[crawfordcomeaux]

I haven't finished reading your reply. I got to this point:

"I do not believe I have made it to the meat of that thesis yet but, up to this point, I have not been convinced by his evidence that there were long-lasting, large-scale human organizations (think city scale and higher) that operated without some hierarchy."

There exists a natural hierarchy between the category of needs for humans to survive and the category of needs for humans to thrive. Nature provides enough.

[eightysixfour]

I honestly don't know what you're trying to say or how it relates to what you quoted from me. What I am saying is that I don't think you can have a large scale population of humans sharing resources cohesively without some sort of sociopolitical heirarchy forming. Graeber argues this is not true and that, as a result, inequality is unnecessary.

[crawfordcomeaux]

I'm trying to say there exist natural hierarchies. If we explicitly acknowledge and account for them in the cultures and the governance models we choose to carry forward, it may be enough hierarchy. There'll also, for a time, be people who choose to realign with nature in such a way and those who'll prefer to not. One of those will be better at meeting needs and a natural inequality will emerge between those factions. I'm thinking inequality might be unavoidable if a culture is going to shift from being largely disconnected from nature to well-aligned with it.