u/wompt

etymologically speaking, hierarchy was first

> from Greek hierarkhia "rule of a high priest," from hierarkhēs "high priest, leader of sacred rites"

then around 1400

> "rank in the sacred order; one of the three divisions of the nine orders of angels;" loosely, "rule, dominion," from Old French ierarchie (14c., Modern French hiérarchie), from Medieval Latin hierarchia "ranked division of angels" (in the system of Dionysius the Areopagite).

and finally, in the modern sense

> "ranked organization of persons or things" is recorded in English by 1610s, initially of clergy, and probably influenced or reinforced by resemblance to unrelated higher.

On this sub, this word seems to be used as a catch all for all rule (and that is not what this word means), we are anarchists, not anhierachists, and I think the usage of hierarchy as indicative of all archies makes for poor communication and understanding.

Can we leave hierarchy to be indicative of explicitly ranked orderings so that we may better understand all archy? Using specifics in reference to the general is ultimately the degradation of our ability to talk about things.

in modern societies, there seems to be an attempt to have complexity at scale, which seems antithetical to the anarchist project. the larger the population that you are forming a body from, the less that can be said about them. a small group might have some spiritual, political, economic, etc. views that can't really be attributed to each individual in the body.

the only positivities we can really assert about humanity in general, is that we all need clean food, clean water, and shelter from the elements. You might be able to add other things to this, like social interaction/community, but there are probably some out there that would dispute this, preferring to be by themselves. i know for a fact some of us reject voting, the economy, the education system (as-is), representation, and many other aspects of governance so that the democratic socialist project can not be part of a larger scale anarchy. (though it could find a place at a smaller scale with people that jive with those ideas).

anarchy at large should mostly be a project of negation, while upholding the few things that we all share in common, we can play with other things on a smaller scale between the people who actually believe in those things, while having a sort of "firewall" to prevent those local positivies from becoming global positivities (for the global positivities are extremely basic by necessity - there are few things we can posit about all of us)