Might makes right is always the problem, whether you’re talking about anarchy, or hierarchy, or some kind of distributed system - some actor will use force to inflict harm for their own benefit (in contrast to inflicting harm to defend others). I believe the study of human history tells us that this always happens, it is not preventable. So the question becomes, how do we build systems that can protect people from harm without concentrating power that may itself be abused?

• Expecting everyone to protect themselves is not a viable option. That way lies barbarism, where the weak are left to perish.
• I’m very open to ideas about resisting force with something other than equivalent force, but I’m not sure what that would actually look like in practice. What do you do when the bandits show up in town and start shooting and looting, other than shoot back?

If you diffuse power horizontally, there is no vacuum to fill. There’s just shared responsibility.

I’ll just point out, this was the original concept behind the US Constitution. Whether it’s worked as intended is… debatable.

Yup! Humans being imperfect is an argument against hierarchical power structures. How can we keep a few narcissists, bad actors, or even well-meaning but mistaken folks from causing bad outcomes for society? By getting rid of their ability to wield power. If you believe that power corrupts, then the answer to that is to distribute it so evenly and thinly that no one can accumulate institutional power. That’s why bottom-up decision making methods are better than top-down ones.

Unfortunately, lots of hierarchical systems are built into the fabric of our societies. Capitalism is a big one. Private property is an even more foundational one. Various kinds of bigotry rest on those systems. The authoritarian state will take whatever excuse it can (religious justifications, property-protection justifications, enemies-at-the-gates justifications, etc) to exercise power over society. So our struggle should ultimately be aimed at those things.

Finding ways to (1) give people the time, material security, and consciousness to organize together to change their lives for the better (tenant unions, labor unions, community-run non-police safety programs, etc); (2) decommodify essentials like food, shelter, clothing, etc; and (3) help populations learn to govern themselves at the local level and federate with others; would all go a very long way.

Look for lessons from existing and recent struggles. Anarchist Spain, the Zapatistas, and others have much to teach us.

How do horizontal power structures handle problems of global scale? The COVID pandemic and how people behaved and created consequences for others comes to mind. I’m not sure if any of the tactics you mention would work. You can’t shame people who think they’re doing the right thing, can’t exile them without a power structure that can use force on them, they have no leadership to revoke, and I’m not sure how distributed decision making would apply.

Another idea on that scale might be best exemplified by climate change (or pfas etc). Do horizontal power structures mean most people could ignore how they’re impacting others negatively? If not, how would that be handled on a global scale?

If anybody is going to answer, I’d appreciate it greatly if the answer did not compare how much worse vertical systems are for these problems. If you can give me a novel idea about this, I’d appreciate it.

I think it’s rather simple, honestly. I like the ideas of anarchism, it sounds good in theory, but has already proven to be impossible

Humans started without governments or societies. We were anarchist already, and moved on to having societies and governments not just because of bad actors but many, many, many, many reasons. Whatever system out there that works the best is likely a monstrous hybrid system of many schools of thought, and likely needs to be fluid and changeable to work

I’m not saying that they can’t. However, I think your definition of centralization and mine must vary. Appointing a committee in my book is centralization and thus minarchism.

I love it when people start asking the right questions. I think the absolute mess of responses just goes to show that this is an avenue of discussion that hasn’t been pursued nearly enough in leftist circles.

We’ve interacted before - you may remember my comments on an earlier post of yours. I am generally of the position that narcissism lies at the core of all of the issues that anarchism is fundamentally trying to solve. If we can solve the issue of narcissism in society, then everything else more or less falls into place (though there are a lot of misconception about what is and is not hierarchy that gets in the way of seeing that for a lot of people, apparently - I’ll try to address some of that).

What if we started seriously discussing tactics for dealing with domination-seeking behavior?

Since we can reduce our political/social problems down to this particular psychological problem (or at least I claim that we can, more or less), then we can try to understand hoe we might address those political/social problems by understanding how one addresses this psychological problem. Unfortunately, we immediately run into a bit of a trouble. There is no known effective treatment for this personality type/disorder. When we consider that we’re talking about trying to change a person’s personality, this sort of make sense, and it make additional sense when we consider that impaired empathy generally shows up on a brain scan as a sort of brain damage. In other words, our options are severely limited at the individual level. We also know that this personality type is extremely stable over the lifetime of the individual.

There are lots of things we might be able to argue from that position, but one point that I really want to highlight is that we cannot expect that we can make this problem go away simply by changing the material or social conditions of these people. Even a dedicated therapy effort doesn’t really work. While we can largely prevent the creation of these individuals in the first place if we were to create the right social/cultural environment (most are made as infants and children by a variety of bad parenting practices), we cannot completely prevent them from occurring (some are simply born this way - about 1% of the population as I had said before). As such, the solution to this problem isn’t going to be a simple change in initial conditions, but rather an ongoing process that is baked into the fabric of society itself.

Let me touch on the issue of how we went from a bunch of societies that existed for millions of years while reliably and robustly preventing these people from gaining power and making a mess of things to a society that is basically run exclusively by these people and seems designed to empower them. As you know but others may not yet be aware, I have a hypothesis about how hierarchical civilization came to be. What’s important to observe about this narrative is that the peaceful egalitarian societies did not voluntarily become hierarchical. They were coerced/conquered by hierarchical societies that formed from the aggregation of their exiles. This story of hierarchical societies devouring egalitarian ones via conquest and subjugation then repeats itself over and over again throughout history. A question for the room: Is there any documented instance of an egalitarian anarchist society voluntarily reforming itself to become hierarchical?

My basis for anarchism is fundamentally founded in this perspective that narcissism is the root problem to address. IMO, the indigenous people largely did a good job - they just made the mistake of externalizing their narcissism problems, and then the additional mistake of failing to prepare for the consequences of that decision. We just need to learn from their mistakes, and do what they did not: In addition to aggressively policing the narcissists that emerge from within, we need to account and prepare for the external threat represented by narcissistic individuals that exist outside of our society. Even a society that solves the exile problem for itself will still have to deal with the exile problem from others, and that generally means maintaining a strong military or otherwise maintaining some mechanism for defending itself against organized threats from hierarchical societies.

What mechanisms help us identify and isolate that kind of behavior without reproducing the same old coercive structures?

Identifying these bad behaviors is both easy and hard. If you know what to look for, it’s really easy. If you don’t, you’re liable to fall for their manipulation. Simply learning about the various manipulative behaviors that narcissists engage in is the conceptually most straight-forward way to address this problem, and it is certainly effective. There are other ways, though. One thing that I’ve noticed is that narcissists will pretty reliably violate the rules of epistemologically sound argumentation whenever they start to try something funny. Simply educating people about logic (and logical fallacies) and the burden of proof would go a long way toward making them resilient to narcissistic manipulation. If we also teach people to take such violations very seriously, rather than just dismissing it with a simple “everyone is entitled to their own opinion”, we would catch a lot of bullshit very early and stop a lot of narcissistic machination before it has a chance to gain any real traction. If you think about it, tolerance of unsound argumentation is a necessary condition for a society to be vulnerable to non-violent manipulation from bad actors of any sort.

How do we build systems that are resilient to sabotage without falling into authoritarian logic?

I’m seeing a lot of people in the comments conflating centralization with hierarchy, and vice-versa, and this is a big problem. I want to make something very clear: Centralization does NOT imply hierarchy. This is very important to understand, as discarding the useful tool that is centralization out of fear of creating the horrible monster that is hierarchy will cripple our ability to achieve anything at all. But what is centralization? What is hierarchy? Why do people conflate the two?

Centralization is simply what happens when coordination or decision-making is delegated to a subset of the group. These coordinators or decision-makers take on apparently central roles because everybody needs the information/instruction that they provide in order to avoid doing redundant or pointless work. Centralization is desirable, because it means that people can specialize. Not everyone has to be involved in every process. Decisions can be made by those who are most qualified to make them, and everybody else can get on with their work without being interrupted about every little detail.

Hierarchy is what you get when you define an up-and-down axis of power. Some people are above others. Some people are below others. The people above have the power/authority to coerce the people below. Subordination is a crime that is basically defined as an individual defying the directives of an individual above them in the hierarchy. The existence of hierarchy does not strictly depend upon the existence of a particular social or governance structure within a group.

That said, hierarchies naturally tend to concentrate decision-making power in the hands of a few, and that’s why hierarchy always seems to imply centralization in practice. It’s hard to find examples of centralization that do not come with the trappings of hierarchy and coercion - you basically have to study the inner-workings of some worker-owned co-ops to find good examples. Combined with the fact that coercion is a concept that isn’t part of common discourse (though I think that is starting to change), and it becomes easier to see why people might struggle to separate the two concepts.

We can have all of the benefits of centralized coordination without any of the drawbacks of hierarchy. We just need to establish a binding social contract that outlaws coercion, and aggressively enforce it. With these tools in hand, building public institutions or even a powerful military capable of rivaling modern civilization’s best is all comfortably within the realm of possibility.

Yep. Exactly like communism: it would be a brilliant idea if people weren’t human beings.

It comes down to some version of “Well, that sounds nice, but what about the bad actors?”

I have encountered the same. One avenue of argumentation that typically follows is “but we needs cops because there’s crime” -> “crime can be reduced with social policy, without cops” -> “but never to zero” -> “but cop duties needn’t be a person’s career”.

Next comes politics. The political system where I live is a parliamentary republic with proportional elections. Compared to volatile cases (e.g. presidential two-party system) it is fairly slow. Risk of takeover by a bad actor is not perceived as high. Anarchist critique fails to get attention.

I have also encountered the argument: “if we decentralize, we [insert national indentity] step too far down the organizational ladder [of ability to mobilize resources fast], and become possible to conquer”. People perceive that a stateless area or low-intensity state would be an invitation for the nearest highly invasive state. They also fear that change would cause weakness, which would be exploited. Thus, a foreign state becomes a justification for the local state. Sadly I must admit that the reasoning is not without merit.

My responses have typically been:

• leaders wanting to return to power are a problem for democracy

• playing voter groups against each other causes long-term problems (degrades cooperation)

• electoral democracy inherently favours wealthy individuals (campaign expenses)

• decentralization protects against takeover and decapitation strike

• authoritarian takeover of local state has happened already once, with tragic results

• party politicans have for decades failed to enact simple, popular measures (e.g. progressive income tax)

My suggestion to a statist person typically ends up being “at least, try sortition”. Which is laughably hard, since it would require a rewrite of the constitution, and parties agreeing to a measure that pushes them into history books. :)

I can convincingly argue that sortition reduces the sway that elites hold over policy, and makes equalizing policy measures easier to pass. But it keeps the number of politicians small and leaves the door open for acting fast (e.g. in case of military threat).

Meanwhile, I would appreciate if mainstreamers left anarchists on their own to experiment with more. Especially in the economy.

P.S. Ultimately, I fear that anarchist society can be only planted on the ruins of a state. The niche must have been emptied by a catastrophic event (and it’s ethically wrong to cause one). However, it’s not wrong to do what’s right when others have done wrong. One should know that catastrophic events increase people’s desire to have stability and order. So there must be a type of anarchy that can quickly deliver freedom + equality + stability + order. That’s a pretty tall list, which is why it typically doesn’t happen.

Over the past years, reading more about the dark triad/quadriad, I am becoming more and more convinced that authoritarianism is the political expression of narcissism and that it is 100% of the explanation, that there is nothing more to it. Want to fight authoritarianism? Stop narcissist. It is not a matter of ideology, of left or right, of reformist vs revolutionary, it is just a matter of psychological profile. Stop the narcissist, that’s all.

How do we build systems that are resilient to sabotage without falling into authoritarian logic?

I had a eye-opening moment with this videp, whose title (“Can 100 people self-organize without a leader”) is actually misleading, as it (IMHO) failed to demonstrate what it wanted to test, but demonstrated something much more interesting. The task given to 100 people was too simple to require multiple people (a “hack” they forbade has shown that one person was enough to do the full task) yet, a hierarchy “naturally” emerged. Even though the sample population is biased towards people who would not be very hierarchical.

My main takeaway was that an organization that does not want a hierarchy does not only need to make it possible to self-organize, but needs to actively “weed out” hierarchies. That’s hard, I don’t know of any examples of it.

There’s also always people willing to fix it for others too

Personally this is why I’m a libertarian minarchist and not an anarchist. Ultimately, I do feel that there will always be people working against the collective effort of the betterment of society and instead of long term community progress they favor short-term personal gains. Having a minimal cooperative-based government that is allowed to hold a monopoly on violence is preferable to vigilanteism. The issue is who watches the watchers.

Exile, public shaming, revocable leadership, and distributed decision-making all worked and often worked better than what we do now. Pre-civilized societies didn’t let power-hungry individuals take over. They stopped them.

I’ll grant that it worked in the past. However we live in a post-truth world now, with far more vast populations. And there are loads or capitalist countries that will attempt to infiltrate any place that attempts to rid itself of capitalism, including anarchist places.

How do we know such a system could survive that?

Any new system will need to be able to survive the inertia of tribalism from the previous system, infiltration, and the complexity of millions/billions of people.

I‘m currently reading David Graeber and David Wengrow: The Dawn of Everything.

It dives deeper into the history of the misconceptions of power.

To preface, I’m a Marxist and not an Anarchist, our frameworks differ substantially.

I agree that “but what about bad actors” criticism is quite bad, but for different reasons. They don’t “spawn in” out of nowhere and ruin systems, the opposite is the case - it’s the system that produces them through inequalities, ideology and reward mechanisms. Capitalism rewards antisocial, domineering behavior because competition, capital and power accumulation demands it in order to “be successful”. This is something inherent to the system and its structures, not something you can fix simply by moral policing, so focusing just on the individual is a mistake.

The vertical power structures like the state aren’t there merely for individual power hoarding, but rather it’s a structure of class domination - the bourgeoisie control over proletariat. Enforcement and protection of private property (such as factories/company offices/other means of production), legal systems controlling who gets into power and what they can change, education and media promoting the status quo are but a few examples of this. The state isn’t merely there to preserve itself, it’s there to preserve the capitalist system.

In my personal experience it really depend on what you are trying to build but most of the time it ends in the party/collective/space expelling the person from it. What can make this process less dramatic and damaging is the organizational culture you have in the space or the party. For example, in the organization that i´m part of when we reunite, all men are required to help in some domestic(cleaning, cooking or preparing the room for the meeting) and organizing(taking notes on the meeting/discussion, being the mediator of the meeting/discussion[1] and so on) task because we have perceived that this is a way to make the woman in the organization participate more actively in the discussions and we as an organization want them to participate more on these discussions. So we have a culture of doing that and for some time it has been a self-reinforcing thing. So if i stopped doing it, my comrades would call my attention to it and if i really took a stand against it, i would probably be kicked out of the organization. My hypothetical exit would galvanize no one because we have been doing this specific thing for a long time and everybody agrees that we should keep doing it.

In short: I don´t have a definitive answer but a good guess would be organizational culture. We, humans are very social species and take a lot of cues from the people around us and if we are able to create a good organizational culture in a space/party/collective people will mostly follow it. That said,it is hard to create a good organizational culture, people in the org or the space really need to want to make it happen but once it is create it is easier(or less harder) to keep.

[1] Counting and signaling the time that one has to speak, keeping the meeting on track, etc.