In the natural world, we often similar solutions evolve across many species because the solution space for challenges such as movement tends to be fairly small. This phenomenon, known as convergent evolution, illustrates that nature tends to converge on a small set of optimal strategies when faced with similar types of problems. One such strategy is the development of systems for coordination. The ability to act as a unified whole turns out to be a very useful adaptation for the functioning of any complex organism. Let’s take a look at why that is.
To thrive, animals must coordinate the actions of countless cells, tissues, and organs. This coordination is made possible by the nervous system and the brain, which integrate sensory input, process information, and orchestrate responses. Without such systems, a complex organism would collapse into chaos. Imagine a human body where each organ acted independently: the heart pumps without regard for oxygen levels, the lungs breathe without synchronizing with the muscles, and the limbs move without direction. Such an organism would have a very short existence. Coordination proves to be essential for orchestrating complex dynamic systems.
Of course, not all large organisms require such intricate systems. Take the Armillaria ostoyae, a fungus that spans thousands of acres. This organism thrives in a relatively static environment, relying on a network of mycelium to absorb nutrients and reproduce. Its structure is homogeneous, and its ability to adapt to rapid change is limited. While it is vast, it lacks the adaptability of animals. The need for coordination arises from the demands of the environment and the complexity of the tasks at hand. In dynamic, unpredictable environments, the ability to act in coordinated fashion becomes a survival imperative.
We can extend this principle beyond individual organisms to societies, which can be thought of as metaorganisms. Just as cells and organs work together within a body, individuals within a society collaborate to achieve shared goals. Societies, like organisms, compete for resources, and their competition exerts selective pressure. Those that can effectively coordinate labor and resources are more likely to persist and thrive. In small societies, coordination can be relatively simple. A tribe might have a leader who helps organize tasks, but much of the work is distributed among autonomous individuals, each specializing in a specific role, like hunting, crafting, or farming. The structure is flat, and communication is direct.
However, as societies grow, so too does the need for more sophisticated coordination. The transformation from a small tribe to a large civilization is a shift where quantity transforms into quality. With more people comes greater specialization, and with specialization comes interdependence. A blacksmith in a small town might work independently, but in a large society, blacksmiths become part of a broader network of producers, traders, and consumers. This interdependence demands systems to manage complexity, much like a nervous system manages the complexity of a multicellular organism. A group of people specializing in a particular profession is akin to an organ within a living organism.
This pattern emerges in all types of human organizations, from companies to governments. In a small team, direct communication suffices. Each member knows their role, and decisions can be made collaboratively. But as the organization grows, the lines of communication multiply exponentially. What works for five people becomes unmanageable for fifty, and impossible for five hundred. At this point, delegation becomes necessary. Departments form, each with its own leader, and these leaders coordinate with one another. Such hierarchical structure necessarily emerges as a solution to the problem of scale. It mirrors the way an organism relies on a brain and the nervous system to manage its many parts.
The need for coordination, in turn, gives rise to the need for authority. Authority is not inherently oppressive; it is a tool for managing complexity. In a software development project, for example, dozens of individuals might work on interconnected tasks. Frontend developers rely on backend developers to provide data, while backend developers depend on database administrators to manage information. If one team member fails to deliver, the entire project can stall. To prevent such breakdowns, the team must agree on shared norms, schedules, and decision-making processes. These agreements require a team lead to take charge in order to resolve disputes, set priorities, and ensure that everyone is aligned. This authority is not arbitrary; it emerges from the practical demands of coordination.
The same principle applies to large-scale industries. Modern factories, with their complex machinery and hundreds of workers, cannot function without a clear chain of command. Independent action gives way to combined action, and combined action requires organization. Authority, in this context, is not a top-down imposition but a bottom-up necessity. It arises because of the material conditions of production dictated by the scale, complexity, and interdependence of tasks.
Critics of authority often argue for absolute autonomy, but such arguments overlook the real and tangible need for coordination. Authority and autonomy are not opposites; they exist on a spectrum, and their balance shifts with the needs of the group. In a small, simple society, autonomy might dominate. In a large, complex one, authority becomes indispensable. To reject authority outright is to ignore the lessons of both biology and history: that coordination is the foundation of complexity, and that complexity, in turn, demands systems to manage it.
Authority, far from being a mere social construct, is a natural response to the challenges of scale and complexity. It is not inherently good or evil. Rather, it is an effective tool for addressing the needs of the group and the demands of the environment.
This is a practical, durable, and reasonably strong point. Unfortunately the full post lacks these qualities.
The passage as a whole is a poor argument that conflates authority and hierarchy and coordination all together, leaving each term poorly defined. It starts from declaring coordination as essential to refined and effective function, and then makes a tautological argument where the most familiar organizational form is substituted for a categorical definition.
Even the supporting points are flimsy.
That's where the line of argument breaks down. Pulling out one of the most complex things in nature, the brain. That should be a master stroke, shouldn't it? But where is the leadership in the brain? Where is the command center? Which neurons are superordinate or subordinate? Which neuron (or neurons) is the Chief Executive of the brain? Do you even have a category of neurons specialized to give orders, and another category specialized to receive them? No, there is no neuroscientific evidence to support this. Sensory neurons have ganglia, but these are less of "leaders" than "signal relayers" performing a function of equal importance to each other cell in the sensory system, without any structural power over them. The whole thing is an acentric tangle of relationships. You can say that "the brain controls and regulates the body", but the analogy promptly ends there, and is not observed on any fractal scale. At best there is only that one level of hierarchy. Like an ant-hill or beehive (the most cognitively and socially sophisticated classes of insect), or a flock of birds (one of the most sophisticated orders of vertebrates), or the mycelial networks of fungal cells, the brain has an emergent complexity from interactions amongst many distinct and equal units that have a peer-to-peer operation paradigm.
For decades, biologists talked about the "queen" bee or ant as the commander of the hive. But the queen is merely the reproductive unit, so this is a false assessment that we now understand was tinted by humans of a specific culture projecting their assumptions onto the science they were studying, and thereby weakening science by not addressing their own perspectives and biases.
"Leader" or "leadership" is a poorly-defined concept that only even exists in specific languages. If you're going to make arguments based on naturalistic observation, you need to have a rigorous terminology, not some bastardized word that was trotted out by the emerging bourgeoisie to detour revolutionary thought into bolstering their takeover of society, deposing the nobility and simply taking the nobility's structural place, unchanged, with just a few incentives and adages to deflect critique. Purported ideology can change, while leaving intact the oppressive structures within a society.
For monarchists, their affinity for monarchism comes from fantasizing about themselves as the monarch. For liberals, their affinity for capitalism comes from them fantasizing about themselves as the CEO. We're going to need socialists who don't succumb to the trap of pyramidal structures of social status, just because they fantasize about themselves or self-insert at the top of the pyramid.
Articulation is necessary. Coordination is necessary, and can take many forms. Authority is a less well-defined concept (this is one reason why I quit using the word "authoritarian"; it has limited use both associatively and etymologically). Hierarchy is a better-defined concept, but it is absolutely not synonymous with coordination. We should all avoid making that hasty mental shortcut.
The argument is that specialized coordination mechanisms are necessary and delegation is how this problem is solved both in nature and human societies.
The argument is that the brain as a whole is a coordinating mechanism for the organism not regarding the details of structure of the brain itself. It's a coordination mechanism that evolved to solve the problem of orchestrating the actions of the body.
Likewise, and and bee hives have their own solutions to the problem of coordination. Nowhere have I argued that there is a single prescriptive way to solve the the problem. Merely that the problem exists, and central coordination mechanism like the brain is a common solution that emerges in response.
Authority is in this context is defined as an individual who acts as a representative for a group of people working together with the whole group being a node within the hierarchy. The person or persons in positions of authority are vested with certain decision making powers on behalf of the group. I don't see the word as being problematic, and there's simply appears to be a knee jerk reaction against it amongst the western left.
The core point I'm making here is that hierarchies arise as a response to a specific problem which is coordinating work of large numbers of people and having efficient communication. Another way to look at it is as levels of abstraction. Each level of the hierarchy deals with the functional output of the layer below, while the details of the task being accomplished are of interest to those who are directly engaged in accomplishing the task.
This makes sense iff you are talking about hierarchies like a file system. But when you mention department managers, you are talking about social hierarchies; you are then treating these as inevitable simply because you observe them and declare them so.
Colective intelligences like a flock of birds or a colony of ants can exhibit very complex behavior from simple individual protocols. This would disprove the assertion that "you need authority and specialization to handle complexity". Even slime molds have been shown to be able to solve certain geometric problems faster and/or more cheaply than a human brain could.
If you are talking about authority sensu lato as any individual representative with vested decision-making power... then who is this arguing against? The anti-organizational anarchists, who limit themselves from ever becoming a force to be taken seriously?
No, that is absolutely not what I'm doing. Once again, I'm saying hierarchies emerge to facilitate abstraction. People at the higher levels of the hierarchy have more general focus, while people at the bottom are focused more on specific details of the problem being solved. This approach has proven itself to be an effective solution to coordination and communication. I'm also not aware of any practical alternatives to it.
This doesn't disprove the need for centralized control systems because these examples solve different problems. However, individual ants and birds do require these types of control mechanisms hence why they end up with brains and nervous systems. And as I've mentioned earlier, I'm not saying that centralized control structures are the only possible solution to the problem, merely that it's a common one.
The goal is to help people understand why systems of authority tend to emerge, and what problem they solve.
If you're not actually arguing for the necessity of a small professional or otherwise influential class of people to persistently have a majority of decision-making power, then doesn't the point end up being kinda moot?
To say that coordination is a form of convergent evolution is kind of like saying that heterotrophy is a form of convergent evolution. It's just so broad.
I don't think it's too broad at all, and it's interesting to see how similar problems and up being solved in similar ways at different scales of organization. What I am arguing is that there is necessity for a role of coordinators and mediators that many people reject as a knee jerk reaction. How that's implemented is up for debate, and there are many effective strategies that have been seen historically, but the underlying problem is real and tangible.
I'm actually in full agreement with that, as long as "coordinator" isn't just used in place of "leader" which in turn was used in place of "lord".
I would say that most people in the West subconsciously look for a figure of dominion, because that's what they're used to. But it would also be a mistake to simply go diametrically against (like that knee-jerk reaction) what one is familiar with, for the same reason.
Right, I think the key focus should be on accountability first and foremost. That's what ultimately matters. There must be effective mechanisms to hold people who are vested with authority to account and to recall them when it becomes necessary. And I think it's useful to establish why we end up with particular social structures, and then we can talk about their deficiencies and how they can be addressed in practical terms. The position of a coordinator or a leader should not be seen as being one of privilege. It's a just a specific role within the social organism.