For most of us, our only point of comparison is life under the authority of the state and capital. Superficially, decision making in this context might seem very efficient. We are allowed to make vanishingly few decisions for ourselves—mostly about which brand of commodity we’ll purchase or which of two elite candidates we might periodically vote into office.

Beyond this, our choices are heavily constrained—you might choose which employment offer to accept but certainly not whether to participate in wage labor—or non-existent, when it comes to our participation in a community. Take a look around at, say, the built environment around you: the roads, the sidewalks, the schools and school districts, parks and police stations, and ask yourself, what say did you have in any of these decisions?

2/10

The answer is invariably “virtually none.” Most decisions are made for and imposed on us. By bosses, managers, bankers, bureaucrats, politicians, technocrats. Do you like having a job and feeding your family? Too bad if Jerome Powell decides to raise interest rates in an attempt to slow inflation, driving up unemployment and turning your life upside down. Do you like your town and community? Too bad if some finance bros halfway around the world make a bad bet that crashes whatever industry was anchoring your local economy. Do you want your community to stay out of violent conflicts in the Middle East? Good luck with that!

What say do you have in these decisions? What say could you possibly have?

3/10

The anarchist alternatives seem inefficient only in comparison to a system that has streamlined decision making by confining the vast majority of choices and decisions to a tiny elite. We might think of the status quo as efficient only because it enjoys massive subsidies—subsidies of violence.

We have so little say because our elites have interposed themselves into the organic processes by which we’d otherwise make decisions together. And that interposition is enormously, incredibly expensive.

The armies. The police. The surveillance. The cadastral surveys and property records, the courts and legislatures, the tax assessors and tax collectors, bureaucrats and the technocrats, schools to teach obedience.

More than a million Americans are employed as police officers or support staff. The US spends well over $100 billion each year on coercive policing and then another $40-50 billion on jails and prisons.

All of this is immensely costly, both in terms of the resources involved and the harms imposed on us, and incredibly brittle. Centralized, top-down decision making only feels more efficient because it is bought at the price of gold and blood.

4/10

It’s not just that we’ve grown so used to having decisions imposed on us that we’ve lost a sense of proportion. An immense amount of that subsidy of violence goes into suppressing our innate inclination for dialogue, consultation, and collaborative consensus building.

In her book “The Unthinkable,” Amanda Ripley conveys an anecdote by a survivor from the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. Louis Lesce was on the 86th floor of the north tower when it was struck. Encountering five strangers on the same floor, Lesce and his group *sat on the floor for 30 minutes* to discuss what to do. Another stranger eventually joined them and encouraged them to evacuate, which they did.

This anecdote has always stuck with me: their response in an emergency was not violent panic, but rather spontaneous community and almost instinctual assembly to discuss solutions. They were perhaps a bit *too* invested in discussion and probably should have evacuated immediately, but I can’t fault them for doing what humans do: talk to each other to reach mutually agreeable solutions to shared problems.

5/10

Over and over again in the historical and archeological records, we find that the oldest form of democracy was not any kind of election or selection of representatives or officials, but rather the *assembly.* Urban assemblies probably predate kingship in the oldest Mesopotamian cities. We find popular assemblies in classical Mesoamerica and classical Greece, Iron Age Germany and burning buildings.

I don’t want to use the term “natural,” because I don’t think that concept has much use when it comes to human political organization. But it seems like there’s something universal about the experience of the assembly. When humans are free, when coercive order breaks down or is otherwise absent, meetings and dialogue are what we tend to do.

6/10

Can we test whether anarchic decision making really is inefficient, in a way that poses actual harms to people?

David Harvey, a Marxist economic geographer, has proposed that “tightly coupled systems,” such as air traffic control or nuclear power plant management, require top-down authority:

“There are many aspects of contemporary life that are now organized in what you might call 'tightly-coupled systems' where you need command and control structures. I wouldn't want my anarchist friends to be in charge of a nuclear power station when the light started blinking red and yellow and all that kind of stuff.”

However, we find that the IAEA has been recommending precisely the opposite approach to improve nuclear safety, recommending less management, decision making pushed to the lowest level, and the operation of “self-guided teams”—precisely the sort of decentralized, consensual, consultative, and deliberative decision making anarchists propose.

The reason? The worst nuclear disasters in history occurred *because of* centralized, top-down decision making. In the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the investigatory committee found that the disaster’s “fundamental causes are to be found in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to ‘sticking with the program’; our groupism; and our insularity.”

https://libcom.org/article/i-wouldnt-want-my-anarchist-friends-be-charge-nuclear-power-station-david-harvey-anarchism

7/10

Another “tightly-coupled system” we might consider is vehicular road traffic. Traffic involves lots of people, often strangers, operating multi-ton blocks of metal and glass that are capable of rapid acceleration to high speeds in close proximity to each other. Done poorly, this is a recipe for disaster.

We might conclude from this that traffic requires fairly extensive and intrusive regimes of rules for managing this process: markings on the road, road signs, traffic lights, traffic police, traffic cameras. This is the kind of driving that many westerners are familiar with. But, in the US at least, this kind of hyper-managed driving is enormously, absurdly deadly: drivers there kill more than 40,000 people each year with these machines.

Maybe they’re just not managed *enough*?

But we discover that, when we start to reduce that regime of top-down rules and management, driving tends to get less dangerous, not more. It turns out that when people can’t rely on cues from road signs—that is, constant instructions from authorities—they drive more cautiously, with more awareness of the actual conditions of the road and other users of that road, making lots of life-and-death decisions in concert with other drivers.

They’re also able to do this rapidly, without the needs for lots of deliberation and meetings, often with fairly little communication between drivers. Perhaps many kinds of anarchist decision making can coexist, depending on changing contexts?

https://bigthink.com/the-present/want-less-car-accidents-get-rid-of-traffic-signals-road-signs/

8/10