is one of the most common responses I get when I talk to people (usually liberals) about horizontal power structures. It comes down to some version of “Well, that sounds nice, but what about the bad actors?” I think the logic that follows from that fact is backwards. The standard response to this issue is to build vertical power structures. To appoint a ruling class that can supposedly “manage” the bad actors. But this ignores the obvious: vertical power structures are magnets for narcissists. They don’t neutralize those people. They empower them. They give them legitimacy and insulation from consequences. They concentrate power precisely where it’s most dangerous. Horizontal societies have always had ways of handling antisocial behavior. (Highly recommend Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior by Christopher Boehm. He studied hundreds of forager societies, overall done amazing work.) 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. We used to know how to deal with bad actors. The idea of a “power vacuum” only makes sense if you believe power must be held at the top. If you diffuse power horizontally, there is no vacuum to fill. There’s just shared responsibility. That may feel unfamiliar, but it’s not impossible. We’ve done it before. Most of human history was built on it. The real question isn’t whether bad actors exist. It’s how we choose to deal with them. Do we build systems that make it harder for them to dominate others, or ones that practically roll out the red carpet? I think this opens up a more useful conversation.
What if we started seriously discussing tactics for dealing with domination-seeking behavior?
What mechanisms help us identify and isolate that kind of behavior without reproducing the same old coercive structures?
How do we build systems that are resilient to sabotage without falling into authoritarian logic?
I’d love to hear your guys’ thoughts.
Edit: It seems as though the conversation has diverted in this comment section. That’s alright, I’ll clarify.
This thread was meant to be about learning how to detect domination-seek behavior and repelling narcissists. This was meant to be a discussion on how anarchism works socially in order to circumvent individuals from sabotaging or otherwise seeking to consolidate power for themselves.
It was not meant as a discussion on if anarchism works. There is plenty of research out on the internet that shows anarchism has the potential to work. Of course, arguing a case for or against anarchism should be allowed, however that drifts away from what I initially wanted to get at in this thread. It’s always good to hear some “what ifs”, but if it completely misses the main point then it derails the discussion and makes it harder for folks who are engaging with the core idea.
So to reiterate: this isn’t a debate about whether anarchism is valid. It’s a focused conversation about the internal dynamics of anarchist spaces, and how we can build practices and awareness that make those spaces resilient against narcissistic or coercive tendencies.
Thanks to everyone who’s contributed in good faith so far – let’s keep it on track.
I really shouldn’t, but I’m gonna take on your hypothetical situation where half of the community is fine with destroying another community.
First, if half of any community supports mass violence, that’s a crisis of values, not a failure of anarchism. An anarchist society wouldn’t have drones or the infrastructure for such violence in the first place. Those things thrive on centralization and detachment.
But alright, let’s say it happens anyway. If half supports the violence, the other half would organize, resist, and dismantle the structures enabling it. It wouldn’t be easy, but that’s the point of horizontal power. No one person or group has the unchecked ability to destroy at scale.
In the end, the problem isn’t lack of control, it’s a broken culture that normalizes cruelty. Anarchism doesn’t guarantee peace, but it prevents that violence from becoming institutionalized and detached from consequences.
I’m not trying for a ‘gotcha’. I really would like for horizontal power structures to work. I’m fascinated by systems in which an orderly outcome can be achieved without any centralized control by the individual agents each following a simple set of rules, e.g. sidewalks and roads (mostly) function well on a mass scale with entirely autonomous agents. I try to envision sets of rules like that at work, or in the club I’m in. These kinds of systems work because the incentives line up: The community is better off when everybody follows the rules, and the individual is better off by following the rules.
Indeed, if half of a community cheers on violence, it’s not a failure of anarchism. However, it’s a real scenario, and if anarchism is to work in the real world, it has to handle such situations. And such a scenario is not at all hypothetical, it’s just a simplification of the political situation that we find ourselves in the United States in right now. The half of the population that deplores violence, or fascism, is trying to organize, resist, and dismantle the power structures enabling it, but there’s only so much we’re willing to do. The incentive structure is not aligned. To make the community better off, individuals would have to make themselves much, much worse off. Unless, of course, everybody participated, like a massive game of Prisoner’s Dilemma.
So what is the answer from anarchism? How do we stop the people who don’t think like us, and want to hurt us, or at least wouldn’t mind?
You’re absolutely right that any theory of social organization, anarchist or not, has to grapple with the fact that not everyone shares the same values, some people actively seek to dominate or harm others, and large-scale coordination problems (like the Prisoner’s Dilemma you mention) are real.
From my perspective, there’s no single silver bullet to this, but I’d say there are two interlocking answers:
1. Prevention through culture and material conditions. If domination-seeking behaviors and violent ideologies are reliably produced under certain social conditions, like alienation, hierarchy, competition, or trauma, then the long-term answer is to change those conditions. This means building communities where people’s needs are met, where they’re raised in environments that reward cooperation over control, and where mutual aid and solidarity are lived experiences rather than abstract ideals. We already see this in practice: in disasters, in mutual aid networks, in some Indigenous and co-op models.
2. Active collective defense without centralized coercion. Anarchism doesn’t mean passivity in the face of harm. On the contrary, self-defense and community protection are vital. But the difference is in how it’s organized: instead of empowering a standing authority (like police or authoritarian leaders), the response comes from the collective itself through things like community defense groups, accountability processes, conflict de-escalation practices, and social exclusion of those who persist in harmful behavior.
That doesn’t make it easy and it requires constant maintenance, and yes, it’s vulnerable to failure. But all systems are. The anarchist gamble is that decentralized, accountable, collectively managed responses are less dangerous over time than top-down systems that concentrate coercive power which history shows are prone to abuse, even when they start with good intentions.
To your point: yes, we live in a society where incentive structures are badly misaligned. That’s part of why anarchists see cultural transformation (not just institutional reform) as essential. If anarchism seems idealistic, it’s because it’s trying to address the root (not just the symptoms) of systemic violence and domination.