Having adopted a second male stray cat, I've been learning about the endless selfish competition among male cats. Male cats find hierarchies nearly impossible. Each must fight for his own feline domination of every inch of territory. They are compelled to do this, stronger than any other drive except those associated with extreme hunger or near death illness. Though during evening hours anyway, the daytime is a mostly-respected sleeping truce. (This is not to say I haven't noticed other secondary tendencies, like a peculiar avuncularity in my older cat that the new cat doesn't seem to appreciate much. Though I wonder if this might be my anthropomorphism.)
Cats always look like they are "smiling" but that is merely the shape of their jaw. They are incapable of generating the myriad facial expressions used in hierarchical relationships, including smiling. Though they can express respect/submission by backing off, they cannot express "I am your tool" in an operational non-loving way. (They can express "love" but not "I will do this for you, my liege.")
Thus there are no cat armies, cat parliaments, cat corporations, etc. Cat society is a anarchy that seems to be guided by fairly strict rules they all intuit. It's obviously successful and has endured for tens of millions of years. It's eminently suitable...for cats. It's not the way canines or humans or many other species have evolved. For us, hierarchy is omnipresent and therefore likely necessary for creating the kinds of environments we work well in. We are not physically adapted to self-sufficient solitary hunting like cats do. We rely on social products without which we cannot function. Our self-invention is a social product. We know ourselves from using what we have learned from others.
In fact hierarchy seems to be requirement for "civilization" and even pre-civilized societies, though the pre-civilized societies operated on much smaller scales, tribes in which everyone knows and respects everyone else (mostly).
Now I give some respect to left anarchists and the like in many ways. But this notion that we can create a non-hierarchical human society is just ludicrous, in my view. We cannot work that way and never have.
The question is better changed to how we can make human hierarchies work for everyone, and better for all.
Q: Has human society ever been non-Authoritarian? A: No, at least not since the dawn of Agriculture, when societies were too large for everyone to know everyone else.
Q: How can we create a good society without harmful Authoritarianism? A: Yes, that is the question.
Nowadays, and at least technically, we could conceivably build True Democracy. In True Democracy the intermediate "Representative" layer (which generally represents power more than the people) is done away with, and everyone directly votes on Everything.
Now there are reasons to believe this wouldn't necessarily work any better anyway.
A) First of all, human opinions are themselves highly malleable social products, created from social experiences ("learning") and endlessly reshaped by peer pressure and mass media. The control of the mass media and things like religious doctrines are of huge importance here. If those things represent elite interests, and it is virtually certain they will, human opinions will be virtually controlled by the elite, though probably highly sectarian as well and there is no reason for the elite not to be sectarian.
B) Not everyone is capable of rendering useful judgement on everything. People don't have the expertise, time, or ability to acquire useful understanding. Specialists are useful for precisely this reason. In Representative Democracy, professional representatives can acquire useful understanding from the "best" that society has to offer. (The problem being that "the best" is generally always going to represent some sect of the elite.)
C) Not everyone participates in everything. It is more sensible that people who themselves are involved with or affected by some social production should have pre-eminent ability to govern it. This is the premise of a (now mostly forgotten, but interesting) strand of social design called Participatory Democracy. The problem that turns away many is that things become so complicated. And nowadays those who are affected by social production byproducts such as CO2 and CH3 is actually Everyone anyway.
D) If you even try to give everyone a chance to speak their mind on everything, as Anarchists do, you'll basically never stop arguing. If you ever do stop arguing, it's only because most have simply gotten to tired to keep up with the discussion anymore. Generally it seems the way to "win" in Anarchists debates is to be indefatigable. Anarchism is Rule by the People who Won't Shut Up.
Socialists, Communists, Liberals, and others often say that the cure for "Democracy" is real (or better) Democracy. But in practice, it more often seems that "increasing" the level of Democracy doesn't always work well. Referendums often have insane results. (Though right now, living in Texas, I wish we had Referendums to overrule the corrupt right wing state government on abortion, drug, and gun laws, among others. IIRC referendums either enabled or forced drug law reform in many states. A vast majority of Texans would favor drug law reform, but it doesn't align with the sect of ruling elite that has grabbed power more successfully.)
One essential problem is that while there are imbalances in power, true Democracy (no matter how implements) is impossible. Those with power will always find some way to manipulate people's minds and/or the results to their advantage, at the expense of everyone else.
Marx had a mystifying term Dictatorship of the Proletariat which most Socialists and even Communists explain really means an extension of effective democracy to every matter relevant to production and control--those things now controlled by Capital, that is by the powerful and wealthy elite (and therefore to their unique advantage).
But this Dictatorship image returns in the minds of the many who denounce Stalin, Mao, and others.
The truth rarely understood by Americans is that much like the CPC in China today, the Soviet regime was a Democracy in it's own terms, and perhaps even a better democracy than most or all in the west.
Certainly today, under "Dictator" Xi (and curiously also Russia under "Dictator" Putin, though no longer a Communist Dictator) the popularity of the government and most everything is nearly 90%, unlike the 30% typically find in the west.
One aspect of this apparent improvement on the "more liberal" Western Democracy is that are long-lasting Presidents, who aren't merely temporary tools of the oligarchy.
Long lasting leaders with expansive powers and relying ultimately on non-specific popular support seem to necessary to overcome the strong hierarchical tendency towards Rule By The Elites. The essential thing is these powerful central leaders must rely purely on popular support, not divided or controlled by elite sects.
Possibly the single best US President, FDR, also operated like that, serving a unique 4 terms. Obviously this was antithetical to most elite interests, so that possibility was quickly abolished.
Not to say we've had any Presidents since who would have been worthy of more than 2 terms, or even 1 term, except perhaps for JFK assuming his latter day conversion to anti-hegemonism was real.
Which brings up another thing. It doesn't seem that US Presidents can be very much like FDR anyway. FDR was a fluke (and not merely because he was an elite himself...nearly all great leaders have been elites).
That may in some measure get back to the way Presidents are selected. It is not by a truly popular vote but by an inherently sectarian one, which therefore maps back to the sectarian elites.
One improvement therefore would be Popular election of the US president, and having the Vice President be the next highest popular vote winner.
