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“We have no leader — we work autonomously, and most of us are unaffiliated with any particular group,” according to the website for New York’s General Assembly, the “participatory decision-making body” behind Occupy Wall Street. “We have come together as concerned individuals who simply want our collective voice heard.”

But on the ground, the supposedly collective camps have been criticized even by their own members for adopting the very structures they seek to eliminate — namely hierarchy and the domination of a few over many others — or for self-imploding into chaos. Even Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show spoofed the idea that New York City occupiers fell into the very social structure they sought to upend, dedicating a satirical segment to the class system that apparently developed in Zuccotti Park as the days wore on.

Some Occupy camps have been more successful at their social experiment than others, and there have been moments that demonstrate something approaching collaboration. A 90% “supermajority” of Occupy Philly protesters on Tuesday voted to appeal the city’s proposal for a scaled-down demonstration at a different site, successfully delaying their eviction until at least next week.

But where the movement failed to achieve its ideal of horizontal decision-making and egalitarianism in the camps, protesters can at least take comfort that the odds were stacked against them from the start: The evidence, in the laboratory and in real life, tells us that human nature, whatever our idealistic intentions, prefers a pyramid.