Humans have been at the governance thing for at least 30,000 years.
Could you please point to any group of more than 12 that lacks a power structure?
Anarchism has been a thing for 150 years, and (in name at least) it’s been tried many times and places. Yet it never seems to stick.
Perhaps there is more to this “coordinate people to get things done” stuff than your little post suggests?
Meh, Villians are just a prop. If you’re a dictator, and your competitor is making a move on your throne, they can.use Villians just as you can. The villian needn’t even be their primary target, they can just accuse you of being soft on Villiany.
Supporting ones key players here, is ranked as far more important than attacking or ignoring players who aren’t key. An empty belly can be just as effective (and far more longlived) distraction as an Immanuel Goldstein or Osama Bin Laden.
I don’t see Anarchism as a Third Way, so much as an ideal toward which heirarchs should be working. When peons are willing to
(1)do the hard work of politics ourselves, with each other, and
(2)making life uncomfortable for those at the top,
It increases the tendency to want to move toward anarchist practise . Lots of people happy to do the second thing, not so many people interested in the first. Net result, is to cultivate politicians willing to lie to us in ways we want to be lied to.
Villains seem almost necessary in situations where the state is mostly stable, like the model in the video wherein the state has wealth in the ground. The eternal villain seems to be the gyroscope that keeps the lopsided model standing upright. Fear of the military is part of it, no doubt, as the video says, but I don’t believe it is enough.
I think Arab Spring was postponed 20 or 30 years with US and Israel to project the simmering anger of the masses upon.
From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that any group of pack animals have a small number of leaders, and mostly followers. Governance is work, and too much effort spent by the whole group in governance, means less effort expended for survival. (Which again, unfortunately argues for the 'keep em hungry" strategy. In the US that’s mostly withholding medical treatment and housing)
The wannabe Utopia designer must keep the overall costs of democracy fairly low if they want to give the pack enough slack to actually survive. Computer networks make such a scheme thinkable, as long as you’re not Argentina in 1970s
It always seemed to me that the fundamental problem anarchists have is that once they’ve removed authority they’d be left with the task of creating an equitable form of governance that didn’t just go right back into creating a dictatorship led by the first group that blinked and seized control of key resources.
Basically, if you find yourself bringing about the “anarchist revolution,” it’s only because some key powers allowed you to, and you’re going to be fucked by those key powers when it’s all over.
Income tax is only one form of taxation, and in most cases one of the more progressive ones. The video clearly shows that they are talking about overall taxation in terms of the total revenue extracted from the country.
Power hierarchy has been tried in many time and places, yet it never seems to stick either. Even Rome fell eventually. But perhaps “stickiness” isn’t the metric we should judge social systems by. Probably “age” isn’t either, although if we’re arguing on those terms it should be noted that both hierarchy and non-hierarchy are ancient ideas.
I get the feeling that you are confusing structure with hierarchy. Obviously any group has some kind of structure, and any group which does anything has power. So power structures can be found wherever there are groups. But power hierarchies are unique, in that they artificially aggregate the power of the whole group to a hyper-minority.
Basically, there are plenty of ways to coordinate people and get things done without a power hierarchy. Open source software projects are an instructive example, or worker-owned coops.
This is begging the question. If you assume that “key powers” are the only entities capable of exerting power, then of course it follows that anything which happens was caused by them.
But where do the key powers get their power from? From each of us, of course. The idea is that it’s not in our interest to give up our power to the current leader, but furthermore it’s not in our interest to give up our power to anyone, ever.
This does not happen through coups or deposing rulers as you’re imagining. It happens by gradually building a society which has no desire or need to be ruled, and working together to slap down those who try to rule.
Well, it is a pyramid shape. The Keys align under the top because of their own interest. It branches out lower and lower, down to local and neighborhood level, with each controlling agent relying on the one directly above for prosperity to pass downward.
If “us” means the masses, well, no, I am afraid that is a bit optimistic. In a democracy the masses are only given choices that allow the key powers to retain control. The military and the police keep us in check otherwise. Term limits shift the titles from person to person, but the power structure behind the process remains the same.
You could make the point that control relies on tolerance from those below, but before the tolerance of the masses matters, the upper and middle keys would have long since upset the system.
That’s all exactly right: the problem with democracy is that it is a power hierarchy. Democracy alone cannot give us the society we want: we must decentralize power itself.
Not just tolerance: active participation. As the video explains, the rulers’ power is actually everybody’s power, rulers have just convinced everybody to turn it over to them. It’s not optimistic to observe that power rests with each individual - it is objective fact.
Optimistic is hoping that people can be convinced not to turn their power over to rulers. But the argument is getting easier every day, as our rulers consistently betray or fail us, and our capacity to self-organize grows.
wow. really? When would you date the founding of the current British power structure? Surely not last Tuesday.
By stick, I meant, “self-perpetuate.” Power hierarchies have often proven very good at this. I like the Han and Tang dynasties, but perhaps you’re partial to the Inca’s and their Spanish Successors. Of course, the Egyptian’s decisively showed the fragility of your response over four millennia ago.
Compare to the various “flat” power structures that have been tried over the past 150 year: from Syndicalist Spain to New Harmony, Indiana, none lasted more than a generation, and most failed is less than a decade.
With no exceptions that I know about.
None.
So while I agree that “nothing lasts forever,” both the past century and the sweep of history shows that Power Hierarchy is way better at “sticking” than whatever it is you seem to be promulgating. Must be some reason…
You do know why Pope Francis, to use his English name, is called “Pontiff,” right?
He had an argument on a bridge once?
It’s true that if your goal is to build a dynastic family or an empire that will make it into history books, you’ll be best served by a power hierarchy. By centralizing power in a hierarchy, you can ensure that society stays loyal to your structure even when that structure doesn’t make much sense or is inappropriate for the current conditions. As the video depicted very well, in a hierarchy the distribution of power itself becomes far more important than any other function the power structure ostensibly has. So people will be inclined to stick with that structure through all kinds of awful things, as long as the core power distribution continues. When power is hierarchical, people serve structures.
By contrast, when power is horizontal, people have limited loyalty to any particular power structure. Since the structure isn’t key to granting them their power, they can take or leave it based on whether it seems to be accomplishing desirable goals. This leads to frequent dissolving and reformulation of these structures, but I would say that’s a feature, not a bug. When power is horizontal, structures serve people.
It seems kind of bitter to say, I suppose, but need is weakness. Scarcity and the inability to do everything we need for ourselves leads to specialization and needing others. Once we need others, well, supply and demand, with the commodity being survival.
Humanity has institutionalized this, forcibly, by making it impossible to be self-sufficient. It is impossible to simply farm, raise enough for one’s self, without the need for anyone else. We have to pay taxes, we have to have electricity and running water, so at the very least we have to raise enough currency to pay for those things, even if we have the funds to move to a place where we are allowed by law to raise animals and enough food to survive.
Add to that the imposition of government approval on things, insurance and medical care, overseen child-rearing, licensing, home inspection, etc., etc. ad nauseam, and there’s no way whatsoever to live independently. If you require approval to do things, it isn’t horizontal, you have no true freedom, and your survival depends on the whims of those Keys above you.
The only three ways I can see horizontal power structures, real ones, is if:
Given we have never had truly horizontal power structures, not even in prehistory, I am not seeing it happen any time soon.
I agree that government tends to undermine our independence, and that’s one reason we should abolish it. But I also think that #NoManIsAnIsland. Perfect independence is a false goal - we always depend on others and that’s a good thing. Freedom is not found in depending on nobody, but in being able to choose who you depend on, and having those bonds be based on common affinity rather than hierarchy.
Let’s not get stuck in black and white though. Power has never been “truly” centralized or “truly” horizontal, there’s a constant interplay between these forms. Even in Nazi Germany common people still retained some power, and that horizontality made resistance possible. Conversely even in the most egalitarian commune, hierarchies can sometimes develop around particular forms of power. That’s not an argument for or against anything, though, just a recognition that nothing is perfect.
The useful point for me is that hierarchies tend to perpetuate themselves at the expense of the people who make them up. Therefore, it tends to be in the interest of almost everyone to flatten them. I’m not suggesting we can or should realize any pure ideal, I’m just suggesting what our stance should be towards power hierarchies: against 'em!
I think we see in the video above, though, that the power they had, and we have, is illusory. We are given decisions where any choice we make is in their favor, or offered negative reinforcement for making decisions they wouldn’t agree with, by way of those needs we have.
It’s like ownership. I have the illusion of owning my home. I can’t, however, change much about it, because of zoning or the fine me, and eventually bankrupt me and take it away. I still pay “rent” in the form of taxes on it, or they take it away. If they want to build a stadium on it, they offer me a low price, or they take it away.
I am free to choose the direction of my country, but only in who makes those choices for me, and only from the pool of choices those Keys above me offer. In Nazi Germany, well, the Brown Shirts made sure you chose correctly. wish I knew of a way to accomplish what you suggest, I really do, but it’s almost as if the basic laws of the universe result in our stratified societies.
Relatedly?
Thankfully he has neither the cash, nor the keys to pull that one off.
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