Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never understood why the "at reasonable scale" is presumed. What happens if I reject that presumption? Why do we assume "millions of people" operating in the same social order is a good thing? Because iphones? Is that reason enough? Do we presume that having millions of people under the same social order is required to make advancements in medicine? It didn't take millions to build Linux or wikipedia, just a couple…
I was thinking of millions, because that's the order of magnitude of the educational system. You could give examples of groups of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands instead if you like. I'm just trying to set a reasonable lower bound for a "society" as a opposed to a small group. Lots of organizational structures work for small groups, but break down when applied to larger ones. What are some of those example…
A key feature of many early human organizational structures was flexibility and creativity. Maybe it's time to do some more experiments. The current structure doesn't really permit that, which is a shame.
Anyway some examples come from Native Americans. One of the arguments in the book is that this idea that social complexity necessitates inequity is false and that its origins are the meeting of Europeans and native Americans. People like Kondiaronk, as depicted by an explorer whose writings disseminated extensively, had deep critiques of the European system of organization, specifically it's focus on profit motive, its punitive justice system, patriarchy, and hierarchies. The enlightenment defense was to cast the egalitarian lives of the native Americans as naive, youthful, ignorant, undeveloped etc. Notice in this thread many doing the same - "sure they were egalitarian, they lived in the stone age!" The book rejects that social inequity is a requirement to leave the stone age.
"Ok but you need hierarchy once you leave society the size of a tribe of 200 people," nope not really, they demonstrate how Teotihuacan started with a rigid hierarchy and transformed itself into an egalitarian society, demonstrating that dense urban society doesn't require inequity and also demonstrating that we can have flexible social systems.
Anyway the book offers no solution, just reflects on three major losses to our global society that we should consider investigating further: the freedom to move away, the freedom to disobey arbitrary authority, and the freedom to experiment with fluidic social structures.
Imo the current social order has already broken down. There's a class of people on this earth that wield unfathomable resources (billionaires). Throughout human history I can think of only a few individuals that had that kind of power, and they at least were responsible for running empires lest they be torn apart suddenly by a mob. Yet today we have thousands. We also seem to have created simple artificial intelligence algorithms/hiveminds and propped them up as infallible and immune-to-ethics (you gonna blame Shell for turning a profit?), and are slowly letting them supplant our liberal democracies as our new rulers (through lobbying and the like) (try to start your own ISP in certain cities).
I feel like it's as valid to say "we just shouldn't try to encapsulate tens of millions under the same social order, it leads to suffering" as it is to say "in tribes there are no iphones." We don't really know, do we? We can't really experiment anymore, can we?