How do you be non-hierarchical and still acknowledge that some people have more knowledge and/or experience about certain subjects?
Great question! I’d say the two – scepticism of hierarchy, and centring of the right knowledge and experience – go together quite naturally, but others may not agree.
The phrase “non-hierarchical” implies an absence of hierarchies, or at least a desire for it.
I’m a descriptivist when it comes to grammar though lol, so: in practice, it’s often used more to mean a desire to minimise all unnecessary hierarchies.
As the word ‘minimise’ implies, there’s an idea that hierarchies are things you can limit, not things you can eliminate. There will always be hierarchies between people as long as there are differences between people. For this reason, some people prefer the term “anti-hierarchical” to “non-hierarchical”.
As the word ‘unnecessary’ implies, not all hierarchies are ones you want to remove. Some types of harmful hierarchies:
Those that reinforce societal oppressions. The harm here is clear, hopefully!
Those that concentrate knowledge in a few people. The harm here may be around security (e.g. because knowledge concentration can become power concentration which is a risk given infiltrators) or lack of growth (centralised knowledge means less skilling up) or group resilience (if the knowledge-holder goes on holiday/burns out, are you screwed?)
Those that provide no benefit. Hierarchies often fundamentally are about limiting autonomy, and that needs to be done for a good reason.
Basically, being against hierarchy is about an analysis of how power in our groups.
This is where your question comes in. In short, often the answer is “with good non-hierarchical structures” – as structure is the key to combatting ignoring valuable knowledge/experience, rather than hierarchy. Some examples off the top of my head:
A lot of knowledge about oppression is concentrated at the bottom of power gradients e.g. with people of colour, with working class/poor people, etc. This is often a hierarchy you want to work with. When talking about combating a form of oppression that affects a particular group, you may want to centre the input of that group e.g. people of colour around white supremacy. How this happens depends on your group and what you’re trying to do, it could involve: prioritising certain voices in a discussion but allowing everyone to take part in decision-making, giving autonomy to certain groups (e.g. a working group, a liberation caucus) to make certain decisions, taking guidance from and being accountable to other groups, etc.
A lot of skills are concentrated at the top of power gradients e.g. with white people, with wealthy people, etc. This is often a hierarchy you want to undo. When needing a particular skill to do a task, one classic way of breaking down hierarchies is skill-sharing e.g. doubling up people doing tasks so that a less versed person is paired with someone with more knowledge, to build in structures of knowledge flow down hierarchies.
tl;dr = there are always some experiences/knowledge you want centre and some you don’t, and non-hierarchical organising tends to suggest using power as the deciding factor.
