“There are no hierarchies in nature other than those imposed by hierarchical modes of human thought, but rather differences merely in function between and within living things.”

—  Murray Bookchin , book Post-Scarcity Anarchism

Source: Post-Scarcity Anarchism

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American libertarian socialist author, orator, and philosop… 1921–2006

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“Aristotle thought that men were naturally superior to women and Greeks naturally superior to other races; Victorians thought white men had to shoulder the burden of being superior to savages; and Nazis thought Aryans were a master race. We have come to reject these and many other supposedly natural hierarchies; the history of what we consider moral progress can be viewed as, in large part, the replacement of hierarchical worldviews with a presumption in favor of forms of egalitarianism. This substitution places the burden of proof on those who would deny equal consideration to the interests of all concerned, rather than on those who seek such consideration. Consequently, some reason is needed to justify the fairness of maintaining a hierarchical worldview when we are dealing with animals.”

Steve F. Sapontzis (1945)

Source: Morals, Reason, and Animals (1987), p. 107

“The people of Earth did not understand that humans were part of a worldwide organism, that something as tiny as a cluster of bacteria could mean the difference between life and death for every living thing, the difference between a functioning, flourishing planet and a desolation.”

Sheri S. Tepper (1929–2016) American fiction writer

Source: The Margarets (2007), Chapter 32, “I Am Gretamara/On Mars” (p. 272)

“But the point, as I argued with Caplan, is not that managers are inherently less intelligent or capable as individuals. Rather, it’s that hierarchical organizations are—to borrow that wonderful phrase from Feldman and March—systematically stupid. For all the same Hayekian reasons that make a planned economy unsustainable, no individual is “smart” enough to manage a large, hierarchical organization. Nobody–not Einstein, not John Galt–possesses the qualities to make a bureaucratic hierarchy function rationally. Nobody’s that smart, any more than anybody’s smart enough to run Gosplan efficiently–that’s the whole point. No matter how insightful and resourceful they are, no matter how prudent, as human beings in dealing with actual reality, nevertheless by their very nature hierarchies insulate those at the top from the reality of what’s going on below, and force them to operate in imaginary worlds where all their intelligence becomes useless. No matter how intelligent managers are as individuals, a bureaucratic hierarchy makes their intelligence less usable.”

Kevin Carson (1963) American academic

Homebrew Industrial Revolution (2010), Chapter 7.
Homebrew Industrial Revolution (2010)

“What hope there is derives from Freud’s assumption that human nature is not so much a hierarchy of high-low, and good-bad, as his predecessors believed, but rather a jostling democracy of contending predispositions, deposited in every nature in roughly equal intensities. … Psychoanalysis is full of such mad logic; it is convincing only if the student of his own life accepts Freud’s egalitarian revision of the traditional idea of a hierarchical human nature.”

Philip Rieff (1922–2006) American sociologist

The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966)

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“The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, vesting every individual with equal rights, was directly opposed to the hierarchical social structure of indigenous Fijian society. Chiefs were at the apex by virtue of their birth and rank. The rest of the people had a communal functional role in this hierarchy.”

Laisenia Qarase (1941) Prime Minister of Fiji

Excerpts from an address to the Commonwealth Workshop in Nadi, 29 August 2005

Hugh Downs photo

“Such close observations of apes and birds and dolphins remind us that humanity is part of a great animal kingdom. All species within this kingdom differ from one another in significant ways, to be sure, but the kingdom does not seem to be organized on the superior/inferior hierarchy. Species are merely different from one another; they are not better than, nor more or less advanced than, each other. The core experience of all animal life is strikingly similar.”

Hugh Downs (1921) American broadcaster

"ABC Radio Perspective on ABC News 20/20 on May 29, 1994"

Pope John Paul II photo

“Born and nurtured when the human being first asked questions about the reason for things and their purpose, philosophy shows in different modes and forms that the desire for truth is part of human nature itself.”

Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) 264th Pope of the Catholic Church, saint

Encyclical Fides et Ratio, 14 September 1998
Source: www.vatican.va http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091998_fides-et-ratio_en.html

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“The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning, while those other subjects merely require scholarship.”

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love

Source: Time Enough for Love: the lives of Lazarus Long; a novel , (1973), p. 366

“A significant observation regarding… architectural representations is that each is of a different nature than the others. They are not merely a set of representations, each of which is an increasing level of detail than the previous one. Level of detail is an independent variable, varying within each architectural representation.”

John Zachman (1934) American computer scientist

Zachman (1986) as cited in: Peter Bernus, Kai Mertins, Günter Schmidt (2005) Handbook on Architectures of Information Systems. p. 544

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“The proper functioning of the state is dependent on the proper functioning of the individual, rather than the reverse. And the proper mode of individual Being that's redemptive is Truth. Truth is the antidote to the suffering that emerges with the fall of man in the story of Adam and Eve.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

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