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.
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.
Are there examples of stable horizontal power structures beyond ~1000 people?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”?
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/
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.
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.
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.
That’s fine if this is started from scratch, but if there was some revolution that overnight rid the world of capitalism, there would still be many who would never willingly accept any social contract. Pick any historical even you like, there is almost always some group that is in opposition. For the american revolution it was about 15-20% of the population who sided with England. If you want to get really depressing about it, in a 2011 CNN poll 23% said they’d sympathize most with the Confederacy.
Assuming similar numbers in our overnight revolution, what is to be done with those 20% that do not agree to join the group under this social contract?
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
And when they transition from childhood to adulthood, if they find that they do not wish to agree to this social contract, what is the process for handling that?
If someone does not agree to the social contract, but their disagreement is minor and we would expect them to still uphold at least a reasonably similar one, then we can let them find or make a community/society that adheres to that contract.
However, I think you are probably more interested in the case where they are very opposed to the nature of the contract, as in, they want coercion to be allowed in circumstances besides dealing with violators. Unfortunately, if we wish to avoid a paradox of tolerance, we have to revoke such a person’s right to participate in society - any society - until such time as they come around (or possibly permanently, depending on the nature of the situation). This will inevitably involve the use of force. Why must we do this? If we allow people that believe coercion should be allowed outside of the context of enforcing rules to exist outside of our own society, then they will just do exactly what they did the first time we made that mistake. They’ll accumulate, form a hierarchical society with a military, and start destroying things. Even if they do not directly attack other societies, the damage that they’ll do to the environment will indirectly impact everyone else - and as we have seen with global warming, that damage can even be enough to threaten the existence of life on this planet itself.
Of course there will be people who won’t accept a social contract that forbids coercion in the common case. Just like how egalitarian societies did not voluntarily become hierarchical ones, hierarchical societies are not going to voluntarily become egalitarian ones.
Are you proposing prison for those that disagree with the social contract?
I make no specific suggestion on how to deal with those that will not accept such a contract. Prison is but one possibility. I would encourage people to think about this problem, and see what they can come up with. What is the most humane way to deal with these people? The only real constraint is that the coercive actors (defined as those who would coerce outside of the terms of the social contract) must not be allowed to actually perform any coercion, and one should take measures to prevent collusion. Keep in mind that deception/misinformation is also a form of coercion, so one must be careful about how they are allowed to communicate with each other and with members of society, if they are allowed to communicate at all.
Then you’re talking about potentially imprisoning quite a lot of people, potentially 1 in 5 people.
That sounds like quite a lot of coercion for a system aiming to reduce coercion.
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 @[email protected] 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.
I am really happy that this question led to so much elaboration. It does come from a person I know IRL who talks a lot about the psychology of power structures, having had to deal with too many psychopaths himself. If you are interested in the profile of authoritarian followers, which is different from leaders, there is an abundant literature on RWA profiles (right wing authoritarianism, but a bit ill named as stalinists followed similar patterns)
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.
We should reverse the logic of the ‘signing onto law’ where a final formality gives a president, a chancellor or a queen an actual but rare veto power.
There should be something like a representative assembly that has to give a ‘go’ vote for coercive power to be exerted. Nowadays it can be very lightweight: remote voting can be secure easily if it is not anonymous (representatives, one can argue, should vote publicly).
It should be almost automatic when trust is there, but if it is absent, mere doubts should be enough to block an action.
We would live ina very different world if the representatives of a neighborhood had to give the ‘go’ for a police operation
I am really happy that this question led to so much elaboration. It does come from a person I know IRL who talks a lot about the psychology of power structures, having had to deal with too many psychopaths himself.
I also have personal experience with these personality types, and this account basically exists for the purpose of trying to make anarchism and narcissism awareness collide whenever I can, so it didn’t take much prompting. I’m just glad to find that I’m not the only person who’s been making this connection. It seems so obvious in hindsight, yet before I learned about the psychology of narcissism, I never would have thought to approach the problem of governance in that way.
There should be something like a representative assembly that has to give a ‘go’ vote for coercive power to be exerted.
I’ve been sort of experimenting with maintaining a narc-free anarchist space recently. It’s a small private group, and I more or less have the cooperation of the other members of the group, but it’s been really rough. The issue that I keep running into is that, even when everybody likes the idea of having a narc-free space, they’re not all experts in narcissism, and so they still don’t always see what’s happening when the bad actors show up and start causing trouble. The most recent event had me worried if the group would survive - the bad actor did manage to poach one member on their way out, and another member basically went totally inactive because I think they disagreed with what emerged as the dominant assessment of the situation (the bad actor really was bad).
On the one hand, I kindof wish I could just remove such people without having to ask the whole rest of the group for permission, as I am better at recognizing them than most everyone else, but on the other hand, that feels like a highly abusable privilege. Why should I be allowed to do that? What if I turned out to be bad, or even just wrong? If someone new shows up, and sees that someone has been granted the unilateral power to remove someone in a group that claims to be anarchist, won’t that look really weird? And would I even be able to maintain my reputation with the rest of the group? You can’t really protect someone from a threat that they can’t see for themselves without at least raising an eyebrow, and in this case, the threats are actively trying to convince everyone that they are not a threat and instead that I am the real threat (because when you’ve studied narcissism at all, somehow the narcs always seem to pick up on the fact that you can see them for what they are, and they know that you’re a threat to their status in the group).
I have to wonder if there’s a better way of handling such a responsibility that does a better job of minimizing damage while avoiding the creation of an unfair power dynamic in a different way.
So in other words, if we want people to want to change their minds in good faith (to essentially value truth over winning) then fostering environments that reward curiosity and make it safe to be wrong might matter more than we think. It’s not about “how do we fight bad actors” its “how do we stop producing so many of them in the first place?” Building like a cultural immune system that raises kids to value epistemic humility, and one that doesn’t reward manipulation or punish vulnerability.
Maybe that’s the real long game? But it also makes clear of how much work that actually takes. Like the anarchist collectives in Catalonia didn’t pop up overnight. That kind of horizontal structure took decades of groundwork and community trust. It took something like 80 years only to build the social foundation before the experiment even became possible. If people take it seriously enough to start, it might actually show that cultural change can be built.
Really stoked about your reply, thanks for your input!
So in other words, if we want people to want to change their minds in good faith (to essentially value truth over winning) then fostering environments that reward curiosity and make it safe to be wrong might matter more than we think. It’s not about “how do we fight bad actors” its “how do we stop producing so many of them in the first place?” Building like a cultural immune system that raises kids to value epistemic humility, and one that doesn’t reward manipulation or punish vulnerability.
Yes, this is the right way to think about it. The vast majority of the long-term wins will come from changes to how we raise our children, and the overall incentive structures created by our cultural values. Most of the narcissism simply won’t occur in the first place, and the few bad actors that still pop up will be much easier to deal with. We do still need a way of fighting off the bad actors, but it’s a lot easier to come up with systems that will work if we can assume that the vast majority of individuals are not bad actors to begin with. (In our current society, we cannot really assume that, and it makes things much more difficult.)
Maybe that’s the real long game? But it also makes clear of how much work that actually takes. Like the anarchist collectives in Catalonia didn’t pop up overnight. That kind of horizontal structure took decades of groundwork and community trust. It took something like 80 years only to build the social foundation before the experiment even became possible. If people take it seriously enough to start, it might actually show that cultural change can be built.
The good news is that I think we can move a lot faster than the existing experiments did if we take advantage of this psychological understanding of what’s going on. We’ll be able to filter out the problematic individuals much earlier in the process, long before they are able to undermine our work. Without such a model, you’d basically have to wait for a bad actor to start actually abusing power in a politically obvious way in order to see them for what they truly are, but in most cases, by the time this has happened, the project has already been completely subverted/corrupted and is no longer truly anarchist.
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 :)
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 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.
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.
A state is a hierarchy where the top dictates what you will ultimately be subjected to.
Imagine if rules and laws were directly voted on and decided by the people themselves, instead of by a corporate captured elite. Imagine if you and your community directly elected who would enforce those rules upon themselves, with possibility of immediate removal if they abuse that power or perform badly.
Anarchism is making it to where power is coming from the bottom, not the top, and where the power that does exist is more distributed and decentralized so that it cannot grow into authoritarian centralized power, as always seems occurs in centralized power structures throughout history without fail.
That’s democracy, not anarchism.
I’m not suggesting voting in a centralized government, but a small community either voting or coming to consensus on matters that directly effect them.
That’s just federal democracy, right? :)
They might want to organize into federated groups as an option, for sure. Critically the lack of coercive dominance hierarchies and horizontal power structures is what would make them Anarchist.
Yeah, the term for that is “Democracy.” Democracy does not require power be put in to a centralized government.
Democracy is a form of government in which political power is vested in the people or the population of a state.
I think I should ask at this point what your definition of Anarchism is.
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.
Tribes (not anarchy) has been far more common
Anarchy doesn’t mean no rules or no organization, it means no rulers.
Right, because tribes are famous for being leaderless? You sure?
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.
Yeah and to act like we weren’t bashing each other’s heads in with clubs for access to the better fruit trees during those 290,000 years is nonsense. It was just less organized. But scarcity was a thing and the concept of morals and ethics weren’t a thing - so head bashing to steal land and the raping of women and the taking of slaves were probably the norm.
That form of anarchy today with the advent of small arms would be basically the same if we were to remove all the militaries from the world. And whoever stole the best fruit trees would amass a bigger group to go steal more fruit trees and you can see where this is going.
Militias and other forms of organized violence are really hard to reconcile as an anarchist. Even from an academic view - how does anyone defend against an antagonistic, coercive power imbalance? They can’t just be exiled because they’ll kill you for whatever resources they want and then you’ll be the one exiled from your lands/life.
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.
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.
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).
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. 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.
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 don’t think that assessment lines up with historical events. During the Spanish Civil War, the anarchist militias/army were hierarchies, but directly democratic ones, where soldiers would vote on who their commanders would be, commanders would vote on who their generals would be, all with the ability to immediately revoke that power if it was abused or performed badly.
That form of structure was still considered Anarchistic, and historically performed very well with the limited resources they had, and garnering the public respect of even the fascist generals from their capability.
Nester Makhno’s Anarchist Army also was extremely effective during the Russian revolution, without which the Soviets wouldn’t have been able to beat the White Army (and thus survive to then turn on the Anarchists and attempt to kill them all).
So the examples we have available don’t really show Anarchists unable to make quick decisions or lack military might, they usually are defeated by allies (Marxist-leninists) betraying them, lack of foreign logistical aid (since there are no other countries that would ever ally with them, and often outright refused to help), and the opposite, where their enemies are given an abundance of aid from friendly fascist powers.
During the Spanish Civil War, the anarchist militias/army *were* hierarchies, but directly democratic ones, where soldiers would vote on who their commanders would be, commanders would vote on who their generals would be, all with the ability to immediately revoke that power if it was abused or performed badly.
First of all, that’s not what direct democracy means. Direct democracy is when voters are directly voting on a course of action. Soldiers voting on who their military commanders should be is representative democracy (electing a vertical power structure) which is exactly what the OP is arguing against. A purely horizontal power structure is one where no one can give orders to anyone else and decisions must be made by consensus, unless those decisions have only a small reach (within the domain of an individual).
So you’re not really arguing against my point which is that having a military chain of command with hierarchical decision making is superior to just letting everyone do what they want (tribal warrior societies). The point about democratically electing your commanding officers is a cool one but no army is going to hold an impromptu election for a new General as artillery shells are raining down around their ears. When the shooting starts, you stick with the chain of command you have or all hell breaks loose and you get routed.
First of all, that’s not what direct democracy means.
That is a misuse of the term, my bad.
but no army is going to hold an impromptu election for a new General as artillery shells are raining down around their ears. When the shooting starts, you stick with the chain of command you have or all hell breaks loose and you get routed.
I thought it would be obvious that ‘immediately’ wouldn’t mean in the context of mid-battle (unless the officer is like, going rogue or something), but in the context of outside of an active battle, where there isn’t a huge bureaucracy to go through to remove a bad commander, since that commander is directly responsible to the people who elected him.
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.
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 bitch 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?
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‘m currently reading David Graeber and David Wengrow: The Dawn of Everything.
It dives deeper into the history of the misconceptions of power.
