While nature tends to strike a balance between growth & decay, hierarchy and decentralization, there is still a "rebalancing" when they get out of whack. The problem is that, with humans, this "rebalancing" may come in the form of famine, plague, die off, who knows--and even more significantly, humans now exert such influence on the global environment that it is possible for the "rebalancing" of human growth to end all life, or at least all human life. As a selfish human, I'm starting from the proposition that I don't find that kind of rebalancing of nature to be acceptable. I'd rather bring about some kind of proactive rebalancing that restores balance without destroying humans, and better yet, without destroying our desire for "quality of life." That's asking a lot, I realize, but it seems that hierarchy, and especially the dependency that leads to hierarchy, is the best lever for humans to push on with that goal in mind.

I certainly agree that humans tend to seek power, and that this represents a real challenge to any kind of egalitarian "utopia." The ideas of minimal self-sufficiency and anthropological self-awareness are the best solutions to that problem that I can come up with at the moment, but they are certainly imperfect. I don't know if it's practicable to hope for such a "rhizome" structure to become ubiquitous, but I'd settle for it helping to balance out run-away hierarchy, and to balance out civilization's running away from addressing our needs as defined by our ontogeny...