FBXL Social

How, I’ve been asked, do people in nonstate societies prevent bad guys from taking over?

It’s a bit of question begging: it presumes that the state (bad guys who have taken over) is required to prevent other bad guys from taking over.

But let’s take a serious look at *some* of the scholarship on how and why nonstate societies aren’t quite as vulnerable to this as people seem to commonly assume.

This is neither exhaustive nor comprehensive.

1/

The best place to start first is probably Christopher Boehm’s “Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy.” Boehm rejected the assumption that egalitarian societies are solely the product of external factors, such as environment, and explored the ways in which people in these societies deliberately constructed them as such.

He surveyed extant egalitarian societies and found they generally relied on a broad set of strategies for preventing the emergence of social hierarchies.

Most basically, these societies rely on criticism and ridicule. People in these societies also simply ignore orders from would-be rulers. They might desert someone attempting to rule over them. And, finally, they might simply kill him (and it’s, practically speaking, always a *him*).

On that last, Boehm notes that interpersonal killing in a nonstate society always carries the risk of a feud emerging. So, in many cases, it is the friends and family of the would-be tyrant who are responsible for reining in, or killing, someone trying to assert control.

https://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/current/readings/boehm.pdf

2/

Other scholars—Karl Widerquist and Grant McCall in “Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy” and David Graeber and David Wengrow in “The Dawn of Everything”—have emphasized the freedom to leave as an important check on hierarchical power.

People living in forager societies, for example, are free to fission—split off—whenever they desire. In the absence of property lines, any adult with the skills to sustain themselves by their own labor can simply leave, what Boehm referred to as “desertion.”

But this is not solely true for people living in band societies. Wengrow and Graeber identify numerous examples of people in dense and settled societies who retained this freedom by virtue of norms of reciprocity. In indigenous North American society, for example, clans spanned the entire continent. If you left your home, you could find people with a social obligation to take you in essentially anywhere on the continent, and you possessed a reciprocal obligation to take in strangers.

https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/31750

3/

We see remnants of this ancient reciprocal freedom and obligation encoded in myths of state societies—think of Zeus Xenios, the patron god of strangers, or of the Norse Odin going wandering in the guise of a ragged old man asking strangers for hospitality.

It should come as no surprise that even state or parastatal societies, such as the ancient Germanic tribes that believed they owed hospitality to total strangers, also retained some of Boehm’s strategies for managing would-be tyrants.

Germanic kings were traditionally elected by the (adult male) members of their community and, when times got tough, ritually sacrificed. If we’re going to have leaders, the least they could do is die when they do a bad job.

4/

In “Society Against the State,” Pierre Clastres observes numerous initiation rituals among nonstate societies that involve tremendous amounts of pain and often leave permanent scars. Clastres postulates that these are not performed for the sake of cruelty, but as leveling mechanism: we have all been through this, we have all suffered in the same way, and so we are all equals, none of us worth more or less than the other.

The Neolithic Trypillian culture, in what is now Ukraine and Moldova, left behind remains of cities that were as big as or bigger than their Mesopotamian contemporaries. Unlike Mesopotamian cities, with their walls and palaces and temples and central granaries, Trypillian cities who signs of remarkable equality and individual freedom. And, notably, the people of Trypillia would periodically—every 75-80 years or so—burn down all the buildings in their city and erect new ones on top of the rubble.

I’ve long wondered if this was a ritual along the lines of what Clastres was observing, a deliberate and physical leveling to socially encode egalitarianism ritually. “However better any of us might imagine we are than each other, we are all exactly the same in this moment.”

https://www.burmalibrary.org/docs21/Clastres-1989-Society_Against_the_State-en-red.pdf

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Among the most important mechanisms to prevent the emergence of coercive hierarchies are common property and mutual aid.

Common property is a resource with multiple owners—typically all the members of a community using the resource—to which no owner can deny any other access.

Elinor Ostrom’s “Governing the Commons” is the seminal introductory text on common property management. Ostrom provides not just a theoretical framework to understand how self-interested individuals cooperate to sustainably manage and use shared resources, but also numerous functional examples—pastures in Switzerland, forests and field in Japan, irrigation networks in Spain, etc.

When people are free to access resources they need to sustain themselves by their own labor, it’s much harder to assert hierarchical control over those people.

https://www.actu-environnement.com/media/pdf/ostrom_1990.pdf

6/

Mutual aid is an important corollary. David Graeber refers to this as everyday communism in its broadest moral sense: if the need is great enough (you come across a child drowning whom you could save) or the cost small enough (bumming a cigarette, holding a door open), members of any society will give freely without expectation of reward.

Every society sets the expected level of mutual aid differently. In nonstate societies, that level of often quite high, deliberately, because it helps ensure that no member of that society will be subject to another by virtue of material need.

In writing about indigenous American societies, Wengrow and Graeber observe that

“it became clear to French observers that most indigenous Americans saw individual autonomy and freedom of action as consummate values – organizing their own lives in such a way as to minimize any possibility of one human being becoming subordinated to the will of another, and hence viewing French society as essentially one of fractious slaves.”

One French observer wrote:

“They reciprocate hospitality and give such assistance to one another that the necessities of all are provided for without there being any indigent beggar in their towns and villages; and they considered it a very bad thing when they heard it said that there were in France a great many of these needy beggars, and thought that this was for lack of charity in us, and blamed us for it severely.”

In this case, ensuring each other’s material equality was a way of ensuring each other’s political equality. To live among subordinates rather than equals was worse than distasteful; it was *boring.*

https://docdrop.org/download_annotation_doc/The-Dawn-of-Everything-by-David-Graeber-David-Wengrow-z-lib.-zmbbo.pdf

7/

To close out this thread—at least for now—I’ll highlight the theoretical work of Alexander Wendt. Wendt is a major figure in the field of international relations and specifically the school of Constructivism. Constructivism posits that states behave not just according to mechanical rules, but also the ideas that they hold about themselves and each other. Although his work is explicitly about state behavior, I think it applies equally well to the individual and nonstate community.

According to realist and neorealist schools of IR, war happens, more or less, because there is nothing to stop it. In the absence of some global coercive authority, any state could attack any other at any time. As a result, states rely on “self-help” — they arm themselves, prepare for war, treat every other state as a potential adversary, and use violence to preempt and prevent threats. Wars happen, in other words, because states are afraid of war and want to hit first.

In his work “Anarchy is What States Make of It,” Wendt argues that empirically and theoretically, this just doesn’t work. Realism cannot explain the existence of unguarded borders, such as the one between the US and Canada; or enduring alliances, such as NATO in the absence of the Soviet Union; or the existence of weak states near strong ones.

Instead, Wendt argues, we interact based on identities that are themselves the product of ongoing interactions. Friend or foe, threat or ally—these are not unchangeable or inevitable categories.

Wendt asks to imagine two actors who encounter each other “in the wild.” Each *could* assume the other poses an intrinsic threat and act accordingly, but then they risk creating an unnecessary enemy. Instead, each will make a display of intent, which the other side will attempt to interpret and respond to, and so on forever.

If actor A does initiate violence against actor B, then actor B is going to be more likely to respond aggressively to actor C in pre-emotion, and so on until we have the security dilemma described by the realists.

But what happens if A encounters and is aggressive towards not just B, but a mature community of B, C, D, and so on?

“If collective security identity is high, however, the emergence of a predator may do much less damage. If the predator attacks any member of the collective, the latter will come to the victim's defense on the principle of ‘all for one, one for all,’ even if the predator is not presently a threat to other members of the collective. If the predator is not strong enough to withstand the collective, it will be defeated and collective security will obtain. But if it is strong enough, the logic of the two-actor case (now predator and collective) will activate, and balance-of-power politics will reestablish itself.”

https://people.ucsc.edu/~rlipsch/migrated/Pol272/Wendt.Anarch.pdf

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Many of the concerns I’ve seen expressed about anarchism beg the question that a stateless society is atomized and passive. In reality, the ones that endure are cohesive and active in cooperative self-defense.

No society, of course, can guarantee defense or survival against external aggression. But the common trope of “the warlord” coming to take over a nonstate society is absurdly premised on the idea that individuals are incapable of coordinating and cooperating against a shared threat absent some sort of coercive central authority.

Rather, it is the threats themselves that find it difficult to emerge. The idea of “the warlord” is premised on *the threat already having emerged,* a leader who has already assembled a cadre capable of coordinated violence. But, as Wendt argues, in a mature community, it will be difficult if not impossible for the ambitious individual to even assemble that cadre.

Recall that the nonstate societies of indigenous North America took centuries for European settler colonists to defeat, despite technological advantages, genocidal warfare, and introduced diseases that killed upwards of *ninety percent* of the indigenous population. Centuries!

The questions we must be asking are not “how did they prevent bad actors from taking over,” but rather “how did bad actors manage to take over despite all these mechanisms” and, more critically, “how do we fix this?”

9/

That reminds me about what Graeber said in "Debt," where the infamous city of Babylon had predatory lending practices within it, and the ruler would occasionally have to pronounce he was forgiving all debts out of the goodness of his heart, because literally everyone ended up in unpayable debt and just kind of left the city en-masse. The ability to just leave is huge, and it's something entirely denied to us these days through a combination of privatization of all land everywhere, and harsh immigration restrictions.

Thanks! That's some books I might want to go read, especially the one on governing commons. (what about establishing commons?)

@cy

Yeah—Michael Hudson has written on Bronze Age debt erasures at length:

https://michael-hudson.com/2017/01/the-land-belongs-to-god/

Criticism and ridicule sound an awful lot like propaganda. Not to say that's a bad thing, but that might be part of what has stripped us of freedom from state rule, propaganda demonizing (even incriminating) things like slander, and leaked secrets.

I've always said we're already living in anarchy, in a stateless society. That provides little comfort when the cops just grab you off the street and drag you away, but it's important to realize that states can and will exist within stateless societies. The defense is to rob those states of legitimacy, so people don't take them seriously, or put up with their bullshit.

So it's an impossible standard to say it's not anarchy unless those states completely cease to exist. All we really need is to disempower them, and protect ourselves from what amount to groups of friends once berefit of their powers of violence and tyranny.

Like, what's the difference between the USA government, and Mickey Mouse fans? Not a lot, when neither of them can impose their restrictions on the rest of us! Not a lot either, when they both have unchecked, imbalanced power! (seriously Disney was a total fascist)

@cy @HeavenlyPossum

I get the impression that one of the biggest issues, is that people who are accustomed to being passive and atomized under authority, where decisionmaking and action are always dictated by someone in charge, have a VERY difficult time even imagining the active individual involvement it takes to make a non-hierarchical collective work.

...grumble, only fascists train 16 year olds to think they're children, grumble...

@cy

I don’t really know how to respond to this, because it’s mostly incoherent.

I was... agreeing that criticism and ridicule are important to resisting the formation of states. A big reason we think our society today isn't stateless is because we take the state way too seriously. And I really should stop talking so much.

@cy

The bigger issue there may be how little respect and agency is granted to children of any age in the first place.

More fences! More fences around schools! Around playgrounds! We have to send them a message! The—the b-bad guys not the children, honest.

@cy

People take the state seriously because it has real, material effects on their lives. As long as enough people take it seriously, we have to take it seriously too. It’s possible to imagine some giant shock to the system could invalidate it in the eyes of a critical mass of people to make it just…disappear, all at once, but those shocks are rare.

San Francisco fire, yeah. What I mean is it helps keep things equitable to find ways people can withstand those real material effects. Giving them allies to rely on besides the state helps avoid authoritarian rule. I'm not saying the state doesn't exist, or that people can just go frolicking naked through the streets without the hammer coming down. But even in the USA, a lot of our lives are still spent in absence of the state, outside the state's power or control. Increasing that amount is how we "achieve" anarchy. The state doesn't have to suddenly disappear, if we can find progressive ways to deal with it and reduce its influence over others.

@cy @violetmadder Brains don't neurologically mature until about age 25. I'm not sure people are looking to teach 16-year-olds that they're kids so much as inform 16-years-olds their hubris isn't likely to be backed by gray matter, while at this point in the science isn't proving beneficial to numb that developing gray matter, either.

it's really, really complicated.

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2022/07/feature-neuroscience-teen-brain

People accept fascism as inevitable and self evident by age 25, at least. By then they have kids, and don't dare speak against the fascist. Kids are really convenient that way. If you let 16 year olds make decisions, they might not tolerate our glorious leader's bullshit!

For real, the greatest tool for making us more obedient and easy to manipulate is to keep us reduced to the role of a child. Stalin didn't make himself out to be the father of all Russia for no reason. Our brains in fact keep neurologically changing for our entire lives: it's called learning new things. It is complete bunk to claim that children can't make decisions, especially to claim that they aren't really people, and especially claiming that until the end of the prime of their adult life.

https://slate.com/technology/2022/11/brain-development-25-year-old-mature-myth.html

@violetmadder @cy @HeavenlyPossum

I would say chew on Graeber. His account of debt’s evolution offers plenty to work through.

Eh, thanks for the recommendation. I tend to be a little leery of blaming someone's current problems on childhood trauma, when it might be all the assholes around that someone today who are causing it. Especially convenient to the assholes when they can blame a trauma their victim doesn't even remember.

But I might take a look. Could be legit. tbh I didn't really have any childhood trauma, just school and surveillance and such.

@HeavenlyPossum How did "clans span the entire continent" in indigenous North American society? That sounds interesting.

@HeavenlyPossum What is the connection between egalitarianism and personal freedom? Do you need the former for the latter somehow? How?

@HeavenlyPossum What if the cadre comes from outside the community, like in the case of Europeans coming to North America?

@cy @HeavenlyPossum You can agree and be incoherent
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@HeavenlyPossum @cy cue that accellerationist xkcd #610 edit

@cy "Especially convenient to the assholes when they can blame a trauma their victim doesn't even remember." The story of my childhood, or maybe rather adulthood in my family of origin.

It's a keen observation.

@violetmadder @cy Cultural note either Norwegians and or Dutch allow remarkable levels of agency for kids

@Hyolobrika

They function as trans-national (fictional) kinship groups. So, you would find people in virtually every community across the continent who might belong to, say, the Heron Clan, who would recognize anyone else from the Heron Clan—regardless of their nationality, language, etc—as family, with social obligations of hosting and mutual care.

@HeavenlyPossum How do they recognize other members of their clan?
Is it secure against lying in order to get help from members of a clan that you are not?

@Hyolobrika

Individual freedom is maximized when everyone has equal rights to sustain themselves by their own labor. Except at the most intimate interpersonal scale, coercive hierarchies of command tend to emerge when some people can assert the privilege of interfering with the self-sustenance of other people.

@Hyolobrika

I don’t know that specifically, though indigenous North Americans made use of a continent-wide sign language lingua franca, so that probably facilitated the process.

I don’t know how anything could ever be secure against lying.

@cy She completely shook up Psychology, and may be the root of the childhood trauma blaming you don't agree with.

But yeah, I'm googling around fear extinction, and I'm all like, "No, the guy ripped me off *yesterday." The anxiety is a response to stimulus ongoing, not made up s* from 40 years ago you patriarchal SFB PhD. No, you absolutely do not know what is best for me. And you want me to pay you for what, now?"

@janisf @cy

We've got plenty of full grown adults whose unchecked hubris is destroying everything around them, too.

You kidding? That guy isn't even a billionaire!

@HeavenlyPossum While I think this a valuable line of inquiry, we now and have for some millennia, live in a world where States do exist, and the ability to live Stateless with the unavoidable contact, trade and relationships with State actors really puts a different spin on “how do Stateless societies deal with bad actors”.

@Theblueone

Yes, but I am an anarchist and advocate the abolition of states. I wrote this thread to alleviate the concerns of people with no experience with statelessness, who believe incorrectly that stateless peoples have no ability to resist takeover by would-be rulers.

@janisf @cy @violetmadder Yeah, keeping young males in check is key in all egalitarian societies (we are a society that rewards bad behaviour by teenage boys and very immature men/grown men who act like terns). In egalitarian societies it's often the job of older women to keep young men humbled and involves ridiculing their actions or attitudes until they either laugh at themselves along with everyone else or cry.

I... don't think egalitarian societies are necessarily sexist, ageist and abusive.

@cy This isn't sexism or ageism, you're simply projecting your own values that you learned in a White supremacist patriarchal culture onto matriarchal cultures. I'd highly suggest actually doing some reading up on this and not relying upon your own thoughts about stuff that's been very extensively studied by people who spend their lives dedicated to studying it. And it's not abusive to lovingly make fun of people, the outcome is usually that the person who is puffing up their chest and being ridiculous realizes it and laughs at themselves too. Being humbled isn't being humiliated, especially when someone is being grandiose and ridiculous about their own importance (as in thinking they're better and more important than everyone else).

It's the leaders who cause harm anyway, if not checked by their followers. Arrogant upstarts just pick fights and get beat up, or ignored. Matriarchal societies do rely on humbling males though, it's true. I prefer societies without patriarchy, or matriarchy, also known as anarchy.

@cy Yeah, anarchy very much has a young male problem too and can have real problems when it comes to people being led down paths by charismatic leaders or being manipulated by sociopaths. Some people people are looking to be grandiose victims not part of a collective, and boys in our patriarchal society (particularly White boys) are particularly raised to believe they're more special than others and to center their own feelings while also being largely emotionally illiterate (and are systemically privileged, yes even the guys who caught a tough break for some reason, men can obviously also free themselves of this with some hard work and deep listening).

Anyway, these are social problems and there need to be ways to manage them, particularly if we don't want to just be an eternal war culture. How do you propose they'd be managed in an anarchist society? I'd highly suggest you spend some more time reading up on different kinds of cultures and investigate where some of your own beliefs actually come from.

Far as I've seen, the least violent young males are the ones treated with respect, who feel useful and important to the community.

Young females too.