The emergence of any kind of hierarchical authority dates back a few thousand years at most, a few percentage points of humanity's time on this earth, and the degree of the division of labour and of central supervision in the modern workplace isn't even anticipated until the last few centuries. If the world is full of witless drudgeons, what were they doing for all that time? Have human beings really degraded so rapidly in their capacities that the greater mass of them can no longer be productive without constant instruction from their superiors? Is the modern worker really so much stupider, so much more inept, than a Medieval peasant, that where the latter could be trusted to manage the cycle of seasons and harvests by himself, the former must be scrutinised and dictated to in every working moment?
In what sense does taking direction imply learning? If the directee does not have a view of the larger process, if they are not learning how to personally manage the whole process or at least to participate in its managements, if the instructions are simply passed down from on-high without justification or context- and you correctly identified in a later post the key phrase in my argument, "may as well be arbitrary"- then what is the directee learning? What lesson is contained in "do this, because I said so"?
The only lesson I can see is "do what you're told, because I said so", and how many times does that need to be taught? Children pick up quickly enough; does it really need to be repeated for eight hours a day, every day, for fifty years, in order to stick?