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.
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.