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.
As I recall, it was @keepthepace@slrpnk.net who actually raised that thought (as a question). I really like how they phrased it: "authoritarianism is the political expression of narcissism". My response was just an elaborate affirmation.
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).
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?
I completely agree with this.
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)
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 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.
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!
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.)
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.