We know now that centralized power attracts the few psychopaths among our population like a magnet. Even when hierarchical structures are created by good people with good intentions, they eventually become infested by the worst among us. Once the top of a social pyramid is co-opted by a psychopath, the lower levels tend to become corrupted until the whole structure is a soulless organization bent on power and/or profit with little or no regard for collateral damage to society or the environment.
Unless a cure is found for psychopathy, the only antidote is to maximize the sovereignty of individuals. Individual sovereignty can be increased by distributing power away from power centers. This process is sometimes termed decentralization or localization. But to clarify: this process is not meant to be taken to the extreme of a perfectly flat peer-to-peer (P2P) social structure. Hierarchies occur naturally and have compelling advantages. Consider how bodies are composed of organs, which in turn are composed of cells, which are in turn composed of atoms.
But social hierarchies, despite their advantages, have an inherent weakness: a tendency for power to concentrate at their vertices. To protect against this tendency, power should be yielded by individuals to higher levels of the hierarchy (family, community, region, state, nation and world) only when there is a compelling benefit to doing so and only with adequate safeguards; and always provisionally, with the inalienable right to reclaim yielded sovereignty should the hierarchy become corrupt. Further, there is a need for unrelenting vigilance.
The Founders of the United States understood all this when they framed the U.S. Constitution. But “We the People” have not been sufficiently vigilant and much of the social hierarchy has become compromised. The People must now either try to repair the damage via their existing representative power structure or, if it is beyond repair, scrap the legacy structure and try to rebuild a better one. Or so it may seem.
Another option for dealing with a corrupt hierarchy has come to prominence: the People are quietly building a parallel, much more decentralized/localized structure while withdrawing support from the legacy structure. This organic approach avoids class warfare and bloody revolution. The predators and parasites of society will simply find themselves with fewer and fewer prey.
I like the term Fractal Sovereignty to describe this parallel social structure. Fractals are structures characterized by their self-similarity on different scales, something like hierarchies. Although potentially infinite in extent, a fractal has an inherent unity due its generating principle that reveals itself on every scale. This image beautifully depicts for me how the whole is represented by each of its parts:
Accordingly, in a fractal society, there would be an ever present awareness of the whole; each sovereign individual would be loosely bound to all other individuals and to the whole through a network of branches that converge on a central nexus. This network would be self-organizing, resilient and adaptive so the central nexus would reconfigure organically in response to changing circumstances.
This fractal structure bears a resemblance to a hierarchy but is fundamentally different. In a hierarchy, authority descends from the top, down, while representation ascends from the bottom, up. In a living fractal, authority resides with the outer individuals, who each represent the whole. The inner network reconfigures as needed to optimize global unity, bypassing authority that does not represent the common good, just as the Internet automatically reconfigures to bypass faults in its networks.
To maintain this structure, there must be two complementary processes always operating. In the outward direction, ongoing decentralization/localization efforts minimize concentration of power and enhance individual sovereignty. In the inward direction, there must be a flow of information to spread awareness of problems and to coordinate voluntary collective corrective action when needed.
I have republished ten articles I wrote eleven years ago about decentralization here on Substack: Decentralized Manufacturing, Decentralized Energy, Decentralized Money, Decentralized Education, Decentralized Agriculture, Decentralized Medicine, Decentralized Security, Decentralized Communication, Decentralized Government and Decentralized Religion. They are mostly still relevant, since society has arguably become even more centralized, in all of these areas, over this last decade.
During the time since those decentralization articles were written, I have pondered the problem of voluntary collective action coordination. The technology to support this already exists. The challenge is to inspire participation. I have observed the phenomenon of virality (e.g., memes “going viral”) but I still don’t understand how it works. Nevertheless, I will outline a system which I call The Nexus, which at least shows what might be possible.