The way it used to work in ancient cities is that each neighborhood had a council that kind of kept things running and made sure there were no feuds and that sort of thing. In some places, in order to get on the council, you had to go through fasting and ordeals in order to make sure the candidate had the best interests of the people at heart and wasn't just seeking a way to aggrandize himself. It was very self-reflective and self-reflexive (perhaps an improvement on UK local councils?), in most cases balancing the autonomy of each person in the neighborhood with the collective good.

But as you say, even that would be hard to go back to now because those with power who are higher up the dominance hierarchy are not likely to give that up unless we have a huge catastrophe of some sort which forces this sort of egalitarianism as a survival strategy. Still, I think that noticing what we are doing allows us to make at least some other choices about what to do next.