It was a revelation to me: to have flat structures, you not only need to make it possible to organize without hierarchy, but you also need a process to constantly weed out emerging hierarchies.
i've noticed this is a common source of disagreement i keep having with nonanarchists.
where someone thinks that i'm advocating purely for the organisational aspects of anarchism, but not also materially, socially, culturally, and politically. they'll dismiss my criticisms of the current system or proposals for alternatives as 'that would never work today', and instead cite monolithic, mythological essentialisms like 'human nature' at me which is just their opportunity to mansplain capitalist logic to me and throw down some 'might makes right' moral argument. people who think tool libraries would never work because one time their underpaid coworkers kept stealing other persons' food from the breakroom fridge or something and well that's proof of the greed inherent to all human beings and no we will not interrogate what leads them to stealing food. material conditions? what's that?
anarchism to me isn't simply a worldview or a form of organisation: it's a lifestance, a lifestyle, a way of being, a way of thinking and a way of acting — and i believe it works best when it is all of those things. social change is cultural change is political change. when i advocate for change, i'm advocating to change both the system and the people who recreate it.
'but how will you prevent [insert consequence of hierarchical conditioning] from happening under anarchism?'