[pdfernhout]

Growing up in the USA I was taught in public school in the 1960s and 1970s that we lived in a better version of Ancient Athens. It took years to realize (e.g. reading Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and Smedley Butler) that in several ways we instead live in a version of Ancient Sparta instead. Perhaps the Athenian ideal was indeed more true when those teachers themselves grew up (in the 1920s and 1930s).

But in any case, as Manuel De Landa says, all real systems are combinations of both meshwork (associative freedom) and hierarchy (imposed structure) -- that often transform into each other. http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm