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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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?”

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