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.
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.
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).