What You Can Get Away With

Hierarchy is ultimately based on servility and force, slavery and violence.
Most people work in a hierarchy.
We claim to be a democracy, because we are allowed to make a choice between strangers once in a while, - who should represent us on the county council, who we should send to the House of Commons.
In our daily lives there is precious little democracy.
Two hundred years ago Napoleon famously mocked the English as a nation of shopkeepers. In contrast to the Continent, where political and social relations were seriously hierarchical, England had developed somewhat differently, maintaining some medieval traditions of independence and equality alongside the fashionable centralization of the state.
There were many tradesmen, labourers, yeomen, people who worked either on their own account or by temporarily hiring their labour to others. Vast estates, like those of southern and eastern Europe, with their semi feudal relations were few in England.
But these days we are heading towards neo feudal social and work relations.
Few people work independently. Most people have a boss.
The most visible example of this is the near disappearance of independent shops. Small independent shops may provide a niche market, but the vast majority of sales go through large anonymous chains, run on hierarchical principles.
Each shop worker wears a uniform and is responsible to a boss, a supervisor, a superior, who likewise wears a uniform and is answerable to their superior.
This work relationship is so ubiquitous that we scarcely notice it anymore. It is simply how things are.
Yet, this social and work relationship is not a ‘normal’ relationship.
It is a relationship that is based on the military model, that is the model of violence.
The robber chief plunders and loots, and rewards and punishes his followers.
Our working lives are run on principles of reward and punishment. Obedience is rewarded. Pleasing our superior is rewarded. Achieving the goals of our own particular gang is rewarded. Considerations as to the rightness of our actions are put to one side.
If an action is not specifically prohibited by the state then we can do it.
But whatever we can get away with is fair game.
There is no need of ten commandments to remind us when we go astray.
Hierarchy is based on reward and punishment. It is the zombie society of the servile. It needs but one commandment, ‘Obey the Regulations.’
Right and wrong, good and evil, is replaced by what you can get away with.