If there is anything that would seem at first consideration to be proof that you do not have an anarchy, it is the presence of a hierarchy. Hierarchy puts people above other people, right?
Well, not necessarily. Go to your nearest file cabinet. Open one of the drawers. If the drawer is divided up into labeled sections, pull out one of the labeled sections. Now pull out a document. Consider for a moment that this document can be said to reside at a location, which we can express as FileCabinet:2ndDrawer:F-J Folder:Hierarchically-Filing-Descrip Document. What makes it easy to find the document is that its "address" inside the filing cabinet is described in a series of hierarchical categories. But if you pull out any other document in the same filing cabinet, you cannot say that one document has power over any of the others, or is in a more privileged position, etc. The hierarchy is not a hierachy of documents, but is only a hierarchy of filing structure. Filing cabinets exist on one level; drawers below that; folders below that; and documents at the bottom. But the only things that are actually in the filing cabinet are the documents and none of them outweighs any of the others due to its position in the hierarchy.
In the human hierarchies that we are accustomed to, things work differently; if human governments that we are familiar with were file cabinets, there would be an "Associate Vice President document of the 2nd Drawer" which would have authority over the entire 2nd drawer. Indeed, it is difficult for many people to imagine a hierachical system of people in any different terms. But suppose the hierarchy is just a hierarchy of meeting sizes? Whether you are currently attending a small meeting or a large one, you're equal in authority and responsibility to any other person in attendance, but sometimes you attend small-group meeting and sometimes you attend large-group meetings. A hierarchy of meeting sizes in and of itself does not make anyone subservient to anyone else, does it?
Now suppose that the smaller groups of equal participants meet more often than the larger groups, in a hierarchical relationship of how often groups ought to meet. Once again, you as an individual, and every other participant as an individual, is a particpant who does not report to another individual located above you; it is a hierarchy but not a hierarchy of people over other people.
My proposed solution is 3. That is, let's say that once a day you meet with 8 other individuals to form a group of 9 and you may each propose projects and solutions and policies, and from the 8 other individuals you can obtain, or fail to obtain, voluntary cooperation that would enable you to implement your plans. Every third day, your meeting occurs in a place large enough to accomodate the members of two other groups of 9, so you are now in a group of 27 people. Some of your ideas, proposals, and concerns would necessarily require more than 9 participants anyway, so this is your chance to propose larger plans. Other ideas involve only your group of 9 and, in keeping with the dictum that initiative be focused at the lowest level, they've already been dealt with and are already being implemented. What if the activities of one group of 9 people is disturbing to some members of a different group of 9, though?
The structure of Three. Exponentially the size
of the community increases in elegant patterns; with initiative and responsibility
concentrated at the lower levels, democracy is maximized.Policy -- the Structure of Decisions Made -- should be hierarchical as well. Decisions easily made should be easily reversed; decisions made over more time and requiring more difficult processes to pass them should be harder to un-make. A hierarchy of permanence of decisions means that low-level initiatives that allow small groups to act without being hamstrung by the red tape of organizational bureaucracy can nevertheless be challenged by members of the larger group incorporating the smaller, but the process of undoing the decision at a larger hierarchical grouping should be designed to take longer, with more advance warning and a larger number of mandated discussion meetings before a new decision can be made, a decision that will occupy a higher position in the hierarchy of permanence of decisions.
I don't pretend that I do not still need more information and experience with the problems that will arise and need solutions. This is still very much a rough draft of how to structure communication. However, I think I have a good enough model to be worthy of trial experimentation, meaning that I think chances are good that the structure will support modifications of itself to address aspects of formal anarchic social interaction that I have not already anticipated and addressed in the plans shown here.
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You may have noticed that the details for the hierarchy of decision-permanence, and how it integrates with the hierarchy of meeting sizes, are not as well-developed here as the rest of this draft. Actually, the first write-up I did for the decision-permance hierarchy occurred in a different context -- a practical one, rather than a theoretical one; I was an intern at a radical social work agency that was committed to completely egalitarian consensus-based decision-making, and I offered the proposed hierarchy of decision-permanence as a solution to enable them to move beyond their then-current state of paralysis -- and although I have long intended to integrate the two sets of ideas, I do not yet have a clear and coherent singular model for how the structures of decision-permanence hierarchy and of meeting size and meeting-period would ideally mesh. I haven't put much effort into it because I kept thinking that I'd run across a rich body of similar thinking, either published writing or in the form of an intellectual "futurological" movement of some sort, and so my far my ideas on the subject seem to be really basic. It would be embarrassing to make a big deal out of elementary-level ideas that people somewhere else have long since moved beyond, you know? But so far, despite my solicitations, I have not received any relevant email for how to address the general subject of constructing a functional structured anarchy, so I am putting into words the ideas that I have had so far, and will update this as they clarify further. I do have clearer visions in my head, but many of them have yet to be put into words.
Anyway, here is my discussion of a hierarchy of decision-permanence.