"...self-serving, self-perpetuating oligarchies."

[Michael Bailey]

 bandwraith wrote:
 It's the term "oligarchies" that raises huge questions- very
>  relevant to fiction, especially to ATD.
>
>  It is an open question whether a complex system can self-perpetuate
>  without being oligarchical, Even ignoring (at our peril) ecological
>  considerations, for the moment, a complex system, i.e., one with
>  multiple subsystems forming some kind of recognizeable cooperative
>  identity (self-serving) that self-perpetuates...? Can it happen
>  "successfully" without some kind of hierarchy? Reef fucks Cyprian
>  but Cyprian doesn't fuck Reef, etc.- probably not.


aha, but isn't that what creates the instability?  perhaps not...

it does seem reasonable that in a system *viewed as a system*,
certain functions become habitual to certain members

hierarchy doesn't seem to be much use, though, in a good system:
are the kidneys more important than the bowels?
More important is the ability to work, together harmoniously,
to share resources -- isn't it?  If one kidney cell monopolized all
the adrenaline,
it wouldn't thereby be aggrandizing itself, au contraire, it would be
interfering with good co-operation.

But is this sub-systemic co-operation necessarily "subservient" to
some "superior" class entity - such as the organism, the society, the
ecosystem -
or does it (one might opine) actually underlie and create them,
and in some sense, then, itself exert superiority?

although as good co-operators they
are not really into that superiour-inferiour duality
...so maybe, say, they find it more fruitful to make themsevles indispensible
by not proclaiming their own hegemony...instead by performing useful tasks

>  I think I'll go out and play a few holes of anarchist golf and mull it
> over.
>
>

sounds like fun!  meet you at the i+5 hole...