Hacker News Reader

Comment by gascan | Hacker News Reader

As I see it, the corruption challenge of collective action is because it is so often not carefully, purposefully structured. Government is constructed with the express purpose of checking power.

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.

View on HN

I agree. As imperfect and corrupt as it is, democratic representation in government has taken a very long time to develop out of previous eras of might makes right. People who advocate for permanent dismantling of government instead of rebuilding it seem severely naive to believe that doing so won't devolve into violent contests between local armed powers.

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.

As someone who's participated in many organizations and movements that were purposefully against power structures and authority, I can tell you that it can go either way.

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.

Are there examples or reading you might be able to give regarding this? I'm interested!

Dunno about feminism, but I definitely observed the same on agile projects that rejected concept of formal leader and management.

Let's see who naturally arises as a leader style also leads to special kind of hell.

This is why representative democracies and rule of law are so important.

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?

>I read a bit I liked a while back about early feminism...

Link (and second recommendation) for the curious:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...

sounds like it was this: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

Reply on news.ycombinator.com