A hierarchy can not exist when people do not accept it

The first hierarchies were not accepted by the people at large. They were enforced by narcissistic individuals taking over the food supply and coercing all of the people in the area who depend upon that food supply to serve them. Only the narcissists at the top accepted the hierarchy, and they accepted it because they were the beneficiaries.

And no, the vast majority of narcissists are luckily quite powerless

Only because the positions of power are already full of other narcissists. These “powerless” ones are the ones sitting in reserve, waiting for their opportunity to be on top - and doing enormous psychological damage to everyone around them while they wait for that chance.

Citation needed

“Goliath’s Curse” by Luke Kemp is most of it, but “Hierarchy in the Forest” by Chrostopher Boehm adds some nice details about how egalitarian we were when we still had the ability to effective police these individuals. I would also recommend that you have a look at the works of Dr. Ramani to see just how much damage these people do just with interpersonal relationships: "Don’t you Know Who I Am?, “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”, and “It’s Not You”.

The idea is that you absolutely should not have hierarchies and other systems that put individuals into power, as those will inevitably be usurped by bad faith actors, or even more likely, corrupt those granted the power.

And how is this state of being enforced? Narcissists will not just obey the rules because people said so. They will create hierarchies without anyone’s consent, and they have a wide variety of methods available to them for doing so when presented with a naive population (which I still maintain that leftists largely are, at this point).

Even if you somehow maintain a non-hierarchical state, but do not remove the narcissists, you will still end up having to deal with the social and psychological damage that narcissists do to everyone around them regardless of whether or not they have any kind of special power over others. Why would you want to tolerate this?

What you propose will just result in a witch-hunt with a lot of collateral damage

Only if you mis-identify the bad actors. Part of educating people about how to reliably identify these people is also teaching them how to not mis-identify someone who is not one of these people.

power corrupts even those that are not narcissists to begin with

This premise is actually just false. The psychology and anthropology makes it plainly clear that power does not corrupt - it merely reveals who a person really was all along. If you actually understood narcissism, you’d understand how they mask their personality so that people don’t realize just how self-centered and abusive they are. When you give narcissists the ability to avoid accountability (something that typically comes with power), they loosen or even take off the mask because they no longer need it to protect their status, and it is a lot of effort for them to maintain.

So is basically every platform. I do not have the capacity to host something on my own right now, and most people are on Discord already. Besides that, I’ve found a way to set things up so that we shouldn’t have to worry about tripping over Discord’s TOS.

I do eventually want to move the community to another (preferably self-hosted) platform once it becomes a practical option.

A number of ways, but here are the biggest ones:

1. We’re narcissist-aware. It’s like being tankie-aware, but much broader and more encompassing. Narcissism is unfortunately very common, and unless you have studied narcissism and narcissistic abuse tactics, it is extremely likely that you will be unable to identify them reliably. The lack of empathy that characterizes narcissism is fundamentally incompatible with leftism - they will always sabotage leftist organizations if they are present, even when they do not specifically intend to do so.
2. If you look at the formal study of fault-tolerance in distributed systems, you see that it isn’t enough to simply have the right governance structure in order to avoid a state where the system (or community, in our case) is no longer able to function. The ability to reliably identify and correct (or remove) faulty actors is actually more important than the choice of governance structure for a community. A lot of anarchists believe axiomatically that power should always be decentralized, but fault-tolerance as we understand it would actually force us to avoid distributing certain powers to members who are not yet able to reliably identify faulty (and, in particular, bad-faith) actors. Of course, we still want to decentralize power as much as is practical, so we do our best to educate our members so that we can safely distribute power to them.
3. Looking at anthropology, we see that civilization has been a narcissistic endeavor from the start, and they are still in control of essentially all of it. This immediately implies that reform-based strategies can’t actually work in the long run. It also implies that a simple regime change will not be sufficient to achieve lasting change. We’ve got to build a new kind of society which is able to fill the niche currently occupied by civilization as we know it - one which is actually designed to be robust to infiltration and subversion by bad actors from the start.

Hierarchy in the Forest by Cristopher Boehm is literally about this. In short, we’ve always had some kind of “hierarchy”, but starting at about 3 million years ago, and becoming ubiquitous at around 300,000 years ago, we “inverted” the hierarchy so that domineering individuals were ostracized, and everybody else was more or less equal. In other words, we found a way to be egalitarian, despite our despotic roots as a species - and we did it for long enough to significantly impact the human genome.

Then the domineering individuals started to figure out how to undo this and form dominance hierarchies again, starting about 40,000 years ago.

Only 4000 years ago? That is much more recent than I would have expected (I am familiar with humanity’s egalitarian roots prior to agriculture, but most everything I know about after the adoption of agriculture are societies that were either always hierarchical, or became hierarchical over time). How did they manage to escape notice from the more aggressively imperialist societies long enough to build such a city? How did they manage to police themselves in such a way as to avoid forming a dominance hierarchy themselves? They would have to have had some way of reliably identifying domineering individuals and acting against them in order to actually reverse the inequality trend like that. How did they ultimately fall?

Also, do you happen to have a link/citation for the academic paper that this article is referencing? I don’t even see the name mentioned in the article text - only the author and university.

I think that others have done a sufficient job of answering the main question. I have things to say about the secondary questions:

how badly damaged is it?

I am wondering how it would be possible to reverse or remove that opinion of so many.

I’ve actually put quite a bit of thought into this problem. Countering the intentional destruction of language in general seems to be basically impossible to do directly because of how many people there are who have no particular interest in figuring out what the word really means, and who just perpetuate the current zeitgeist via sheer inertia. It also doesn’t help that there are a great many who claim to be anarchists who actually want the term to be misunderstood. The nihilistic version of anarchism that you’re calling out is perfect for sociopathic individuals who want a world without accountability.

My conclusion is that the word itself has become effectively destroyed and unusable (except in contexts where you know that your audience is made of the small subset of people who actually understand what it is supposed to mean) and needs to be replaced. However, attempting to just invent a new term for the same ideas won’t quite work either, because it will just be equated to the old one, and destroyed by the very same actors as before. We may be able to buy some time, but we need to do something about the forces that work to destroy the language itself if we want a lasting solution.

We need to learn how to protect ourselves from the actors that consistently sabotage our efforts to communicate, form communities and institutions, and actually accomplish objectives. We need to learn how to recognize those actors reliably, and keep them out of our spaces. Feds and such aren’t really the main issue here - it’s the people that claim to be our allies but instead subvert our rhetoric and activity to their own selfish ends that we need to be most wary of.

Once we can keep our spaces clean, we’ll have control over our language again, and we can use a new term or the old one. Those who are actually interested in doing good can be kept safe from the interference of bad-faith actors as long as they are able to find their way into these spaces.

You want to learn about narcissism, narcissistic abuse, and, in particular, what happens to the victims of sustained narcissistic abuse. The victims end up suffering from ‘codependency’ or ‘self-love deficit disorder’ depending on who you talk to. Your mention of ‘pathologically stable attachment’ is pretty close to talking about one real aspect of codependency. There are attachment disorders (like anxious attachment disorder) that will cause people to hyper-attach to others (especially abusers).

I do not say this to name-call, per se - but rather to give you some keywords that you can use to learn more about what’s going on. I will also recommend this youtuber, and in particular her Glossary of Narcissistic Relationships playlist. She’s also written books if you would prefer that format instead. Most information on this topic focuses on interpersonal relationships (intimate ones, especially), but it is trivially applicable to other (larger) contexts.

One of the best things you can do for someone who is suffering from codependency is to help them learn about narcissistic abuse, so that they are even able to recognize what is being done to them. A big part of the apathy that you are observing in people is just plain normalization. They literally don’t even recognize that they are being abused. Once you get past this barrier, helping them heal from the trauma and develop far healthier responses to abusive situations becomes a whole lot easier.

Goliath’s Curse by Luke Kemp

Not directly about anarchism, but instead about anthropology. I find that a lot of discussions about anarchism end up going awry as soon as people start injecting some common myths about anthropology into the mix. False assumptions about history and human nature will lead to ineffective conclusions about how to deal with it.

deleted by creator

When I am talking about narcissism, I am talking about something much broader than NPD. The ICD 11 revised the whole section on personality disorders so that they are no longer separated into clusters (A, B, and C) and are now characterized on a per-individual basis by a combination of atomized descriptors. One of the major reasons for doing this was because there is a lot more overlap between them than the categorization of discrete disorders implied. The lack of empathy that characterizes narcissism was present in basically all of cluster B and frequently occurred with several disorders in clusters A and C.

Narcissism is way more common than you think. I estimate that they make up at least 1/3 of the population, and probably more like 1/2 (and exactly how I’ve arrived at these numbers is something I’d want to write about). Those “regular” people who are “pushed” into egotistic behavior? They’re actually low-grade or covert narcs who are being given permission to be narcissistic by our culture.

The capitalist system does work as intended, but the reason that it is intended to work the way that it does is because it was designed by narcissists from the very beginning (another topic we’d be discussing, with sources), and it serves them very well. They weren’t a hidden cabal, though, and the emergence of modern capitalism didn’t happen overnight. The system gradually emerged piece by piece as various people tried to solve various problems (and it probably all started with the issue of distributing portions of tribute to one’s lackeys).

If you’re going to vilify an entire group of people, do so based on their actual behaviours and not on the personality trait(s) that they share.

We are villifying them based on their actual behaviors. It just so happens that when you look at the reasons for those behaviors, you see that it is caused by a personality type/disorder, and as such, naming the group that behaves badly in this way also essentially names the personality type/disorder. You simply cannot separate the two concepts, because they are causally/definitionally linked. As such, it is paradoxical to simultaneously condone discriminating against the behaviors and condemn discriminating against the personality type.

So yeah, I know what you are talking about, but what is that new community exactly supposed to achive?

The central thesis or hypothesis, if you will, is that all of the issues that we are dealing with today (authoritarianism, late-stage capitalism, fascism, sexism, racism, systemic ecological destruction, the destruction of the concept of truth, etc…) are fundamentally rooted in narcissism. The point of the community is to explore this relationship, and take advantage of that perspective to discuss effective strategies for dealing with these problems (generally via dealing with the underlying cause - the narcissism itself). When you start casting the polycrisis through the lens of narcissism, a lot of the conventional ideas about how to address those issues fall apart (including many ideas that are common in anarchist circles).

I expect that the bulk of the content would be focused on analyzing the connection between the psychology of narcissism and various aspects of politics/economics in both historical and contemporary contexts. For example, one thing I expect that we would spend a lot of time discussing is exactly how authoritarian societies emerged from the egalitarian ones that were ubiquitous prior to the development of agriculture. We would also discuss things like how the dynamics of capitalism map really nicely to the transactional nature of narcissistic relationships, or how various elements of modern social etiquette practically seem to be designed to enable narcissistic abuse (e.g. Gossiping would pretty thoroughly defeat a lot of narcissistic “splitting behaviors”, and yet it is often taboo).

Besides analysis, we would also discuss effective strategies for dealing with common problems in a way that is narcissistically-aware. Moderating communities, both real and virtual, would probably be one of the most common topics of discussion in this regard. Maintaining a space so that it is inclusive, especially one that is public, while also preventing abusive behavior is really challenging, and there are lots of subtle ways that things can go wrong that a lot of people overlook because they don’t realize just how insidious bad actors can actually be. We can talk about more conventional direct-action strategy stuff too, and in a lot of ways I would expect those discussions to look a lot like similar discussions between anarchists that you’ve seen elsewhere. It’s just that we’ll be taking into account the fact that we have an actual psychological model for how the bad actors will really behave, and so we will be able to adapt our strategies accordingly.

I hope this helps you understand what I’m going for here. I’m not trying to make a hate-club or anything. I think there’s genuine insight to be had here that could be very helpful for a lot of people.

What happens when you stop paying taxes or rent? What happens when you stop working for the money to do those things? It won’t take all that long for you to end up an the receiving end of state-endorsed violence. Being a wage slave is not really that different from being a prisoner. The cage is just a little nicer, and a little more subtle.

What you seem to fail to understand is the amount of suffering that is caused by these bad actors on a daily basis for the vast majority of people alive. Until you really understand coercion and the subtle but pervasive violence of the state, you will probably never be able to see where I am coming from. Nevermind that I’ve already explained on other comments that the steady-state would be about 1% of the population that needs to be coerced. The current state of things is temporary, due to the fact that we live in a culture that is doing its very best to create as many of these bad actors as it possibly can. In the long run, even by the same metrics and standards you are using now, the scheme I propose would come out way ahead.

Right now, approximately 5 in 5 of people are being coerced on a daily basis. 1 in 5 sounds like a whole lot less than that to me.

I make no specific suggestion on how to deal with those that will not accept such a contract. Prison is but one possibility. I would encourage people to think about this problem, and see what they can come up with. What is the most humane way to deal with these people? The only real constraint is that the coercive actors (defined as those who would coerce outside of the terms of the social contract) must not be allowed to actually perform any coercion, and one should take measures to prevent collusion. Keep in mind that deception/misinformation is also a form of coercion, so one must be careful about how they are allowed to communicate with each other and with members of society, if they are allowed to communicate at all.

I am really happy that this question led to so much elaboration. It does come from a person I know IRL who talks a lot about the psychology of power structures, having had to deal with too many psychopaths himself.

I also have personal experience with these personality types, and this account basically exists for the purpose of trying to make anarchism and narcissism awareness collide whenever I can, so it didn’t take much prompting. I’m just glad to find that I’m not the only person who’s been making this connection. It seems so obvious in hindsight, yet before I learned about the psychology of narcissism, I never would have thought to approach the problem of governance in that way.

There should be something like a representative assembly that has to give a ‘go’ vote for coercive power to be exerted.

I’ve been sort of experimenting with maintaining a narc-free anarchist space recently. It’s a small private group, and I more or less have the cooperation of the other members of the group, but it’s been really rough. The issue that I keep running into is that, even when everybody likes the idea of having a narc-free space, they’re not all experts in narcissism, and so they still don’t always see what’s happening when the bad actors show up and start causing trouble. The most recent event had me worried if the group would survive - the bad actor did manage to poach one member on their way out, and another member basically went totally inactive because I think they disagreed with what emerged as the dominant assessment of the situation (the bad actor really was bad).

On the one hand, I kindof wish I could just remove such people without having to ask the whole rest of the group for permission, as I am better at recognizing them than most everyone else, but on the other hand, that feels like a highly abusable privilege. Why should I be allowed to do that? What if I turned out to be bad, or even just wrong? If someone new shows up, and sees that someone has been granted the unilateral power to remove someone in a group that claims to be anarchist, won’t that look really weird? And would I even be able to maintain my reputation with the rest of the group? You can’t really protect someone from a threat that they can’t see for themselves without at least raising an eyebrow, and in this case, the threats are actively trying to convince everyone that they are not a threat and instead that I am the real threat (because when you’ve studied narcissism at all, somehow the narcs always seem to pick up on the fact that you can see them for what they are, and they know that you’re a threat to their status in the group).

I have to wonder if there’s a better way of handling such a responsibility that does a better job of minimizing damage while avoiding the creation of an unfair power dynamic in a different way.

So in other words, if we want people to want to change their minds in good faith (to essentially value truth over winning) then fostering environments that reward curiosity and make it safe to be wrong might matter more than we think. It’s not about “how do we fight bad actors” its “how do we stop producing so many of them in the first place?” Building like a cultural immune system that raises kids to value epistemic humility, and one that doesn’t reward manipulation or punish vulnerability.

Yes, this is the right way to think about it. The vast majority of the long-term wins will come from changes to how we raise our children, and the overall incentive structures created by our cultural values. Most of the narcissism simply won’t occur in the first place, and the few bad actors that still pop up will be much easier to deal with. We do still need a way of fighting off the bad actors, but it’s a lot easier to come up with systems that will work if we can assume that the vast majority of individuals are not bad actors to begin with. (In our current society, we cannot really assume that, and it makes things much more difficult.)

Maybe that’s the real long game? But it also makes clear of how much work that actually takes. Like the anarchist collectives in Catalonia didn’t pop up overnight. That kind of horizontal structure took decades of groundwork and community trust. It took something like 80 years only to build the social foundation before the experiment even became possible. If people take it seriously enough to start, it might actually show that cultural change can be built.

The good news is that I think we can move a lot faster than the existing experiments did if we take advantage of this psychological understanding of what’s going on. We’ll be able to filter out the problematic individuals much earlier in the process, long before they are able to undermine our work. Without such a model, you’d basically have to wait for a bad actor to start actually abusing power in a politically obvious way in order to see them for what they truly are, but in most cases, by the time this has happened, the project has already been completely subverted/corrupted and is no longer truly anarchist.

If someone does not agree to the social contract, but their disagreement is minor and we would expect them to still uphold at least a reasonably similar one, then we can let them find or make a community/society that adheres to that contract.

However, I think you are probably more interested in the case where they are very opposed to the nature of the contract, as in, they want coercion to be allowed in circumstances besides dealing with violators. Unfortunately, if we wish to avoid a paradox of tolerance, we have to revoke such a person’s right to participate in society - any society - until such time as they come around (or possibly permanently, depending on the nature of the situation). This will inevitably involve the use of force. Why must we do this? If we allow people that believe coercion should be allowed outside of the context of enforcing rules to exist outside of our own society, then they will just do exactly what they did the first time we made that mistake. They’ll accumulate, form a hierarchical society with a military, and start destroying things. Even if they do not directly attack other societies, the damage that they’ll do to the environment will indirectly impact everyone else - and as we have seen with global warming, that damage can even be enough to threaten the existence of life on this planet itself.

Of course there will be people who won’t accept a social contract that forbids coercion in the common case. Just like how egalitarian societies did not voluntarily become hierarchical ones, hierarchical societies are not going to voluntarily become egalitarian ones.

Honestly, that point you made about authoritarianism being the narcissists perfect political expression really resonated.

As I recall, it was @keepthepace@slrpnk.net who actually raised that thought (as a question). I really like how they phrased it: “authoritarianism is the political expression of narcissism”. My response was just an elaborate affirmation.

I don’t always frame it that way myself (I tend to talk about domination-seeking behavior or socialized individualism) but I think we’re circling the same core.

There are some benefits to framing things around narcissism (or psychology at the very least) rather than sticking to more vague political/behavioral terms. The biggest one is that you now have an attachment to a scientific field that you can mine for information about how it actually works. It’s hard to argue with a Marxist about material conditions changing behavior if we’re just talking about bad actors in the abstract, because it’s pretty easy to make a fairly convincing-sounding argument based on rational behavior, incentives, and game theory. The argument is actually flawed, though, because with such a vague definition of what a bad actor even is, the hypothesis is unfalsifiable. If you actually manage to map the bad behavior to psychology, though, the situation changes completely, because now the hypothesis is well-defined enough that we can test it - and the psychologists have already done a pretty good job of showing that this isn’t how narcissism works at all. (And to be clear, I’m not trying to be mean to Marxists - this just happens to be one of the things that Marx got wrong that people still mistakenly believe. He did the best that he could with the information that he had, and I think he did a lot of good with his writing, but it is simply the nature of scientific advancement that the ideas of the past are sometimes replaced by new and better-supported ones over time).

Having a concrete idea of the cause of all the bad behavior also gives us a much clearer view of the possible set of solutions. We can disregard the detached philosophical musings about human nature in favor of actual scientific studies that show how things really work. This helps us understand why things like education and messaging haven’t been effective at changing the behavior of even the minor bad actors (and also explains why it never will), so we can start redirecting our efforts toward activities which might actually have a positive impact (like educating everyone else about these people and teaching them how to avoid them or otherwise protect themselves from them).

I think centralization can easily slip into hierarchy, especially if we don’t design mechanisms of accountability from the start.

Of course. There’s lots of reasons for this. People who are naive to narcissistic abuse will often fall for the manipulation and not see how power gets consolidated even when it happens right under their noses. Also, the common-knowledge mechanisms for holding people accountable are, frankly, really ineffective (probably by design, at this point). Power/authority needs to be based on trust, and it needs to be lost at the same instant as the trust that supports it is. The overhead of getting everyone together to hold a vote of no-confidence is way too high. People will be reluctant to do it out of fear of retaliation, because there’s basically no way to do it subtly enough to reliably avoid detection by the target of the vote - yet this is essentially the solution that most organizations resort to. We need better tools for holding people accountable that can still be formalized. Perhaps we can use the methods of those pre-civilized egalitarian societies as inspiration or a starting point?

The reason I made this post in the first place is because I think learning to spot domination-seeking behavior could potentially (and should) be as culturally foundational as reading or math. It’s something that I feel like we’re really missing in todays education system if you ask me.

I completely agree with this.

You mentioned narcissists violating epistemic norms. Do you know if there are specific cultural practices or rituals that could make epistemic hygiene emotionally resonant, not just intellectually correct?

I read a long time ago (I don’t remember where) that you have to introduce kids to the scientific method by the age of 6 if you want them to respect science as an adult. I’ve also been seeing a lot more recently that the primary factor in how well a person is able to change their mind in response to new information is actually creativity (rather than intelligence, like you might expect).

I am not convinced that we need to do anything new per se, but it would be good if we actually taught kids about science starting very early, and it would be especially good if we stopped crushing their creativity. If we just had a population that didn’t have the capacity to care about truth beaten out of them, I think we’d already be in a much better place.

Something I’d like to note is that, in my experience, the people who actually resist epistemic norms are people who have either a narcissistic streak themselves (I haven’t really talked about it, but narcissism is disturbingly common - way more common than you’d probably expect.), or are otherwise not ready to leave an abusive relationship with one (and are desperately trying to deny the reality that they are in such an abusive relationship, and that that relationship will never become the relationship that they wished that they had with said individual(s)). Although others might not be well-versed or practiced in following epistemic norms, I find that they are usually receptive to learning about them. It may be the case that simply eliminating the influence of narcissism from our society is enough to avoid the sort of post-truth nonsense that we’re dealing with now.