Anarchism and Social Ecology @slrpnk.net

7mo ago

“Anarchism wouldn't work because there will always be people to ruin it for others.”

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.

152 comments

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.
- We keep us safe. Defense against bad actors is everyone's resposibility. The kid who runs off with the ball doesn't get invited to play anymore. I don't know where the idea anarchists are pascifist comes from, but the answer is shoot back. No Gods, no masters.
- I’ll just point out, this was the original concept behind the US Constitution. Whether it’s worked as intended is… debatable.
  A quick note on the U.S. Constitution: it’s sometimes framed as an attempt to diffuse power horizontally, but that’s not really accurate. The U.S. already had a decentralized system at the time, the Articles of Confederation. And the Constitution was created explicitly to centralize federal power in response to elite fears of uprisings like Shays’ Rebellion. It didn’t introduce shared responsibility; it replaced a fragile form of it with a much stronger central government.
  So while it may have used the language of distributed power (checks and balances, separation of powers, etc.), it wasn’t about horizontalism in the sense that I meant. It was about stabilizing and legitimizing state authority which is a very different project.
  Regarding your question: What would we do when bandits show up in a town and start shooting and looting, other than shoot back?
  ...Realistically, I don't believe we wouldn't shoot back. But in my eyes that's already an extreme case of power concentrating, which I firmly believe is preventable before it even occurs. When violence does erupt, collective defense is necessary. But the difference is whether we wait until that crisis point (where power has already centralized in dangerous hands) or whether we create resilient, horizontal networks that make it far harder for any one group or individual to monopolize force and exploit others.
  So yes, we defend ourselves when necessary, but the real work is done long before the shooting starts.
  Edit: The goal is to build social systems that reduce the conditions enabling those “bandits” to emerge in the first place. Through strong community bonds, mutual aid, shared responsibility, and mechanisms for accountability that keep narcissistic or violent individuals from gaining influence or forming armed factions.

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 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?
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.

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.

Bad actors are going to build their vertical power structures whether you like it or not. This is the challenge liberals are posing to anarchists: if you are unwilling to build your own vertical power structure then how do you stop the bad actors from building theirs and then using it as a cudgel against you?
Exile and public shaming are tools that only work against bad actors as individuals. They do not work when the bad actors team up and form a critical mass.
In the distant past, anarchism worked because everyone knew each other and bad actors had nowhere to hide to build their power structures and grow in strength. The agricultural revolution changed all this because of food storage and the potential for an outside group to attack and steal the food. People formed power structures and developed the first militaries in order to defend their granaries and this led to the growth of large cities where people no longer had the ability to know everyone.
Militaries also showed the power of hierarchies. Making decisions by consensus is slow. A military with a formal power structure has a huge advantage in combat against an unstructured tribe of warriors. This was proven again and again as the empires of the past conquered their neighbours.
But I digress. A large city where it’s impossible to know everyone is a huge problem for anarchists who want to prevent bad actors from forming a vertical power structure and taking over. There simply is no known social tool which can combat against the formation of conspiracies and elites within a large society.
- In the distant past, anarchism worked because everyone knew each other and bad actors had nowhere to hide to build their power structures and grow in strength.
  Sure they did - in the form of their own neighboring state. Then they invaded your peaceful anarchist society and you are now the great-great-great-(great....) descendant of their rape.
  It sucks but you're absolutely right. Read Ursula K Le Guin's The Dispossessed. The only way anarchism worked in that story was on an entirely separate planet that everyone agreed to leave alone because it was a fucking desert and not worth conquering.
  
  I meant distant past before statehood was even a thing. That was before agriculture when all people lived in nomadic tribes. There were no neighbouring states because no one had fixed territories. Groups still fought among each other as they tracked the movement of migratory herds (mobile food supply) but there were no raids on granaries because there were no granaries yet.
  The first agricultural societies had a really bad time. Their nutrition was extremely poor compared to the meat-rich diets of nomads. The nomads with their superior health and mobility had easy pickings on the crude granaries and poor defences of early farming villages. Statehood began when those villages began to work together and start their own militaries which led to specialized soldiers for the first time (as opposed to nomadic warriors who fought but also hunted and parented and everything else their tribe needed them to do).

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.
- 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.
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
- 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.

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.
- Hey I remember you!
  Honestly, that point you made about authoritarianism being the narcissists perfect political expression really resonated. 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. And I fully agree that changing material conditions isn’t enough if we don’t also build ongoing, cultural mechanisms to prevent this kind of behavior from embedding itself. Putting the exile issue into historical context: Egalitarian societies didn’t “fail,” they were overrun, the perspective shifts the framing entirely: it’s not about whether anarchism “works,” it’s about how we defend it from systems built to destroy it.
  One thing though, not a disagreement, but just to complicate it; I think centralization can easily slip into hierarchy, especially if we don’t design mechanisms of accountability from the start. Even worker co-ops, if they’re not careful, can drift toward soft hierarchies if access to information or power isn’t distributed well. But you’re totally right that centralization and hierarchy are not inherently the same and that distinction needs way more attention in this comment section.
  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.
  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?
  
  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.
  
  Interesting points, this names some of the things I have suspected for a long time but was never able to properly put to words. Basically, it takes a certain kind of person to become "big boss", whether in social circles, companies or governments.
  It is, in my opinion, self-selecting: only someone "wired" to become the big boss will make the necessary decisions to become the boss, which creates an environment where only certain people go to the top, and so on.
  I do disagree about hierarchies - in my opinion, hierarchies, if used properly, can be very efficient. But that is a different discussion :)
- We just need to establish a binding social contract that outlaws coercion, and aggressively enforce it.
  How is that not a form of coercion itself?
  
  In most cases, we can assume that the people bound by the social contract agreed to the social contract as a condition of joining the group. In other words, they were not coerced into that behavior, and any penalties that they suffer as a result of violating the social contract are penalties that they agreed to as well (so long as said penalties are also outlined in the contract up front). It seems like coercion because bad actors typically resist the penalties imposed as a consequence of their bad behaviors, but it actually is not, because they agreed to all of it up front.
  Things get tricky only when we consider the case where the social contract is imposed upon people who did not agree to it beforehand, which does apply in the case of a society that is doing external policing, or arguably in the case of children - they are subject to rules that they did not choose for themselves. In this case, we are coercing them, and we have to admit this one exception. We avoid the paradox of tolerance so long as the contract only allows society to coerce those individuals who break the rules of the social contract, which otherwise outlaws coercion. To actually justify this set of rules requires now that we reason about some broader objectives, like maximizing freedom or minimizing harm. I would imagine that the exact details of the social contract would end up as the subject of an ongoing discussion due to the difficult and sometimes ambiguous nature of the underlying objectives, though I still think that the amount of variation that we would see between different (non-narcissistic) groups would end up being rather small. This is the sort of thing that should be refined over time as we learn more about ourselves, our world, and how we would best fit into it.

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.
- 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.
  
  You're basically describing "we've reviewed ourselves and found nothing wrong!" I.e., Microsoft.

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 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 hear you because I've had the same exact thoughts, but I think you may be committing the classic blunder of conflating rules with rulers.
  You can still have rules, norms, mores, leaders, even I believe laws under anarchism -- you just can't have absolute, unrevocable authority.
  
  Rules, laws, and leaders sounds an awful lot like a state.
- For the last 300,000 years humans have existed, we spent 290000 living according to our nature in anarchy. For the last 10,000 years we've been trying and failing at non-anarchy, causing mass death from war, starvation, and disease.
  
  There's a bit more to it than that. For the last 10,000 years we've had comparative abundance, constant technological advances, a population explosion, and globalization.
  
  Tribes (not anarchy) has been far more common

Even with hierarchies of mutual aid, you end up with different tasks allocated to different people. Oh joel does bin duty because it's easiest for him for x y z reasons. Okay, Joel becomes bin guy. May even get stuck in that role. Ect ect... Eventually taken for granted. An unintentional hierarchy appears from horizontal power structures.
By the way, dandies were usually children of wealth, and their outfits went on to become some of the first business suits.
- Does Joel dislike being the bin guy? He could just stop doing it.
  Is Joel doing a shitty job with the bins? Anyone could start doing it, even if he protests.
  I don't see the problem.
  
  Joel is the kind of anarchist who thinks he has a right to do a shitty job in protest, says they're just bins. No one else wants the job. Joel says he'll keep doing it out of an uncomfortable feeling of obligation. Sometimes at the Friday night drinking session, others make fun of him and he plays along enough to not cause a scene but it's really upsetting him.
- It's tough to do anti-hierarchical practices in a hierarchical world! I've seen organizations have rotating roles that make sure people don't get stuck.

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.

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.
- The fact that you will have to fight for something good doesn't mean giving up is the answer.
  
  Hierarchical, formal power structures have a competitive advantage when it comes to making decisions quickly and directing the group. This has nowhere been more evident than in the countless military victories of organized armies over groups of tribal warriors.
  The advantage of anarchism and structureless society is with diversity of ideas and the innovations you can get from that. Straight up fights against organized adversaries is its biggest weakness.
  
  I'm not suggesting giving up. I'm trying to point out an issue. And I'd genuinely like to hear an answer on how it would be solved.

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.

Are there examples of stable horizontal power structures beyond ~1000 people?
- The linux development team
  
  That's not really horizontal though, different people have (soft?) ownership of different parts of the kernel. It's merit-based but not horizontal, which IMO is a fairly good system but doesn't really fit the description.
- 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.
- 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.

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.

Man, people are so fatalistic and utopian in their world views. The fact is that we are beautiful, wretched, capable creatures, and life is a fight. People are gonna beat you down, and the world is gonna shit all over you. Whether we're watching people do their fucking war games and playing monopoly with the world, we rise up and punch a removed in the face when he fucks with us. Anarchism is a way of being, and we're clever as fuck. We're gonna work this shit out and jump over hurdles and get into ugly arguments and love our family right. We can convolute this shit and try to work out the fantasy worlds we would love to live in - at the end of the day, we try to fill our bellies and be loved. And 9 times out of ten, you're not arguing with the world, you're failing to confront yourself. How do prevent hierarchy? We fucking stand up to bullies, protect ourselves, and treat our women right. Feel me?

I‘m currently reading David Graeber and David Wengrow: The Dawn of Everything.
It dives deeper into the history of the misconceptions of power.

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

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.

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.
- 'Minarchism' in my book is a term invented by fascist and capitalist entryists, and people who use it to gatekeep anarchism should be on the other side of the gate.
  They don't need to be 'appointed' by a king or politician in order to exist. Committees are one of the essential organs of actual right-now functioning real-life working large-scale anarchist groups. When done well, they include the voices of all of the significant stakeholders in a decision, and efficiently discover solutions that achieve the goal while respecting the autonomy and interests of all of the participants.
  Don't @ me, but definitely reply to @JustJack23@slrpnk.net with the disemboweled anarchism you propose as an alternative.
  
  I think you should slow down and critically read the words that I wrote. You should probably also read into natural philosophy.
  I have no problem with the no Gods no Kings no Masters point of view. I would count a committee as a master. I guess we're my worldview and your splits is you seem to think that the committee can do no wrong. I am not against working with groups or committees. It's just I equally distrust the motives of individuals and organizations both are easily swayed by mob rule.
- That is very interesting, what alternative do you propose?

I asked this in a thread a while ago but I'll repost it here since I never got an answer:
[I don't see how anarchism] would work in practice. Hierarchies form to simplify the logistics and social cohesion of a disorganized network of subunits.
As a basic example, how the hell do collectives even communicate with those on other continents? It took millenia for humans to develop reliable seafaring technology, only made possible through the direction of state actors. Sea cables cost millions to maintain; satellite communication is even harder to achieve.
Assuming that any of these could even be accomplished strictly via collectives ("Why the hell should I give you my Chilean copper so you can throw it in the ocean to talk to Europe?"), operating these essential services gives access to power and coercion.
Somebody has to launch the ships or run the heart of the telegraph network. Will you centralize the authority of multiple collectives to regulate and monitor it?...
And if you don't do anything to bridge the ocean, what's to prevent ideological drift for that continent; getting a little too centralized for more efficient resource use? Even if your accessible web remains strong and ideologically pure, you have to pray that completely separate webs will be just as strong.
Anarcho-primitivism is the only critique that seems to own the inherent anti-civilization logic, but even then there's nothing stopping a collective-of-collectives from making a bigger pile of sharp rocks to subjugate you.
The gist of it being that hierarchies form due to the natural gravitation of civilization towards efficiency. Delegating someone with power to direct the actions of a large group will always be more efficient than getting N subunits to reach a web of equilibrium. If you've ever tried to horizontally coordinate a group of a large size it's pretty obvious.
Efficiency begets power and power propogates and entrenches the system that it's derived from.
- A lot of what your comment assumes is that global-scale coordination is a given, like of course collectives have to be connected across continents and sharing copper. But I don’t think that assumption actually holds. Here’s my absolutely radical extremist view: Why should every society be plugged into a global system? That’s the legacy of empire and capitalism talking, this idea that everything and everyone needs to be connected, streamlined, “efficient.”
  You’re right that power accumulates where efficiency is the priority, because efficiency always asks what the fastest way to do this is, not who gets hurt in the process. That’s how we end up with hierarchies. Thats how you end up with extractive infrastructures that centralize control over basic resources. But maybe the issue isn’t how to horizontally recreate global coordination. Maybe it’s that global coordination isn’t inherently good, especially when it’s built on unsustainable logistics and deep inequality. If two regions drift ideologically because they aren’t connected by undersea cables, I don’t see that as a crisis. That’s autonomy. And if one group starts consolidating power and turning coercive, that’s a problem. However it’s not solved by having centralized oversight in the first place. That’s how we got here.
  So in my eyes, the real answer is: don’t recreate the world we have, and shrink the scope of interdependence. I believe in the need to relocalize needs. Build federated structures where it makes sense, if it makes sense. And to stop assuming the “efficiency” that comes with hierarchy is something to preserve.
  
  My gut reaction to the idea of unplugging is that it's unwise. It's too easy for groups on one side of the planet to unintentionally affect groups on the other side. I think there will always be a need for a reasonable level of global communication and cooperation.
  
  I don't disagree that anarchist ideals about localization make sense as a reaction to our modern, global, hierarchical world. I'm not arguing to preserve the efficiencies of centralization but pointing out that their gravity makes opposition by other means impossible. Here's the issue that I never see resolved:
  if one group starts consolidating power and turning coercive, that’s a problem. However it’s not solved by having centralized oversight in the first place. That’s how we got here.
  Then how does it get solved? History shows a thousand instances of empires expanding through piece meal conquering of fragmented autonomous polities. Look at the European conquest of Mesoamerica, how the Roman's picked apart most of the world, the colonization of Ireland, the fate of the Iroquois Confederacy, etc... The aggressor doesn't even need a material or martial advantage, as in Macedonia's subjugation of the loose federation of Greek city states.
  Generally, the expansion only stops from an internal shift (dynasty change, leader death, coup, etc...), hitting a geographical limit, or when the aggressor runs into someone too large to bully.
  I'll point out as well that this doesn't even need to be a nefarious, expansionist scheme. Changes in climate can apply a survival pressure to take what you need from neighbors. Take for example, sea level rise reducing arable land for the Vikings, one of the causes for their invasion and settling in Britain.

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.
- To touch up on some of your questions you have at the bottom, and be warned that this will be somewhat anti-anarchistic:
  After a successful revolution, bourgeoisie fall and people cheer in the streets. What now, do we go full horizontal hierarchy mode and decentralize? The truth of the matter is that post-revolutionary period is incredibly volatile (as seen by the fact that most revolutions happened in cascades) and faces a multitude of immediate issues, such as: 1. The previous ruling class trying to get themselves back into power again via counter-revolution or armed uprisings using their resources and connections, be it foreign or internal. 2. The need to overcome capitalist commodity production and reorganize it into planned production to satisfy human and economic needs (aka socialist mode of production). 3. Defense against foreign capitalist threats who would love to get more land/resources or major political influence via coup. 4. The need to spread the revolution internationally, as a country that doesn’t operate under capitalist mode of production simply cannot survive in a global capitalist world (can elaborate on this if anyone cares, don’t want this wall of text to be too long).
  Decentralized horizontal systems are quite detrimental when it comes to solving these immediate issues - it fragments authority, decision making, delays responses to armed insurrections, foreign invasions and production reorganization. You need quick, decisive action during a revolutionary period or collapse follows even before “bad actors” become a problem.
  The working class must seize state power - whether through a vanguard party, council republic, or equivalent to suppress the bourgeoisie, defend the revolution, and transition from capitalist commodity production towards planned economies to satisfy needs. Of course, the state must fulfill the immediate goals to no longer become necessary and for the state to wither away in a timely manner - else, and I agree with Anarchists here, the revolution will degenerate (into red bourgeois states) usually with the help of ‘bad actors’, as seen with USSR and China.
  Also as a short addendum, comparing societies of today to primitive egalitarian horizontal societies is an error - these societies operated under radically different productive forces, population scales and social complexity, production was localized and individualistic. Today’s production is inherently social, large-scale and global, requiring entirely different forms of coordination and past forms simply cannot be revived or even be compared.
  
  Very good and complete answer as usually, that said this is one of my main problems with left ideologies that think hierarchies are necessary even for a limited time, the people in power like to stay it power. As the saying goes:
  Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.
  I have strong doubts that the people in charge will just give up power once it comes to that, and sadly most experiments with communism/socialism (in Eurasian at least) lead exactly to that.

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.

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

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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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

Yep. Exactly like communism: it would be a brilliant idea if people weren't human beings.
- Anarchism and anthropology go well together because anthropologists know that a society without a state is possible because so many exist.
  David Graeber
- That can be said about anything really. Except that anarchist explicitly recognise that and try to put up measures to prevent individual people to do too much damage, which is not something that can be said about our current system nor the (formerly) existing socialist states.

152 comments