I appreciate the sorts of ways you're thinking about this. I don't think I see it much. It feels like you're looking at things similar to me but arriving at different conclusions. That's super interesting. So here's my belated reply in return.
I don't think shying away from governing hierarchies are pessimistic but maybe you see it that way because I didn't explain myself well.
It's important to separate something. Hierarchy and cooperation are not the same thing. Though I guess in instantiation at the human level, they seem to mostly be.
But multi-cellular creatures are made up of cooperating cells wherein there is no centralized power. It seems like nature has borne out that this configuration is robust.
And, if you squint, markets are a similar thing. I love markets. They're a way that people can make individual choices about what they can offer their neighbor and so be rewarded by their neighbor in this positive sum way. It is, by nature, decentralized (though regulation exists in modern markets and sometimes work well for a time as a patchwork kludge over a janky system).
Anyway, there's trust networks there and lots of interesting stuff we could tangent about. But the point is that markets are a decentralized thing have been around longer than governments. We don't need monopolies on violence to cooperate if social norms forbid violence. Of course, the violent ones hacked the system and so we needed to defend against that, so we picked the violent winner, and governance is born.
This is also an interesting path turning point that, given our current technology and understanding, if we started from zero, you could wonder if we could develop in a way without a single entity with a monopoly on violence because we handle this sort of threat somehow else.
There's that whole debt and reciprocity thing that is even older than markets - hell, animals do it. But I wonder about the scalability of that. I don't believe david graeber's idea that the abstraction of reciprocity was the root of all evil but that's like one take and maybe we could make better reciprocity networks.
This is all rambly. I hope my point comes across though. We lack imagination for configurations that can be that are cooperative without the cancer of centralization.
It would be nice if someone starts imagining this for us. It's very hard to imagine a world so different from our own. But we know, by nature, that it is possible. There are a lot of cells in my body - it's not a scale issue.
My take is that cultural values/social norms are the real thing that makes society. We think it's all these things like laws, money, and borders. But those things are secondary fiction memes to the primary fiction meme of values.
The thing about values are that they are very resistant to centralized control by nature.