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.
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.
Exile and public shaming
How do you enforce exile and ensure that it is just? Because any cultural majority is going to pick on a minority even and especially without any distant government. The history of progress has been using a distant government (that can be impartial to local prejudice) to force majorities to accept minorities.
Eisenhower sending the 101st Airborne to protect black children is the only reason Arkansas desegregated.
And bad actors do not care about public shaming.
I had basically this exactly same question about how can open source software be safe if just anyone can make it. It was basically the same…sure, you can’t totally trust that people are vetting FOSS for malware…but can you trust big companies to NOT put malware and Spyware in our software? I sure as hell don’t. Seems to be a Good analogy when discussing this type of thing.
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I dont trust either to not put malware in. I trust that more people are watching and paying attention to big company software than any of your FOSS offerings.
How would that be the case if the source code isn’t readily available? FOSS software is less susceptible to surveillance and bad actors in general because anyone can typically go look at the source code. If there’s something shady, it’s much easier to find it when the entire open source community has access. With proprietary software it may be possible to get some of the code, but it’s not made readily available to a community of people who are about to vett its security.
Because people actually use the software and report issues. Have none of you people ever developed software before. Everything you have described has happened in both FOSS and paid software. The open source community is tiny and insignificant compared to the number of people using professionally sold offerings. Just because something is free doesn’t inherently make it better and this illusion that it does is what causes shit like this
https://www.lumificyber.com/threat-library/pdfast-freeware-compromise-used-to-distribute-malware/
You’re basically describing “we’ve reviewed ourselves and found nothing wrong!” I.e., Microsoft.
No. Every company that uses Microsoft is reviewing them and all their offerings. What part of “more people” means “only microsoft”?
I‘m currently reading David Graeber and David Wengrow: The Dawn of Everything.
It dives deeper into the history of the misconceptions of power.
I would love to live in a society that is set up this way. I saw a recent study about inequality challenging the conventional wisdom that it is inevitable, here on lemmy actually. Dunno if thats one of the reasons for this post. But I certainly think its worth asking is the way we do things now the best way? Probably not, just because we do stuff the way we do now doesn’t mean it must be done that way. I personally am in favor of governments where the responsibility is given to small groups of people who rotate into positions for some length of time. It would just be randomly chosen people from society at large. It’s been done in the past, and it seems like a great way to keep a small group from concentrating power and misusing it. Also makes it so ordinary people are making the decisions, so less likely to make malaligned choices that are bad for the rest of society. Whether that is a flat structure, or a vertical structure is certainly up for debate.
Yeah. That’s always been such a strange contradiction in their beliefs. “People can’t be trusted with power, so that’s why we need a system that empowers the absolute worst people!” Setting aside how wrong that belief is, the conclusion doesn’t even logically follow from the incorrect “fact.”
As for how we handle things in the future… idk. You’re right that people have methods of socially dealing with bad behavior, but I also wonder if we can reliably transplant the experiences of pre-industrial societies into our modern world. As technology progresses, it becomes easier and easier for smaller and smaller groups of people to inflict harm on others. In the past, if you wanted to go fight a war you needed to convince a whole army’s worth of people to go risk their lives and hurt others. Now? A handful of people in an air conditioned room can level a building on the other side of the world without ever getting up out of their chairs thanks to drones. Not only do you need to convince fewer people, they’re also more isolated from both the risk and horror of their actions, so it’s easier to convince them.
I don’t think it’s that plausible to deal with those kinds of problems through social pressure alone. What to do about it? Idk.
No yea, you’re obviously right. We can’t just take forager social praxis and use it in our society, but we can absolutely learn from them. You have to understand that social pressure goes a lot further than just ostracizing an individual. Humans need eachother, more often than not. We feed eachother, fix eachothers plumbing, teach each-others children how to garden, how to fix stuff. Let’s say there is a group of individuals causing destruction (using drones). Well we’ve acknowledged they’re doing terrible shit, so we stop helping them and we make it clear to the rest of the community what these people are doing. In extreme cases we’d have to deal with the situation violently, but it’s equally as important to recognize that when we’re talking about bad actors in general, we’re talking about bad actors in all of its spectrum. From pickpockets, to murders. And I think for each case there is a solution.
The question that comes to my mind is, “Who’s ‘we’, Kimosabe?” (It’s the punchline of a joke.)
In the drone example, half of the community acknowledges that the operators are doing terrible shit. The other half of the community things it’s fantastic. What then? The half that deplores the killing isn’t likely to do much about it, because the killing is happening to somebody else on the other side of the world. If they try to stop it violently, the killing will start happening to them.
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.
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.
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.
There’s also always people willing to fix it for others too
I have a bit of an inverted perspective. All anti-social behaviors aside: can Anarchists build and maintain public infrastructure?
I like public utilities. If an anarchist commune can keep a wastewater treatment plant running and even expand sewerage to those without it, I am all for it. If the public drinking water systems can be maintained and uncontaminated that’s a win in my book.
But practically speaking some functions of the state do serve the public, and I find that acceptable.
I like public utilities too. I want clean water, working sewer systems, transit that functions. None of that is anti-anarchist. What anarchists are against is the hierarchical power that controls those things, not the things themselves.
The idea that we need a state to maintain infrastructure just doesn’t hold up when you look at examples of horizontal systems actually doing this. In Spain during the civil war, worker collectives ran utilities and transit. Zapatistas in Chiapas have been building and maintaining clinics, water systems, and schools for decades now. Rojava has been coordinating everything from food distribution to electricity in wartime conditions.
The issue isn’t “infrastructure good, therefore state good.” It’s who controls it, who gets to decide how it works, who it serves. I’m not saying there’s no complexity here, especially at scale. But the assumption that you need a centralized, coercive authority to make public services work - that’s something anarchism directly challenges, and I think with good reason.
I’m with you though, any serious anarchist vision needs a real answer to this. Not just vague gestures at mutual aid, but actual plans for maintenance, for logistics and scaling. I don’t think that’s impossible. I just think we haven’t built most of those systems yet, and we’re not going to build them unless we start trying.
Something people never talk about. Who do you think is going to run these utilities and work in sewage plants in your anarchist utopia? People wont do that shit unless it pays good. No one ever talks about who will do the awful jobs that we need to keep comfortable lives.
Never said anything about a utopia. Utopia is a made up concept. There will never, ever, in a million years be a perfect society.
You’re claiming that the only way to get people to work is if we keep capitalism and the threat of poverty. That if people aren’t coerced by survival, nothing gets done. I just don’t buy that. Humans maintained shared infrastructure long before bosses and wages. The idea that nobody would do difficult or unpleasant work without capitalism says more about how alienating our system is than about human nature.
You don’t have to believe in socialism or anarchism. That’s not really what I was trying to get at in this thread. The original post was about domination-seeking behavior. That’s the conversation I’m more interested in. So I’m gonna leave it at that. I think I’ll read your reply if you do come to it, just know I’m not here to defend anarchism.
I agree that wont ever happen. I just don’t agree that humans will do any of that work unless coerced in some way (not by slavery but by saying hey, if you work in shit all day, you can live relatively comforably)… I’ve seen how lazy and unmotivated the average person is, unfortunately, and I can’t see any vital jobs being performed just for the sake of it. I sure as hell would not work for a sewage plant or garbage pickup for nothing.
I agree it’s an alienating system, but that’s what happens when there is billions of humans, and cities with populations over a million.
I was originally going to leave it alone, but honestly, what you’re implying really ticked me off.
There are hundreds of thousands of volunteer firefighters who risk their lives for their communities every year. In disaster zones and informal settlements, people organize clean water, waste systems, and emergency response, not for wages, but because it needs to be done (I know, crazy right??) . During COVID, mutual aid networks sprang into action everywhere, people delivered food, ran errands, and showed real care for their neighbors out of solidarity, not coercion.
And speaking from personal experience: I’ve been part of a worker co-op. We shared the load of the less desirable tasks because the structure made it fair and collective. People weren’t doing it because they were forced to, they were doing it because it felt right.
So maybe YOU wouldn’t take on that job. That’s fine. But there’s clear evidence that millions of people would, and do, take on hard or unpleasant work without coercion or pay. I’m not going to let you pretend those people don’t exist. They do. And they deserve recognition.
Have a good day or night.
That is true, there’s a lot of great volunteers out there and I commend them! But full scale, I don’t believe it would work like you are wishing. Im not sure natural disasters and firefighters are really in the same realm of the day to day. You’re saying the average taco bell (random example) employee is still going to go into work when they have no reason to do it? Or that garbage collectors are still gonna get up at 4 am to collect trash? Or that office workers will still sit in front of a computer for 9 hours working on documentation? I’d be down for a test though, bring on the UBI! I know if I had UBI I’d work half the hours I do now just to make money for fun stuff. The rest of the time I’d be reading, playing games, building stuff in the shop. Also, im not sure if you’ve met many younger people. But from my experience managing them, about 1 in 10 show any initiative and are the type you are talking about that would work hard no matter what. The other 9, they’ll play COD all day long if you don’t force them to work. Thats kind of human nature.
This is very interesting though I like hearing your thoughts as it differs from many people I deal with in the day to day. You could be right. But we have no way to ever test it.
It’s an ongoing conversation, like you say. For my part, I think a good start would be introducing more democracy into workplaces. Like having workers vote on their managers, work conditions, etc. And have other members of the public voting on what projects city infrastructure workers are undertaking.
And then of course a dialogue about how to make it happen – like making sure the infrastructure workers feel valued, and are getting everything they need to succeed.
actual plans for maintenance, for logistics and scaling.
I think this still begins to necessitate structures that begin to resemble the state. After all: Zapatistas, Rojava, Spanish Civil War each have something in common: wartime conditions with military structures. I find it difficult to parse the very real achievements of those movements from that context.
At least with with the Spanish Civil War (not familiar with how the Zapatistas do it, and would have to read a refresher on Rojava’s), those military structures were bottom up direct democracies where soldiers voted who their commanders would be, and those commanders voted on who their generals would be, etc, with the option of immediate removal.
So even there, there was not a top down hierarchical structure, and historically they performed quite well militarily and logistically with the few resources they had available (and before the Soviets did their classic stabby stab move).
can Anarchists build and maintain public infrastructure?
Internet
Wikipedia
Many open source projects
One could argue that international research efforts are generally done in a non-coercivie way
Anarchist ways can maintain public infrastructure, but they need to be built differently with that modus operandi in mind.
It can be done with strong decentralization principles like fediverse itself but applying that to infrastructure yields 2 big problems: efficiency loss due to lack of centralization and compatibility issues between the decentralization implementations. Unfortunately these are basically unsolvable without sci-fi progression.
That’s why anarcho syndicalism is a thing right? I’m no expert on it but I think that a syndicate would be the right tool in this instance.
Pre-civilized societies didn’t let power-hungry individuals take over.
Pre-civilized societies were small.
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?
This seems like a misunderstanding to me. The people don’t build systems. The people are subjected to systems built by dominating bad actors.
Are there examples of stable horizontal power structures beyond ~1000 people?
Some examples of large scale cooperation without authority or hierarchy are Bitcoin users/miners, sci-hub, historic communities in Spain and eastern Europe and French communes, modern autonomous zones in several countries like Mexico and France where law enforcement will not go.
Another idea is that even in a place where authority is centralized under a hierarchy of power, that power only exists temporarily when it is enforced and anarchy rules apply until the power is enforced, i.e. laws of any system only matter when they are exercised. Anywhere considered wilderness or frequently autonomous without law enforcement access would fit this category.
Good examples, especially that last idea. I will say Bitcoin mining certainly doesn’t count though, there’s no non-hierarchical cooperation since everything is enforced by the rules of the system they’re using. Possible attacks that work despite that system, eg. a majority consensus attack, have been tried on blockchains when they might work.
Not really no. There are some successful communes and intentional communities but the upper limit for such things is low and they typically operate within a larger society that is traditionally structured. Even if such an experiment theoretically worked up to 100k or 1 million people it still could not operate independently because without a “host” state foreign nations with an exponentially larger population and traditional hierarchy could sweep in and easily take over due to a large standing army. Despite what anyone says we will always live in that world because human nature doesn’t change.
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.
Do you feel current systems of governance are handling these global collective action problems well? Because I do not. I think they’re just very difficult and thorny problems that we’ll always have to wrestle with.
I just don’t think that current systems being meh means that any given other system has merit. That’s why I mentioned not comparing in my comment.
I think the main advantage of anarchism and adjacent systems is better local governance and personal freedom. But I’m not really convinced that means global governance would be worse. If anything, disarming the global superpowers would improve international solidarity since different autonomous groups could more effectively reach agreements for the common good rather than being bullied into doing harmful things by the powerful. This would make the anarchist-UN potentially much more effective than it is now. Otherwise, I don’t think it would be too different than the way international orgs work now plus some additional norms and structures to avoid bullying and encourage consensus.
But my point is just that not having a clear solution for this specific problem isn’t a reason against these ideas. These issues are some of the most difficult to solve and I’d rather focus on low-hanging fruit first.
not gonna get fully into the weeds here but ‘have no leadership to revoke’ is an odd point to try and make when the covid disinfo campaign absolutely had leadership.
I meant it more as individuals than were carrying out antisocial behaviors could do so without having leadership positions. It’s not only the group and its leaders that were capable of harm.
If you can give me a novel idea about this, I’d appreciate it.
Change the select few decisionmakers regularly. With dice, not an expensive and polarizing campaign followed by elections. (Note: creates incentive to educate everyone well, since they could be chosen at random.)
Education of everyone doesn’t mean any individual can make informed decisions even on their own health let alone understand the chemistry and impact of PFAS, for example. But I do agree there’s something to the idea of removing incentives to campaign.
I don’t deny that these are difficult problems, and I won’t attempt to address everything that you mention, but “can’t exile them without a power structure that can use force on them” isn’t true. The use of force doesn’t require any sort of formal vertical power structure. Problems of global scale are just combinations of many individual actions at the local scale, and at the local scale, if someone is committing violence or endangering others, all it takes is a few concerned people to team up and remove them using whatever force needed. Firearms help, but even those are not strictly necessary. If such problems are addressed quickly enough at the local level, then they are less likely to scale up to the global level in any organised way. If many people are already committing violence together on a larger scale, then removing them becomes a matter of tribal warfare or genocide. Ugly, and not something that I recommend, but far from impossible, as history has shown.
Firearms help
Firearms allow an individual to commit mass murder before a a bunch of good guys are even aware of it. There’s a bunch of ways individuals can have way more destructive power than is reasonable. I’m not saying a vertical power structure is required, just that I still don’t see how a horizontal one can deal with destructive individuals or provide safety without most people being willing to kill other humans, maintain the many skills that would require, and have a mindset where being constantly vigilant doesn’t cause some sort of mental issues. If it’s just a problem that’s doesn’t currently have a solution, that’s fine. I tend to agree with Nozick that it just creates competing and escalating defense groups until one comes out on top. And if we’re going to agree that humans are bad enough to avoid providing them with vertical power structures, we absolutely cannot wave away that people would behave any better under any other system.
Maybe we’re using different definitions of exile. As I know it, in means physically kicking them out of an area and its social structure. I can imagine heavy resistance to that. If it’s just cutting somebody off from systems, I really don’t see the difference between killing somebody with violence vs starving them or similar. If it’s just ostracizing them, I don’t see how a social punishment is a deterrent to antisocial behavior.
As for global problems just requiring concerned individuals to use force, I can’t imagine a few individuals forcing the whole world off fossil fuels, for example.
Oh, I didn’t try to shame anyone. Apologies if it looked like it. To answer your question:
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?
My answer to that would be: In order for horizontal power, we need to radically rethink how people are connected to each other in the first place. The root issue here isn’t that decentralized systems can’t coordinate, it’s that they require a different kind of infrastructure to do it. In a pandemic scenario, that could look like local health councils making decisions based on conditions on the ground, real-time, open data-sharing across regions, resource pooling to get masks, meds, or food where they’re needed and ideally cultural norm of collective care (not just individual freedom).
On the climate front, it’s obviously more complex, but the same principles apply. If people are embedded in local systems of stewardship where the land and water is shared and monitored by the people who depend on them, you’re much more likely to see sustainable behavior. And if those communities are networked across bioregions, then broader ecological decisions can be coordinated without a single coercive authority calling the shots.
I’m not saying any of this is easy, especially from where we are now. But I don’t think we need to scale control to meet global crises. I think we need to scale cooperation and that’s where horizontal system actually have a chance to shine.
I understand it would take radically different structures, but in the pandemic example, what happens when the next local group decides to not participate in mutual care? Could it still work without magically making humans better than they are?
I believe most people aren’t bad actors. But also, most people can see what is good for them. And cooperatives prove that people can run with it to their advantage.
David Graeber made a very good point that the concept of money is only necessary for war. Take money out of the equation and the next local group will have to stretch to avoid mutual care.
most people can see what’s good for them
Counterpoints: smoking and other addictions, results of recent US election, propaganda and advertising working
As for money, it’s a technology that can act as a value store. I don’t think getting rid of it is a realistic idea until we’ve got Star Trek levels of tech.
in the pandemic example, what happens when the next local group decides to not participate in mutual care?
Some entire countries essentially did that. They responded carelessly and slow, and experienced harsher consequences as a result. Nobody can stop a group of people from getting themselves hurt. Sure, one can try to help them once they are hurt, if some resources remain available for that.
I guess my point is not that groups can harm themselves, but that they can (and did) harm others in this particular scenario.
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.
Horizontal power structures can only be stable if people have a healthy culture of proactively fighting selfish actions. Any teenager will have experienced students firing their teachers, the village taking children away from abusive parents, women going on a sex strike to get men to take allegations of catcalling seriously, etc.
So when COVID rolls around and some people act selfishly, people already know from experience how to act with it. People are already familiar with shunning friends because they refuse to grow out of hurting others, they’re already familiar with boycotting specific businesses and finding alternatives. And most importantly, people already know that all of this is waiting for them if they do choose to be selfish, so they are way more likely to choose the right thing from the start.
Ideally, horizontal power structures also come with Restorative Justice. For every crime that people have ever heard of, they’ll have seen the process of someone being kept at a safe distance until they learn why they were wrong and make amends to those they wronged, and receiving help with learning.
But sure, suppose somehow that 40% of the population doesn’t really care much about keeping each other healthy and is not going to budge without consequences. In that case: Making people sick is an act of violence, so people would be in their rights to use the threat of reciprocal violence to keep people that refuse to wear masks at 2m distance.
This would be a problem that needs discussion. My fifteen minute answer would be that those of the 60% that feel comfortable with it could be given consent by the community to walk around with 2m long halberds (shaped to be blunt when poking and sharp when slicing) and keep the 40% out of spaces where they would cause harm with the threat of force. They could share a digital zine on how to make these halberds from common household materials, and have the normal justice system for people that misuse those weapons.
can’t exile them without a power structure that can use force on them
If you can’t find twenty people to work together to overpower and exile one person, that’s a good sign that you’re wrong about wanting to exile them.
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?
In a horizontal power structure, a nation disregarding the agreed-on CO2 output norms is the same thing as a person disagreeing the agreed-on “no catcalling” norms. Talking to them, boycotting them, using violence if necessary. If the USA and EU didn’t have a position of power over the rest of the world, their excess CO2 production would be answered with a boycott from the rest of the world.
The willfully negligent poisoning of others is also an act of violence. People who do not understand that reckless scientific experimentation or deployment of untested chemicals is murder can be stopped by any means up to and including violence. In a horizontal power structure, every Chemours factory would be carefully decontaminated rubble.
Though more realistically, Chemours would never have existed. There would not be a patent on PFAS. People would treat those that deploy PFAS without prior study on its health effects as violent. People would discover its toxicity and environmental harm within years of its discovery and before any large-scale roll-out, and the cleanup of contaminated sites would be manageable by volunteers.
I’m curious if you agree that police not providing protection to Italian immigrants in the US in the late 19th century caused the Mafia to be created to fill that need.
I’m not saying cops are good, but most of the anarchists I’ve spoken to have the idea that it would be great for everybody to be willing to be violent with others when disagreements arise.
Maybe I can find twenty people to exile someone, but what if they can find forty to protect themselves? Does that make one group more right than the other? I also think that finding 20 people who agree with you makes you think there’s merit to your position and justification for violence is an absolutely terrifyingly low bar.
Can you describe what an horizontal power structure is?
I’d describe it as a social relationship that develops and maintains social structures for equitable distribution of management power.
Sounds like a needlessly complicated way to say everyone just be nice to each other. And yeah it’s a good message but I don’t see a world in which that’s gonna happen in my lifetime. I’d rater society moves towards a UBI model with free or subsidized Healthcare, so you don’t have to work at a job like your life depends on it, don’t like the dick heads at company A, interview and get a job at some other company B, till you find a bunch of people you can tolerate
“Sounds like a needlessly complicated way to say everyone just be nice to each other.”
I mean if that’s your takeaway, I don’t see a need to argue whether horizontal power structures are “complicated” or not. I’m trying to describe something more specific than just “being nice”. It’s about building structures that intentionally prevent concentrations of power and give people collective control over the systems that affect them. That’s a whole lot different than just hoping people are kind.
As for UBI and healthcare. Yeah! I’d rather live in that world too than the one we’re in now. But even those things don’t challenge the underlying dynamic: the few deciding for the many. Switching jobs still means your livelihood is tied to bosses and market whims. A horizontal structure isn’t about individual escape routes.
So describe this structure, all you have said is just wish fulfillment word salad backed by nothing, it’s like someone saying I want world peace, sure so do I, but wishing for something isn’t gonna make it happen, you need implementation details, ideas are worthless without execution
Look man, if you’re genuinely interested in what horizontal structures or non-coercive coordination can look like, there’s plenty of research out there. I’d encourage digging into that.
I’m not here to spoonfeed a blueprint for an entire global society. The point was to ask questions about how to quell narcissistic people and keep them from gaining power and influence, not pretend to have all the answers.
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.
Do you have anywhere to do further reading?
I would advise you to read. John Locke’s political treaties as well as David Henry Thoreaus essays
Thank you. I’ll check them out. I’ve read a small amount of locke’s work but definitely need to read more of it.
I personally don’t think I’m very much in favor of a nightwatch state. I have to admit though, I’m not much learned in the field of “minarchism.” I still strongly believe any centralized power is in danger of corruption.
Anarchists can have means of governing themselves – it’s not a big free-for all. The point is that there is no central hierarchy. For example, an anarchist collective could decide (via whatever method, that’s a separate convo) that each community member gets to use a piece of equipment one week per year, or that the community as a whole will operate that equipment to satisfy the needs of people in a mutually-decided order. They could also decide that the 20 electrical engineers among them should as a group have operational control on a day-to-day basis of the power generating infrastructure, but only as long as they operate it according to the expressed needs of the community, in the community’s interest, in a safe way.
None of that would be hierarchy or domination, as long as the underlying decision making process was democratic.
You’re making the exact same argument OP is talking about.
Yes but op’s decision is that because bad people could take positions of power. There should be no positions of power which doesn’t correct the original issue. Op stated that bad people will do bad things and abuse other people. So we can let those bad people run amok or we can make an effort to police their actions which will ultimately give some of those bad people and additional level of power.
