Because it didn't start that way. Because _nearly_ every society shows signs of warfare, banding together, governance and structuring society in some sort of hierarchical way. Because even when there is absolutely no reason for someone to _not_ help someone they see in need, they sometimes don't.
Now, this doesn't say we can't make it better, and that anarchists experiments aren't worth trying. But to assert that all hierarchical structuring of society is necessarily bad seems completely unfounded, and misses what good things hierarchical structure brings to human society.
Example: Einstein. This is an example of someone escaping hierarchical society to give us an unquestionable good. Giordano Bruno, Baruch Spinoza, Galileo, the nominalist Peter Abelard; goods that had to circumnavigate hierarchical society.
If I say "a handful of millenniums" I am pointing to the evidence of history. Splinter groups and revolutionaries both of thought and action resisting governments have given us the goods we receive. To say that hierarchical society is the backdrop behindwhich they do good works is begging the question.
Moreover, simply because hierarchical society has done good for us, on the average, does not meant it MUST continue to do so. As I stated earlier, Chomksy, etc. have argued for why anarchism MUST work, not that it works more often than non-anarchisms.
Bruno and Galileo are more memorable than their contemporaries who worked more closely within the hierarchy, but achieved less if you assess their contributions objectively.
>Moreover, simply because hierarchical society has done good for us, on the average, does not meant it MUST continue to do so.
Sure. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Imagine a world wherein our intellectual heroes and vagabonds did not have to answer to the unchecked rule of tyranny, rather than the other way around.
Whence cometh the world of unchecked human excellence?
Given the relative rarity of human excellence, less good than the converse, on balance; were it otherwise, what you rightly call 'excellence' would be merely commonplace.
You mistake me, I think, due to imprecision on my part; by 'it' in the second clause, I refer to the rarity of human excellence, not to a theoretical flowering of suppressed potential in the absence of what you regard as oppressive rule.
Let us stipulate the basic sensibility of your question, and consider its necessary consequences, disregarding the essential imprecision of a term like "angels" for the sake of interesting discourse.
We have, then, "...governments and religious institutions actively engaged in telling us we are not [angels]". We may presume, from the fact that this behavior persists throughout human history, that these agencies see some concrete benefit in so doing; while of course one may find individuals and institutions acting against their own interests, such behavior cannot lend itself to survival across centuries.
Were all humans angels, would those who constitute these doleful organizations see such benefit? I find it doubtful; while "angel" is not properly formulated here or anywhere else, we can assume from context that the cardinal quality of such a creature would be a perfect altruism, one to which gain of self at expense of another would be not merely distasteful but insuperably repellent, if indeed conceivable at all.
The necessary conclusion, then, is that, while there may be some humans who are actually angels, all humans cannot possibly be angels, because no true angel would act in behalf of a scheme centered upon convincing other angels they were in fact not angels, to the real and significant benefit of the schemers.
We therefore find ourselves with the following dilemma: either not all humans are angels, and to have stable and effective government, we must find some way to rule which accounts for this fact; or, not all things which have the human semblance are human, and to have stable and effective government, we must identify and exterminate the unhuman creatures which beset us, down to the last not-man, not-woman, and not-child, in order that we true humans may govern ourselves, free of their blight, in whatever fashion our shared perfect altruism sees fit.
Perhaps you feel I have unfairly caricatured one of these points of view. If so, I commend to you a careful study of the history of the twentieth century, in which the latter opinion may fairly be said to have run rampant across large swaths of the globe.
So your argument is -- some humans being possessed of what we seem to be calling angelic altruism, and some humans being not so blessed -- that, rather than finding some means of rule which accommodates both dispositions, we should overturn all governments and seek not to replace them with anything? You fascinate me. How do you imagine this working?
Structural Oppression is a real thing.