this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2026
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The problem is that people that want power will find ways to get power even if there's no established structures that give people power.
How do you prevent that from happening?
Establish customs and structures that prevent power. It needs vigilance. There's evidence that before agriculture some humans exhibited "reverse dominance hierarchy," where if someone tried to assert dominance, the group would team up and ostracise, exile, or execute them.
So all I gotta do is be the person delegated to the vigilance task and I'm golden for a takeover
Zapatistas frequently rotate roles. There are no professional police or politicians.
No no of course not, it'll only take a minute, and hey, I did such a good job with food distribution I can do it again if you want....
AFAIK, they aim so that every single person is rotated to every role (and only hold those roles for weeks before being rotated out); it's not like an election thing; it's more like a duty that everyone has to do. Whatever they're doing has been working for 3 decades.
Which, sure, would be cool to try, but I think that any system for organizing humans has a critical flaw, that being the humans. Even with a rotation, just one bad actor can screw things up a lot.
Democracy and the separation of power is such a structure that we already have. It works perfectly fine if "the group would team up" and vote people that try to assert dominance out.
We're just missing the "customs" that would make people do just that, and the question is how to establish this custom.
It was already clear that we need customs that make people not give other people power, the question that I posed was how to start those customs you talk about.
Yeah, I think the current consensus is dual power and wait until it's either strong enough or the state is weak enough to revolt.
Well, there might need to be an equal and opposite reaction in order to keep it in check. If some people are just inherently evil and desire power over others, then I imagine there would also be inherently good people and desire to protect others.
I don't think you can "prevent" this outright. That's why there's talk of "vigilance" and being "watchful" when it comes to government/democracy.
I absolutely agree with you, but this requires people to mostly think like that. And if people already mostly think like that, then it is actually almost completely irrelevant what political system we have. The question is how to establish such a mindset in most people.
Hmmm.. idk if "establishing a mindset in people" is viable tho. That kinda sounds like "make them think a certain way". I'm reminded of the adage you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink you know?
An active community of hunters, trained to recognize and hunt down such menaces.
Shunning, exile, and other more usual ordinary consequences.
"people that want power will find ways to get power"
nah. probably not.
So how exactly do you think this all started in the first place? We didn't start out with people in power...
People arent born seeking power. That is an idea they get at a certain point. Why? Can we not nuture people away from this path?
How do you know your first sentence is true?
"Goo goo gaa gaa I want to have power over others" is no one's first sentence. Its an idea you have to learn at some point
No one's first words are "goo goo gaa gaa I want to put my penis in your pussy" and for some reason humans still manage to figure that one out like 12 years later without explicitly being taught it.
Just because something is not immediately apparent in a baby does not mean that it isn't innate.
the red flags are waving. Wtf do you mean TWELVE YEARS LATER? Side note, that too is pretty thoroughly taught by society, especially these days. And there are tons of people, particularly overly prudish religious couples, who dont figure it out and have to have someone explain to them which hole they are supposed to be trying.
Abolish the concept of power
You can't abolish thoughts. That's why the "war on terror" will never be won.
You also can't abolish things without a power structure to enforce it.
Uh, sort of. You can human thoughts anyway. Just look at mars.