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Calling the skill and ambition distribution a pyramid is really an artifact of history, not biology. If you want to take on 'human nature' you have to examine millions of years of evolution as mostly egalitarian troupe hominids, and state that groups bigger than 100 people are something we haven't had time to evolve for yet.
So you put in checks and balances, it's what makes governance complex, and egalitarian governance is ironically going to be more complex and relational.
The Haudenosaunee / Iroquois Confederacy is a good example of how to approach such a problem.
"mostly" is pulling a lot of weight in that statement, eh?
sure, we took care of the elderly and others in the tribe. packs of wild dogs and monkeys have been seen to do that as well. share food, etc. but if our early tribes are anything like what we see in primates, and it almost certainly was, the distribution of power was not equal.
there are monkeys with differing levels. baboons have a much stricter hierarchy than bonobos, but the structure is still there
I do not claim it is impossible, although I also do not believe that the exceptions disprove the rule. My favorite example personally is the brief anarchist experiment during the Spanish Civil War. The anarchists managed to at least for a short period of time replicate what I believe would be the ideal society.
the issue is that this type of society simply loses to other more authoritarian ones in a sort of Darwinist playing field. the vanguard party commies beat the anarchists and then the nationalists beat the communists. bye bye egalitarian power structure
let's say i am a foot taller than you and weigh 100 pounds more. we have just finished a hunt and we are distributing the spoils. let's say I take double your portion. you speak up "hey I deserve an equal amount" and then I simply look at you and say "no"
what are you gonna do? my genetic makeup (along with external factors of course, like my mother's nutrition while i was in the womb) caused me to have more physical power than you. you have no choice but to bow your head and take what you get.
that doesn't mean it's impossible, for example, to create alliances with others in the tribe and end up with a "social victory" and we actually see these types of behaviors in chimps. but I think that in itself is just another form of power. social intelligence, political and diplomatic maneuvering is a function of intelligence which like physical strength is a makeup genetic (as well as external, like before)
so you may be physically weaker, but mentally stronger. but in the end, power is power.
the older I get, the more I realize how deeply ingrained this structure is in our societies. I wish it weren't, but it really is. the only way around it, I think, would require a radical restructuring of our society and would necessarily have to be just as dystopian as the opposite extreme