Fred,

Who hands out this money? When the banks do it, they want interest.

You or I could just hand out out personal IOU's, but if we could not afford to return some equivalent value, no one would take them.

Think of money as the voucher system that it really is. There has to be some collective willing to grant rights, but unless they are repaid by some equivalent responsibilities, negative feedback will pull the group apart quite quickly.

So then this is the value circulation mechanism. Does it need a central nervous system? If it's a plant, not really, because the nutrients come to it and defences tend to be chemical, rather than tactical.

People are social and it would be nice if hierarchies didn't form, but judging goes pretty deep into our psyche, given we have to navigate and make many such necessary decisions. So that when people are under constraints, structures start to form. If we better understood these processes, we might be able to construct more refined social configurations and cultures. We do keep pushing at it, but in the grand scheme of things, we are still probably fairly primative. Biology evolved much greater levels of complexity by a hundred million years ago, than our social and even technical constructions have currently achieved.