and Elon started ramping up their fire-and-defund campaign, I read a section of Blue Mars in which the Martian colonists, after a civil war, are drafting their own constitution.  One of the First Hundred, Vlad, is arguing for a socialist/cooperative economic structure, against a kind of Martian tech-bro type.  Vlad asks,

‘Do you believe in democracy and self-rule as the fundamental values that government ought to encourage?’

‘Yes!’ Antar repeated, looking more and more annoyed.

‘Very well.  If democracy and self-rule are the fundamentals, then why shoyuld people give up these rights when they enter their workplace? In politics we fight like tigers for freedom, for the right to elect our leaders, for freedom of movement, choice of residence, choice of what work to pursue—control of our lives, in short.  And then we wake up in the morning and go to work, and all those rights disappear.  We no longer insist on them.  And so for most of the day we return to feudalism.  That is what capitalism is—a version of feudalism in which capital replaces land, and business leaders replace kings. But the hierarchy remains.  And so we still hand over our lives’ labor, under duress, to feed rulers who do no real work.’

For us Americans, it’s not just our work lives either.  We submit to hierarchies in our political system, our education system, our organized religions (especially Christianity).  It’s the water we swim in.  Of course we’re not the only ones, but for a country that Loves Freedom as much as we say we do in our marketing campaigns, we really don’t act like it.  

And we’re certainly not acting like it these days.  From the stream of Terran tech-bros lined up to lick Trump’s boots at the inauguration, to the congressional Democrats whose hAnDs ArE tIeD and cAn OnLy Do So MuCh, to the fact that Trump just said ‘Elon’s in charge now’ and so many people seem to buy it(!), we’re suffering from either a love of hierarchy or a blindness to a world outside of it, or both.

I forget who originally said it, but it seems that a lot of us actually do fear freedom.  Many Americans are comfortable, even enthusiastic, about submitting to the Elon/Trump regime; many more seem uncomfortable with it but either believe the hierarchies of the system (judicial/congressional checks and balances) will prevail—or can’t conceive of acting outside of those hierarchies.

This also might explain why so many of our elected leaders, institutions, etc, also seem to be ‘obeying in advance’, as Timothy Snyder puts it.  We’re trapped in hierarchy, even to the point of handing over our freedom before it’s asked of us.  

Now, I’ve been privileged enough to be self-employed or funemployed for most of the past five yers, which means I’ve been living outside a lot of these hierarchies for a while now—long enough that I’ve started learning that they don’t have to be the default.  We don’t, as the Davids Graeber and Wengrow write in The Dawn of Everything (another good read for expanding one’s idea of the possible in social construction), ‘have to make do with real chiefs and play freedoms.’ 

Yes, Elon and Trump have some real power right now.  But they don’t have nearly as much as they act like they do.  In a lot of ways, their authority is just like the fairies in Peter Pan—if we stop believing in them, they’ll disappear.  It’s scary to imagine what might follow, but we have to try.

The alternative, I think, is scarier.  If we don’t start rejecting these hierarchies, we may find ourselves voicing the same last words as many Nazis after World War II ended: ‘I was only following orders.’