You’re absolutely right that any theory of social organization, anarchist or not, has to grapple with the fact that not everyone shares the same values, some people actively seek to dominate or harm others, and large-scale coordination problems (like the Prisoner’s Dilemma you mention) are real.

From my perspective, there’s no single silver bullet to this, but I’d say there are two interlocking answers:

1. Prevention through culture and material conditions. If domination-seeking behaviors and violent ideologies are reliably produced under certain social conditions, like alienation, hierarchy, competition, or trauma, then the long-term answer is to change those conditions. This means building communities where people’s needs are met, where they’re raised in environments that reward cooperation over control, and where mutual aid and solidarity are lived experiences rather than abstract ideals. We already see this in practice: in disasters, in mutual aid networks, in some Indigenous and co-op models.

2. Active collective defense without centralized coercion. Anarchism doesn’t mean passivity in the face of harm. On the contrary, self-defense and community protection are vital. But the difference is in how it’s organized: instead of empowering a standing authority (like police or authoritarian leaders), the response comes from the collective itself through things like community defense groups, accountability processes, conflict de-escalation practices, and social exclusion of those who persist in harmful behavior.

That doesn’t make it easy and it requires constant maintenance, and yes, it’s vulnerable to failure. But all systems are. The anarchist gamble is that decentralized, accountable, collectively managed responses are less dangerous over time than top-down systems that concentrate coercive power which history shows are prone to abuse, even when they start with good intentions.

To your point: yes, we live in a society where incentive structures are badly misaligned. That’s part of why anarchists see cultural transformation (not just institutional reform) as essential. If anarchism seems idealistic, it’s because it’s trying to address the root (not just the symptoms) of systemic violence and domination.

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.

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!

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.

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.

“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.

I’d describe it as a social relationship that develops and maintains social structures for equitable distribution of management power.

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?

I really shouldn’t, but I’m gonna take on your hypothetical situation where half of the community is fine with destroying another community.

First, if half of any community supports mass violence, that’s a crisis of values, not a failure of anarchism. An anarchist society wouldn’t have drones or the infrastructure for such violence in the first place. Those things thrive on centralization and detachment.

But alright, let’s say it happens anyway. If half supports the violence, the other half would organize, resist, and dismantle the structures enabling it. It wouldn’t be easy, but that’s the point of horizontal power. No one person or group has the unchecked ability to destroy at scale.

In the end, the problem isn’t lack of control, it’s a broken culture that normalizes cruelty. Anarchism doesn’t guarantee peace, but it prevents that violence from becoming institutionalized and detached from consequences.

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.

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.

Oh, I didn’t try to shame anyone. Apologies if it looked like it. To answer your question:

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?

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’ll just point out, this was the original concept behind the US Constitution. Whether it’s worked as intended is… debatable.

A quick note on the U.S. Constitution: it’s sometimes framed as an attempt to diffuse power horizontally, but that’s not really accurate. The U.S. already had a decentralized system at the time, the Articles of Confederation. And the Constitution was created explicitly to centralize federal power in response to elite fears of uprisings like Shays’ Rebellion. It didn’t introduce shared responsibility; it replaced a fragile form of it with a much stronger central government.

So while it may have used the language of distributed power (checks and balances, separation of powers, etc.), it wasn’t about horizontalism in the sense that I meant. It was about stabilizing and legitimizing state authority which is a very different project.

Regarding your question: What would we do when bandits show up in a town and start shooting and looting, other than shoot back?

…Realistically, I don’t believe we wouldn’t shoot back. But in my eyes that’s already an extreme case of power concentrating, which I firmly believe is preventable before it even occurs. When violence does erupt, collective defense is necessary. But the difference is whether we wait until that crisis point (where power has already centralized in dangerous hands) or whether we create resilient, horizontal networks that make it far harder for any one group or individual to monopolize force and exploit others.

So yes, we defend ourselves when necessary, but the real work is done long before the shooting starts.

Edit: The goal is to build social systems that reduce the conditions enabling those “bandits” to emerge in the first place. Through strong community bonds, mutual aid, shared responsibility, and mechanisms for accountability that keep narcissistic or violent individuals from gaining influence or forming armed factions.

I personally don’t think I’m very much in favor of a nightwatch state. I have to admit though, I’m not much learned in the field of “minarchism.” I still strongly believe any centralized power is in danger of corruption.

No yea, you’re obviously right. We can’t just take forager social praxis and use it in our society, but we can absolutely learn from them. You have to understand that social pressure goes a lot further than just ostracizing an individual. Humans need eachother, more often than not. We feed eachother, fix eachothers plumbing, teach each-others children how to garden, how to fix stuff. Let’s say there is a group of individuals causing destruction (using drones). Well we’ve acknowledged they’re doing terrible shit, so we stop helping them and we make it clear to the rest of the community what these people are doing. In extreme cases we’d have to deal with the situation violently, but it’s equally as important to recognize that when we’re talking about bad actors in general, we’re talking about bad actors in all of its spectrum. From pickpockets, to murders. And I think for each case there is a solution.

Anarcho-capitalism, radical neo-liberalism, unfettered capitalism, call it what you want, in the end it’s basically a breeding ground for monarchism. When you give money all the power in the world you just replace kings with billionaires, unelected rulers backed by private armies.

This is very insightful. I’m really interested, are there any books or otherwise sources that helped you draw this conclusion? It makes a whole lot of sense, I guess I was kind of ignoring that possibility.

Yea, I skimmed through the comments. Yikes. Really just proves my point that they take these criticisms like a shot to the chest.

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