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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do you feel current systems of governance are handling these global collective action problems well? Because I do not. I think they’re just very difficult and thorny problems that we’ll always have to wrestle with.
I just don’t think that current systems being meh means that any given other system has merit. That’s why I mentioned not comparing in my comment.
I think the main advantage of anarchism and adjacent systems is better local governance and personal freedom. But I’m not really convinced that means global governance would be worse. If anything, disarming the global superpowers would improve international solidarity since different autonomous groups could more effectively reach agreements for the common good rather than being bullied into doing harmful things by the powerful. This would make the anarchist-UN potentially much more effective than it is now. Otherwise, I don’t think it would be too different than the way international orgs work now plus some additional norms and structures to avoid bullying and encourage consensus.
But my point is just that not having a clear solution for this specific problem isn’t a reason against these ideas. These issues are some of the most difficult to solve and I’d rather focus on low-hanging fruit first.
Change the select few decisionmakers regularly. With dice, not an expensive and polarizing campaign followed by elections. (Note: creates incentive to educate everyone well, since they could be chosen at random.)
Education of everyone doesn’t mean any individual can make informed decisions even on their own health let alone understand the chemistry and impact of PFAS, for example. But I do agree there’s something to the idea of removing incentives to campaign.
I don’t deny that these are difficult problems, and I won’t attempt to address everything that you mention, but “can’t exile them without a power structure that can use force on them” isn’t true. The use of force doesn’t require any sort of formal vertical power structure. Problems of global scale are just combinations of many individual actions at the local scale, and at the local scale, if someone is committing violence or endangering others, all it takes is a few concerned people to team up and remove them using whatever force needed. Firearms help, but even those are not strictly necessary. If such problems are addressed quickly enough at the local level, then they are less likely to scale up to the global level in any organised way. If many people are already committing violence together on a larger scale, then removing them becomes a matter of tribal warfare or genocide. Ugly, and not something that I recommend, but far from impossible, as history has shown.
Firearms 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.
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.
Oh, I didn’t try to shame anyone. Apologies if it looked like it. To answer your question:
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?
Some entire countries essentially did that. They responded carelessly and slow, and experienced harsher consequences as a result. Nobody can stop a group of people from getting themselves hurt. Sure, one can try to help them once they are hurt, if some resources remain available for that.
I guess my point is not that groups can harm themselves, but that they can (and did) harm others in this particular scenario.
I believe most people aren’t bad actors. But also, most people can see what is good for them. And cooperatives prove that people can run with it to their advantage.
David Graeber made a very good point that the concept of money is only necessary for war. Take money out of the equation and the next local group will have to stretch to avoid mutual care.
Counterpoints: smoking and other addictions, results of recent US election, propaganda and advertising working
As for money, it’s a technology that can act as a value store. I don’t think getting rid of it is a realistic idea until we’ve got Star Trek levels of tech.