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When I am talking about narcissism, I am talking about something much broader than NPD. The ICD 11 revised the whole section on personality disorders so that they are no longer separated into clusters (A, B, and C) and are now characterized on a per-individual basis by a combination of atomized descriptors. One of the major reasons for doing this was because there is a lot more overlap between them than the categorization of discrete disorders implied. The lack of empathy that characterizes narcissism was present in basically all of cluster B and frequently occurred with several disorders in clusters A and C.

Narcissism is way more common than you think. I estimate that they make up at least 1/3 of the population, and probably more like 1/2 (and exactly how I’ve arrived at these numbers is something I’d want to write about). Those “regular” people who are “pushed” into egotistic behavior? They’re actually low-grade or covert narcs who are being given permission to be narcissistic by our culture.

The capitalist system does work as intended, but the reason that it is intended to work the way that it does is because it was designed by narcissists from the very beginning (another topic we’d be discussing, with sources), and it serves them very well. They weren’t a hidden cabal, though, and the emergence of modern capitalism didn’t happen overnight. The system gradually emerged piece by piece as various people tried to solve various problems (and it probably all started with the issue of distributing portions of tribute to one’s lackeys).

If you’re going to vilify an entire group of people, do so based on their actual behaviours and not on the personality trait(s) that they share.

We are villifying them based on their actual behaviors. It just so happens that when you look at the reasons for those behaviors, you see that it is caused by a personality type/disorder, and as such, naming the group that behaves badly in this way also essentially names the personality type/disorder. You simply cannot separate the two concepts, because they are causally/definitionally linked. As such, it is paradoxical to simultaneously condone discriminating against the behaviors and condemn discriminating against the personality type.

So yeah, I know what you are talking about, but what is that new community exactly supposed to achive?

The central thesis or hypothesis, if you will, is that all of the issues that we are dealing with today (authoritarianism, late-stage capitalism, fascism, sexism, racism, systemic ecological destruction, the destruction of the concept of truth, etc…) are fundamentally rooted in narcissism. The point of the community is to explore this relationship, and take advantage of that perspective to discuss effective strategies for dealing with these problems (generally via dealing with the underlying cause - the narcissism itself). When you start casting the polycrisis through the lens of narcissism, a lot of the conventional ideas about how to address those issues fall apart (including many ideas that are common in anarchist circles).

I expect that the bulk of the content would be focused on analyzing the connection between the psychology of narcissism and various aspects of politics/economics in both historical and contemporary contexts. For example, one thing I expect that we would spend a lot of time discussing is exactly how authoritarian societies emerged from the egalitarian ones that were ubiquitous prior to the development of agriculture. We would also discuss things like how the dynamics of capitalism map really nicely to the transactional nature of narcissistic relationships, or how various elements of modern social etiquette practically seem to be designed to enable narcissistic abuse (e.g. Gossiping would pretty thoroughly defeat a lot of narcissistic “splitting behaviors”, and yet it is often taboo).

Besides analysis, we would also discuss effective strategies for dealing with common problems in a way that is narcissistically-aware. Moderating communities, both real and virtual, would probably be one of the most common topics of discussion in this regard. Maintaining a space so that it is inclusive, especially one that is public, while also preventing abusive behavior is really challenging, and there are lots of subtle ways that things can go wrong that a lot of people overlook because they don’t realize just how insidious bad actors can actually be. We can talk about more conventional direct-action strategy stuff too, and in a lot of ways I would expect those discussions to look a lot like similar discussions between anarchists that you’ve seen elsewhere. It’s just that we’ll be taking into account the fact that we have an actual psychological model for how the bad actors will really behave, and so we will be able to adapt our strategies accordingly.

I hope this helps you understand what I’m going for here. I’m not trying to make a hate-club or anything. I think there’s genuine insight to be had here that could be very helpful for a lot of people.

This argument could be made much simpler by observing that centrism is simply the middle of the road fallacy turned into an ideology. As the middle of the road fallacy is unsound by definition, any positions taken on the basis of such an argument are liable to have nothing to do with reality, and any decisions made by such an argument are likely to have unintended or harmful consequences.

Of course, some people will also hide behind this argument because they want to use certain extremes as strawmen so that they can use centrism as a smokescreen to hide the true toxicity of their real beliefs that they want to push. In these cases, the middle of the road fallacy will often be accompanied by many other fallacies as well.

In any case, it should be sufficient to point out the fallacious/illogical nature of their ideology and arguments to show that these people should not be listened to or taken seriously at all. (It isn’t sufficient in practice, because most people are too far removed from reality/epistemological soundness to be saved, but it should be. It will be for anyone with a functioning brain in their heads.)

Outside of spreading the definition that I’ve given, I don’t know what else you’d need or want to do. I’d like to think that this comment thread doesn’t really qualify as an ‘anarchist theory rabbithole’, so if the explanation I gave worked here then perhaps it can work elsewhere. I don’t think that this definition is likely to be controversial.

I’m not sure what you are asking for. I’m just saying that it would be good for people to understand hierarchy in terms of coercion, generally, so trying to establish that definition as common knowledge would be a good idea.

I think it would be a very good idea to make the link between the notion of ‘hierarchy’ as anarchists like to think of it and coercion a part of common knowledge, both inside and outside of the anarchist community. I think everybody being on the same page with terminology would help clear up a lot of miscommunication about anarchism.

I don’t think that this is the primary problem that we’re facing, though. I think that part of the reason that it is difficult to pin down a definition of ‘hierarchy’ that everybody agrees upon is because there are some ‘anarchists’ that don’t actually want anarchism, but instead want a lack of personal accountability - in other words, the freedom to do whatever they want to whomever they want without consequences. If you frame this in terms of ‘personal freedom for everybody’, it sort of sounds like anarchism, but because it emphasizes positive freedoms to the point of discarding negative freedoms almost entirely, it actually ends up being a self-contradictory position where bullies have power because they’re willing to penalize their victims into submission, and there are no collectively-enforced consequences for engaging in such oppressive behavior.

I think that the #1 problem that we need to solve is the issue of these individuals generally being an accepted part of our group (or society at large, even). Anarchism isn’t actually a magic bullet for oppression, because even an anarchist society would eventually be corrupted into an oppressive one if bullies like this are allowed to persist and manipulate people into following them and their disordered ideology. To actually create a truly ‘good’ society, we need to learn how to reliably recognize these bullies and keep them out of our spaces. Anarchism helps enormously, because collective power is much harder to subvert than hierarchical power, but it isn’t a complete solution on its own.

That said, being able to recognize coercion and manipulation in all of its various forms would help a lot with that goal, and so the goals of establishing such a common terminology and also teaching people how to recognize bullies in all of their various forms are synergistic.

Hierarchy happens when some people are ‘above’ others, or, in other words, can make decisions for other people and enforce them without their consent.

I intended for this to basically be the definition, but I can try to rephrase to make it clearer.

‘Hierarchy’ is any social structure or relationship where someone has coercive power over another person, and where that coercive power is a normalized part of the structure or relationship. This normalization could be a social contract or the result of patterns of abusive behavior, it doesn’t really matter exactly how it happens. It’s just important to distinguish between coercion that happens because someone is breaking the rules and coercion that happens even when nobody is breaking any rules. It is the latter that forms a power dynamic between individuals or groups, and it is these power dynamics that hierarchies are made of.

I hope that clears things up.

It is tricky to do this in a way that allows for complex coordination at scale while avoiding the oppressive properties of systems which we would all recognize as undesirable. The concept that is required in order to properly navigate this is ‘coercive control’.

Hierarchy happens when some people are ‘above’ others, or, in other words, can make decisions for other people and enforce them without their consent. This is coercive control. This is the situation that we want to avoid.

At the same time, the collective does have to be able to enforce rules, so some degree of coercion must be allowed in order to avoid a sort of paradox-of-tolerance situation. To resolve this apparent contradiction, we introduce the notion of a ‘social contract’. To be a part of an anarchist organization would require that a person agree to a social contract. As long as the person upholds the social contract, they cannot otherwise be coerced, as that would be a violation of anarchist principles, and could result in oppressive behavior. (Note: For this to be self-consistent, coercion has to be outlawed as part of said social contract.) If a person breaks the social contract, then they are also no longer protected by it, and can be coerced by the group to leave or such.

The social contract bit is sort of an aside to the original question, but I think people get confused by what is and isn’t hierarchy because they understand the first part in some way, even if they don’t have the words for it, but then they don’t know how to solve the obvious problem of enforcing rules so that people’s freedoms can actually be protected in practice.

Centralization doesn’t necessarily imply hierarchy, as, given an undirected acyclic graph, you can pick any node to be the ‘root’ and end up with a valid ‘tree’ - the structure that most people would visualize when they hear the word ‘hierarchy’. Of course, we would prefer to not pick any node as the root, as the hierarchical structure implied by such a distinction shouldn’t be necessary for the collective to reap the benefits of such centralization. There is a whole discussion that could be had about how to actually implement centralization without falling into various traps, but that isn’t really what the question in the OP is about. I simply bring it up because some people confuse centralization for hierarchy, and end up shooting themselves in the foot for doing so.