Sacred cow boss: Why do we actually submit to hierarchies?

Hierarchical organizations instill fear, slow people down, and make them stupid. It's time to slaughter them.

Philosopher and author Michael Andrick Emmanuele Contini/Berliner Zeitung

In my imagination, God has a caustic sense of humor and enjoys conferring with the Devil. I imagine, for instance, that after thoroughly examining the Peasants' War, the Thirty Years' War, the English, Dutch, American, and French Revolutions, and shaking his head in disbelief at the German efforts to have a revolution presented to them by their princes as a constitution, he sat down with the Devil. They had to discuss, I believe, how humanity might proceed. After all, the Eurocentric people of Earth had now proclaimed themselves masters of their own destiny in several places and languages—and in doing so, had not only dethroned and decrowned, but even beheaded, crowned heads, the representatives of God on Earth. And isn't regicide blasphemy?

"The people of the earth want to be their own masters, and yet I granted them free will... what to do, Devil?" – His answer still troubles us today: "Well, let's let them be free, let them rejoice in being rid of the kings – and then bind ourselves even more tightly than before." And so the Devil struck the people with blindness, and after their liberation from feudalism, the people eagerly set to work submitting to self-constructed hierarchies, thus becoming fearful, slow, and stupid. How did this happen?

The machine of the organization

People knew that with their revolutions they wanted to escape the unlimited arbitrary power of others over their bodies, their lives, and their possessions. And once escaped, they hastened to write down in which matters no one would henceforth be allowed to dictate to them, and they invented their rights and wrote them down on expensive paper for public declaration.

And once they had written down what their freedoms were and what they were all called – lovely names they had, like "Happiness Pursuit" or "Inviolability" or "Inviolability" and so on – they saw that it really was all very good and that there really was nothing more to do than... what else was there? Yes – organization! After all, they had to make sure that all these wonderful rights were actually exercised.

Conveniences of authority

It is not definitively recorded how exactly the devil interfered in the subsequent discussions on organizing human rights-based societies, but that he did is clearly evident from state and administrative practices worldwide. We therefore leave it to the reader's imagination to ask who in the American, French, and German—oh no, there weren't any in Germany—who exactly in these constitutional conventions and parliaments wasn't actually who he pretended to be, but rather the devil himself. We do know, at least from the outcome, what the devil whispered to the newly liberated free spirits: "No matter what you do, there always has to be someone in charge, someone who makes the decisions for others!" This whisper was ingenious because it was based on profound psychological insight. For although the freedom fighters hated the arbitrariness and cruelty of their feudal lords, they were also human beings and, as such, deeply loved the comforts of authority – namely, that someone does and is responsible for me what I myself could do and be responsible for, but not because it is strenuous (that is Late Low German for “prefer to sleep and eat”).

And so it came to pass that, beneath framed, high-quality prints of the most beautiful and comprehensive declarations of human, civil, women's, men's, and children's rights, little princes reside at their desks in social institutions all over the world, deciding with almost complete arbitrariness what applies to their flock – pardon, subordinates – and what they are to do and what they are to refrain from doing.

The Pharaoh decides

And what's more, we often have several layers of commanders installed who are themselves order-takers of order-takers, and at every level of the lofty hierarchy, one thinks for many, but only with one decision-making mind, thus completely disabling the minds of all the others without any princely dignity, which – as mentioned at the beginning – makes everyone collectively anxious, slow, and stupid. But they hardly minded, after all, they were officially free, and besides, they had all gone into these institutions themselves to earn their bread and surrender their minds. This is how it is in ministries, companies, universities, schools, libraries, swimming pools, editorial offices, clubs, parties, parliamentary groups, on construction sites and in submarines, on ships and boats, in the military and the secret service, in supermarkets, in hospitals, in Rome and Kathmandu, in Hamburg and Buenos Aires, where the air is only good outside, but just as stale in the hierarchies as everywhere else where people subject each other to their whims and where reasons are no reason not to do what the boss wants. The diabolical whispering of the hierarchy finds its culmination in the cheerful mockery of all pyramid inhabitants by the principle according to which the pharaohs at the top of the pyramid, who are furthest of all the inmates of the institution from the soil of earning a living, To live far away and know the least about one's needs, to have the most say for everyone, and to be paid the highest. No one, that is, no human being, could invent that. It was the devil.

Michael Andrick is a philosopher, columnist for the Berliner Zeitung, and bestselling author ("In the Moral Prison"). His new book , "I'm Not In – Thought Notes for a Free Mind," also contains some satires.

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