By this I mean, organize around some single person for leadership, or in other contexts focus on a popular figure. Even societies that tend to be described as more collectively-organized/oriented tend to do this.
People are people and are as flawed as one another, so this pervasive tendency to elevate others is odd to me. It can be fun and goofy as a game, but as a more serious organizing or focal principle, it just seems extremely fragile and prone to failure (e.g. numerous groups falling into disarray at the loss of a leader/leader & their family, corruption via nepotism and the like, etc.).
Nearly every organization a person is in from ages 5-25 is hierarchical. There is always a authority figure you have to at least pretend to listen too. And if you tick off that authority figure by doing something they don’t like, they punish you in some form.
So people learn to ignore authority figures as much as they can and rarely challenge them directly as there are usually consequences for challenging someone in certain contexts. This leads to everyone pretending to agree and pretending to care about what leaders care about to avoid conflict. It is simply easier to cater to those who can and will make your life miserable than to challenge them successfully without creating grudges that might come back to bite you.
It is also worth noting that we are never taught to lead others, We are just expected to figure it out by trial and error or not figure it out at all.
TLDR; It’s learned behavior from the institutions we are exposed to. It’s easier and more encouraged to follow than to challenge authority figures.
Just to add to this: there is, although seeing it thuroughly implemented is comparatively uncommon, there are the practices of ‘democratic education’ and ‘self directed education’. The sudbury valley school in massechusets is one, relatively well known, example of thiese.
In those context, the trends are, in many ways, turned on their head. They, sudbury valles school as an example, havee a website, and a a youtube channel(, accesible vía That froendly alternative frontend that I can’t rember just now) , with intervies with some alumni of the school, and some published books listed with accounts from other svs graduates.
Just wanted to add, that the phenomenon described with in the comment replied to, although all too common, are not universal., nor always are they the only option.
edit: this page gives n OK overview of the self directed edu things : https://www.self-directed.org/sde . Pretty sure it can be seen as related to the question and the above reply.
edit:spelling and grammar.