I agree that social hierarchies are a feature of homo sapiens, hence why any good form of governance should be based on restricting our worst instincts. That's what the original liberalism improved with the separation of political power into executive, legislative, and judicate branches. Unfortunately, the same was not done for economic power, which - most liberal democracies - allowed to keep concentrating with few to no safeguards.

Distributism is interesting on this front I think, it's sceptical of power and wealth being concentrated by anyone public or private and instead advocates widespread ownership of the means of production.

I've been listening to The Dawn of Everything, a New History of Humanity the past couple weeks and it's been quite interesting. Particularly relevant to this topic is how many societies we have evidence for — through actual contact and documentation or through archaeological findings and anthropological research — that either consciously did not develop or later abolished a ruling class, whether as devolved cultural groups or even in cities of tens of thousands. Examples are given for cities in Mesopotamia, Yucatan, iirc north of the Black Sea, and other areas.

Lots of interesting stuff on personal freedom, collective decision-making, community care, agriculture and conscious lack thereof, etc.

This is why you have to insure the alignment of direct stakeholders and not overly broaden it above those who are directly impacted. You never want the same guy selling your food to be the same guy that verifies that it is safe.

A Stakeholder Socialist system, I think, is that ideal as it utilizes coöp commonwealths, democratic workerplaces, muti-stakeholder and syndicated ownership models, and federated levels of oversight such that power only escalates for things necessary and narrowly at that scope like interconnected grids or safety in international food trade.