I read a bit I liked a while back about early feminism, in which members rejected wholesale the idea of power structures & authority, and established no authority. The author relates, however, that the power vacuum was naturally still filled- but because everyone wanted to pretend there was no power structure, the one that developed was unusually cruel & unaccountable.
I liked the bit because to me it seems like the strongest argument for official government- if the power vacuum must always be filled, let us be deliberate in how we fill it.
Another very big factor in having a properly accountable government is reducing information asymmetry as much as possible. Democracy doesn't work well if education is crippled, and there's been a serious decline in the quality and breadth of education in the U.S. (I can't speak to other countries, but I hear of decline elsewhere as well) It sounds a little conspiratorial, but I don't believe the massive student debt loads and the disparagement of fields of study such as philosophy, which prompts critical authority-challenging questions, are accidents. It is my opinion that the upheaval of the 60's scared major U.S. powers and they took steps to nullify student activism.
People in general are very disengaged, apathetic, and distracted. Much of the corruption in government, media, and business could be countered effectively by a population that knows how to inform itself. Instead we seem to be sinking, like Rome did, into corruption, ignorance, and widespread superstition.
I've seen it work, where people found ways to fluidly hold each other accountable and natural leaders gently stepped into the power vacuums with out any kind of formalized authority. And I've seen it fail catastrophically in a myriad of ways. It really comes down to the people who are involved, and how intentionally they approach the organizational problem.
I've also seen larger scale organizations that intentionally attacked this problem and created formalized structures that were built to minimize concentrated power and instead keep it distributed. It was essentially a formalization of the first case where the no-authority / structure model worked.
So it's doable. You can have collective action with out concentrated power and hierarchy. It just takes intention and strong (but compassionate) social accountability.
Let's see who naturally arises as a leader style also leads to special kind of hell.
It's important to make governments that are "about laws - not about men". Because if governments are built around single people, those people will concentrate power. When a system leads to the person in power hands off power to the next person, it's a way to distribute power.
The second principle that is a huge problem today is concentration of power into the hands of the wealthy. Thomas Piketty put his finger on the problem - in the 1970s, most obviously in the US, billionaires began to figure out how to use their wealth for persuasion. In that way they use their wealth to take more of the profits in the economy for themselves.
I think this is the problem of our time: How do we stop oligarchs and billionaires from funding a propaganda machine designed to break democracies so they can accumulate more wealth?
Link (and second recommendation) for the curious:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...
Not just "sometimes", it takes the threat of violent people in uniforms ALL of the time when dealing with people bent on illegally benefiting themselves at the expense of others.
The issue is that the violent people in uniforms, (and even the people controlling them for that matter), can ALSO be bent on benefiting themselves at the expense of others.
It's not only grassroots organizations that can be corrupt, the government itself is actually even more likely to be corrupt. So you almost have to solve corruption before you try to solve the other structural issues. And corruption is just a very hard problem to solve.
It talks about how socializing risk and privatizing profits is actually the definition of corruption.
No. Once upon a time we nominated experts to make most of those decisions. Groups like the EPA or the IRS were given a mandate to examine what was going on and ban behaviors that did harm. But today "regulation" is a bad word. Everything is political. The EPA and IRS cannot ban anything without massive public debate. In fact, most regulatory bodies are so under pressure to reduce any and all regulation that they rarely ever ban anything. Quick and efficient regulation of harmful behavior is dead.
Example: the recent bill to ban upskirting photography in the UK. Nothing much to debate. But the bill gets killed by the new breed of politicians who demand every new regulation be subject to the full public process in order to make the act of passing new regulations as difficult as possible.
One thing I've observed over and over is that there are unintended consequences to everything. It often takes years to figure them out.
Try again.
Exactly. I tend to be wary of concentrating power. The larger the group the more likely that there are conflicts of interest within the group.
Perhaps more importantly, large groups just don't make sense in a lot of cases. If I make a union of milk drinkers, we can buy in huge bulk and get a discount. But then we have 1000000 bottles of milk in one place that will go bad in a couple weeks. We need to invent a distribution network, and a way to figure out who actually needs milk and when, and a way to track who is drinking the most milk so they can pay higher dues. In other words, the union hasn't accomplished anything and basically everything will be the same.
The broad correlation (and correlation isn't necessarily causation) is that as union power decreased, so did real wage growth.
Dealing with information asymmetry not distribution can result in better outcomes without expending nearly as many resources.
PS: Consumer reports is a solid example. Collecting a lot of information on each toaster/fridge/bed is not practical for an individual, but split that among 1,000,000 people and each can save more money than the cost of a subscription.
At different scales this means unionization and professional organizations, government regulation, and international regulation, to prevent whole countries from defecting - this is in large part what the EU is about, and a significant source of UK ill will towards it; and also generally what makes nationalists upset at globalists.
Collective action problems require collective action solutions. Large actors, however, tend to dislike collective action because it reduces their scale advantage.
Collective action has its own problem: power structures encourage corruption and misuse of the pooled power. Overall, I suspect government and international systems are more likely to be less corrupt because they can afford to build more checks and balances into their institutions, but the distance from the people decreases their perceived legitimacy.
Not an easy circle to square.