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The reason anarchism focuses on domination in all forms -- not just specific political systems -- is that someone *only* motivated to seek change because of their class position or material conditions has no deep check against opportunistically embracing power themselves.
In this light it's important that we consider how certain values and orientations get ingrained in people. Particularly the paradigm of power (or 'arche') that sees the world as zero-sum sum interactions, and seeks to gain status & control to instrumentalize other people.
This perspective is particularly potent because 1) it sets itself as instrumental to almost every initial desire one might have, and 2) it socially reproduces itself through its actions -- betrayal and domination teach betrayal and domination as a defensive strategy against such.
That anarchism is centrally an ethical project concerned with values, specifically embracing freedom and rejecting domination, is relatively uncontroversial. But I think there are good arguments and bad, or at least *incomplete*, arguments for such.
Three incomplete arguments:
Three incomplete arguments:
The first not-so-good argument against the paradigm of power is that empires inevitably fall. No matter what power structures you build, entropy will eventually erode them.
But this is completely toothless against short-time preference. The immediatist doesn't care.
But this is completely toothless against short-time preference. The immediatist doesn't care.
The second not-so-good argument against the paradigm of power is that n-iterated games generally reward cooperation.
But this is deeply incomplete, there are always contexts of exception or one-off interactions with strangers where you can get away with domination / abuse / etc.
But this is deeply incomplete, there are always contexts of exception or one-off interactions with strangers where you can get away with domination / abuse / etc.
The third not-so-good argument is that, relatedly, evolution rewards mutual aid giving us some pro-social instincts.
But we can and do regularly overcome our biological instincts. Indeed to be human is pretty much to have our thoughts overrule and rewrite our default desires.
But we can and do regularly overcome our biological instincts. Indeed to be human is pretty much to have our thoughts overrule and rewrite our default desires.
The problem with these three incomplete arguments against power is that they're just *complications* to someone captured by a hunger for personal status and power. They force the abuser or ruler to be a little bit smarter and more sneaky, they don't undermine his core project.
While the three incomplete arguments against power are very popular in anarchist circles ("civ will fall", "being an asshole doesn't get you far", "people are naturally good") I think we have three *much stronger* arguments against power...
The first stronger argument cuts at a core justification for power-seeking: that dominating others is a generally efficient means to acquire any ends. It points out that domination has diminishing returns because of limits to personal knowledge, kings get chained to the crown.
This is sharper because it strikes at the root justification for power-seeking, not just adding implementation complications for those already in thrall to such. For most Xes you ultimately *can't* get X for large values of X via power, it's not a universal currency.
The second stronger argument against power is in a similar vein: not only does maintaining control limit you personally, but in terms of broad social organization negative or zero-sum games like domination are wildly wasteful and inefficient uses of social resources.
It may be illustrative to quickly reference the positive sum games involved in art and science: unlike with domination there's no fundamental limit to your capacity to change the world, moreover such changes don't have to conflict, they can build on one another.
Finally, the absolute strongest counter to the whispers of power-seeking is the ultimate incoherence and arbitrariness of the concept of a self. This means that any sort of deep reflection is always a *danger* to the power-seeker as it could undermine their sense of self.
One of the most consistent things revealed about rabid power-seekers is their short-term time preference and rigidity of notions of self. Because they need to draw clear lines of identity between thoughts in their local brain and in other brains (including their future selves).
Long story short, there is some sense in which these people operate like the proverbial paperclip maximizing AI. They seek general power to accomplish their ends but because their value is so arbitrary they have to create defenses around it that impede their own campaign.
Of course an important and critical part of the power-seeker is that they slip from valuing domination as an instrumental tool in pursuit of another value into seeing it as their sole terminal value. But they're still fragile to "why value power tho?" along a few dimensions.
In particular I am responsible for a novel argument for why those with fixed identities rather than more fluid and expansive notions of "self" should be ultimately worse at doing science (because ontological update problems pose a greater threat to them).
But that's a more esoteric and specialized argument. The general point here is that structural changes *are not enough* -- we have to address the core values and strategies behind power, or else we'll simply tear down one system to let another weirder system of power replace it.
