On Emergent Authority

How social ecology and the structure of its relations can result in domination or stewardship

Photo by Wei-Cheng Wu on Unsplash

A Note on Context

This started out as a very different essay. I was tempted to describe a lot of my personal history in order to provide context for how my understanding of the notion of authority has evolved since my early teens. Instead, I’ve decided to provide a brief summary so that the context can be boiled down to a few sentences instead. I was introduced to anarchism when I was twelve by reading Murray Bookchin’s “Ecology of Freedom”. In the following years, I read a bunch of anarchist literature, and eventually got around to reading Marx. Marx was too dense for me at that time, and had ideas that clashed with what I had already learned from anarchist literature, and so I stopped reading Marx. Then I got into university, and by the time I left university as a programmer deeply involved in mutual aid work, I had an opportunity to travel abroad, and spent 6 months playing on the beaches of Grand Cayman Island in the Caribbean where I worked as a jetski operator and kayak tour guide for working class American Tourists that arrived daily to the island to double its population (while rich assholes used the exploited tourist destination to hide their wealth from the world). From there, instead of heading back home, I set out on my own to try and visit as many countries as I could (along with a full set of the collected works of Marx, gifted to me by a Cuban family I had lived with for 2 weeks, as my only full-time companion. A heavy load both physically and intellectually). I worked as I went, doing manual and menial labour alongside locals, and living off the charity and welcoming nature of families and communities virtually everywhere I went. I would earn enough to pay back what I could, pay for my next visa, and arrange a flight, or a bus ticket, or just hitch-hike on my way to the next destination. I did this for 6 years before returning home, and in the process, I visited 126 countries and managed to circumnavigate the planet twice. It was a privilege most will never get to experience, and an experience that could not have happened without thousands of people’s willingness to take a scrawny, babbling little white kid into their homes and communities. I write from this place of learning. I write from this experience of understanding people in a way that most never will. But mostly, I write because I owe it to a world that let me see it for the rich and vibrant tapestry of diverse threads it is. A tapestry that Capitalism and Western hegemony want you to believe are relics and oddities and barbarisms that barely still exist outside of “Civilisation”.

There. That’s the original essay’s travel-blog-esque context summed up in a lengthy paragraph. The reason I decided not to approach this subject through that lens is that it ironically sets me up as some sort of authority on the subject of authority when it is meant to avoid setting me up as an authority by providing context for the notion of authority. Ugh. What a mess.

So, having provided a summary of where I’m coming from when I write this, I want to talk about authority. Very specifically, I want to talk about how deeply wrong the Western conception of authority is. I also want to do this without romanticizing non-Western epistemologies of authority. The first part is relatively easy. The second part is complicated, because authority, as a concept and a practice, is not a monolith in the non-Western world. There is no binary conception to work with. We cannot say Western authority is “this” and non-Western authority is “that”. Because as I learned in my journey, “that” is a massive volume of differing cosmologies that vary not just from place to place, but time to time.

Wrapping my head around this concept was difficult at the time. I was an anarchist who believed myself to be opposed to all forms of authority. And it took a 6-year journey and several years of slow reflection afterward to learn that what I opposed is a warped and narrow framing of authority that very specifically serves hierarchies of domination not only in establishing dominion, but maintaining it with the minimum expenditure of energy.

The Social Ecology and Hierarchy

But before we can tackle the problem of how the West conceptualizes authority, we need to talk about something that might seem unrelated, but isn’t. Social Ecology. I’m borrowing this idea from Murray Bookchin. He wasn’t a propertarian, so I don’t think he would have minded. To summarize and paraphrase him, Social Ecology refers to the web of relationships, practices, norms, and material conditions that shape how people interact with each other and their environment. It’s more than culture, economics, or politics. It is the living tissue of the entire sphere of interplay between social life and the material world.

“Social ecology is based on the conviction that nearly all of our present ecological problems originate in deep-seated social problems. It follows, from this view, that these ecological problems cannot be understood, let alone solved, without a careful understanding of our existing society and the irrationalities that dominate it. To make this point more concrete: economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender conflicts, among many others, lie at the core of the most serious ecological dislocations we face today—apart, to be sure, from those that are produced by natural catastrophes.”

―Murray Bookchin

When Bookchin wrote the Ecology of Freedom in 1982, it had been nearly 2 decades after he had begun exploring the core concept of Social Ecology. His original insight was that all ecological problems are rooted in social hierarchies. He wrote about this in “Our Synthetic Environment” in 1962, and elaborated on it 9 years later in 1971. But it was another 11 years before he finally published The Ecology of Freedom, in which he traced Hierarchy’s historical emergence and dissolution. He would go on to write at length over the next few decades about the practical application of this concept of Social Ecology, evolving over time from being a libertarian socialist in general, to falling out with what he called lifestyle anarchists (people who adopt the trappings of anarchism but refuse to engage in revolutionary politics) and eventually settling into being a communalist or what some might call a libertarian municipalist. But we don’t need to understand his personal ideological views in order to come to grips with the notion of social ecology.

Bookchin first articulated socio-ecological values as a challenge to the left to see environmentalism as revolutionary. Today we can viscerally see that if more people had adopted this view in Bookchin’s time, we might not be in as much trouble as we are now.

The notion of Social Ecology asks us to understand that social hierarchies precede and cause exploitation by creating a psychology of domination in which humans view themselves as superior to their environment, and deserving of anything that can be extracted from their environment for their own gain.

A crucial point (that has been contentious since it was first articulated) is that ecologies have no “natural hierarchies” outside of those created by conditions of scarcity. Originally, humans tried to suggest a “food chain” in which predators stood above prey, and in which humans were the ultimate predator that found its natural position at the top of a global pyramid. And then later ecologists and other life scientists came to understand that rather than hierarchies, life on our planet actually forms a complex web of interdependencies where no single species ever truly dominates another. Hierarchy not only didn’t exist as a universally constant attribute of living systems, it was also precisely the wrong lens through which to view life on Earth.

Where troops of baboons were initially used as examples of strict primate hierarchies of domination in some kind of “natural order”, Professor Robert Sapolski found through catastrophe that a troop he was studying emerged from disaster with a completely flattened social order that was devoid of hierarchy, upending decades of theory about the role of hierarchy in primate social relations.

Wolf packs that were depicted as being ruled over by Alpha males by Rudolf Schenkel in 1947 and popularized by L. David Mech in his 1970 book The Wolf: Ecology and Behaviour of an Endangered Species, were later shown by Mech to only exhibit this behaviour in captivity when wolves from different backgrounds were forced to live together, and Mech has spent the rest of his life trying desperately to get people to understand that he and Schenkel had been wrong.

In case after case, hierarchy has been found in “nature” to be contingent. It is an adaptive response to ecological conditions.

With this understanding, I can state a hypothesis: The specific ways in which our social ecology is structured will result in different manifestations of authority. If we structure it hierarchically, with the logic of extraction, exploitation, oppression, and atomization, then authority will be positional, institutional, and transactional. But if we structure it horizontally with the logic of stewardship, renewal, and interdependence, then authority will be conditional, relational, and perhaps most importantly, it will depend on the health and diversity of the ecology it stewards.

Western Authority

So let’s get back to the Western conception of authority. The dominant depiction of authority not just throughout the Western world, but throughout the history of the Western world, is of something to be held. Like an attribute of an abstract object, it is depicted variously as a property of an office, or an institution, or a credential. A property granted through religious decree, contracts, elections, or certifications, and justified through procedures until it is understood as being stable, transferable, and objectively impersonal. And above all, it is always stipulated to be positional in its relation to social hierarchy.

To make my case, I won’t do a full deep dive into the history of Western thought on the notion of authority. Instead, I will do a brief tour of the major developments that took authority from a mostly horizontal, relational concept to an institutional, positional concept.

Authority, throughout the recorded history of the West, is deeply tied to the concept of the State. Which, as I laid out in my previous essay, is a Pattern of Human Social Relations predicated on control. So from the early Greek city-states, to the Roman Empire, the notion of authority was an extension of this pattern of control. Perhaps only loosely understood at first, and for literal millennia, it gradually became more rigid and formalized.

In 494 CE, Pope Gelasius I wrote his famous letter to Emperor Anastasius, declaring that “There are two things, august emperor, by which this world is chiefly ruled: the consecrated authority of bishops and the royal power.” This “Gelasian doctrine” created a dual authority structure that covered the spiritual (auctoritas) and temporal (potestas), each with its own sphere. But notice how authority is something granted from above. Prior to this, authority within the Roman Empire (and the Greeks before them) was something earned, and contingent on continued prosperity of those influenced by it (we don’t need to discuss that it very much ignored the influence it had on the populations of slaves maintained by these societies).

After a few centuries of relative stability, in which the church and the state argued about, but maintained the status quo ambiguously, there were about 5 decades of heightened tension that eventually resulted in the Concordat of Worms (1122), which distinguished between the spiritual and temporal aspects of office. The Church would invest spiritual authority (with staff and ring), while the emperor would invest lands and powers (with a scepter). Authority was, with a few strokes of penmanship, definitively understood as something that could be granted, transferred, and divided. It was a property of offices, not an emergent quality of relationship. The formal, institutional conception was officially institutionalized in both Church and State.

This lasted for a few hundred more years, until the monarch got sick of sharing authority with the church because it kept leading to holy wars that most of the monarchs really were not very good at fighting, and which constantly threatened their ability to control their claimed territories, so they switched from feudalist authority to absolutist authority. To achieve this, they relied on some pre-modern heavyweights like Machiavelli, Locke, and Hobbes to theorize a transformation from authority predicated on divinity, morality, and ancestry into a more stable form: political authority.

The heavyweights did this by theorizing about authority as the “voluntary creation of natural individuals”, with the unspoken caveat that only those with power over their people were natural individuals that actually had creative volition. Hobbes in particular gave authority a new, literal definition: “the right of doing any act” that is “authorized” by an author (the people) to a representative (the sovereign). Thus, he made authority contractual. He made what had once been something relational into something transactional.

It only took another century or so for this development to get codified in the Peace of Westphalia by recognizing the principle of state sovereignty and enshrining territorial authority as the dominant form of political organization.

Authority from ”The Left”

Over the next 3 centuries, debates surrounding authority predominantly refused to question its nature, and instead focused on how much to limit the authority of institutions. Liberals, Conservatives, and even the early Socialists prior to Marx (the Ricardians and many of the utopian socialists) did not address the notion of authority at all. They addressed economic institutions while leaving political authority almost entirely untouched.

It wasn’t until Proudhon that the questioning of authority started to resurface. Unfortunately, he massively overcorrected by rejecting ALL political activity and ALL authority as inherently coercive and domineering. This totalizing stance, perhaps inadvertently, did little but prop up the Western conception of authority. Proudhon wasn’t reclaiming the relationality of authority; he was reaffirming its institutionality and positionality, and rejecting the entire concept. This obviously had a long-tail impact on anarchist thinkers that evolved from this premise, including myself.

Then came Marx. As an anarchist, it is hard for me to express how much I love Marx, while also admitting how strongly I disagree with Marx on some fronts. And here I must be clear. I’m not talking about Marxism after Marx. I’m not talking about Engels (whom I genuinely dislike, but we will get to him soon), or Lenin, or any of the long line of Socialists that came after Marx. I have problems with them, but my problems with Marx feel far more personal. As I said in the introduction to this essay, for five-and-a-half years Marx was my only constant companion. I read every word he wrote, several times. I argued with him in my own notebooks. I grappled with his concepts relentlessly, and eventually realized that I preferred Marx to almost any other thinker that I’ve ever encountered, even though (or perhaps because) I disagree with him more than I do even the most eloquent anarchists.

I would love to tell you that Marx broke the spell and disenchanted the West’s depiction of authority. That the fundamental relationality of Marx’s theories re-established a relational conception of authority that would undo centuries of epistemic drift into alienation of the concept from its roots. Unfortunately, while Marx did make some headway in countering Proudhon’s absolutist stance rejecting authority, Marx maintained the institutional view of authority. He rightly understood that political activity was necessary for a liberated world, but Marx did not believe in prefiguration. Ultimately, and somewhat ironically, he took the utilitarian view that the means (the state) would justify the ends (communism), rather than the consequentialist view that the means and the ends must be the same, because the means must eventually be judged by the ends they achieve. And just so that I am clear. I am perfectly aware that Marx would have rejected the label of utilitarian with the utmost vehemence. I know that he viewed the state as a necessary evil dictated by the material reality of history. But my critique is not that he knowingly adopted a utilitarian viewpoint. Far from it, we are only able, now in retrospect, to see the utilitarian logic of justifying the ends by the means. Marx genuinely believed that capitalism would evolve into socialism as the proletariat arose to grasp the reins of authority, and that with the dissolution of class, the ideological rationale for the state would wither away. My contention, all these years later, is that it is the Western conception of authority that ultimately undid the dream. And that through a re-examination of authority, the dream might still be achieved.

Which brings me to Engels. As I mentioned earlier, I dislike Engels. I disliked him when I first read On Authority in high school as a budding anarchist, but that was probably just a knee-jerk reaction. I did not understand the extent of my dislike for Engels until I finally got around to taking my 6-year journey with Marx. It wasn’t until I came to grips with Marx that I could come to grips with the subtle and disastrous influence Engels had on him. Marx viewed the Dictatorship of the Proletariat as an emergent kind of authority. He understood that the workers who most clearly understood the nature of the extractive social relation that we call capitalism would be the same workers who would lead the entire working class into grasping their own futures and collectively and democratically freeing themselves of the shackles of state and class and capital. Marx’s vanguard wasn’t a single party, and it wasn’t a formal institution. It was a fluid leadership of those most capable of liberating society trusted by their fellows because they demonstrated their responsible stewardship of the communist revolution. It was Engels who pushed for the more formal and scientific approach. It was Engels who viewed authority as the imposition of one person’s will over another, and felt that such authority was inevitable, and as long as a formalized vanguard was at the top of the relationship, such authority was both desirable and a permanent condition.

I have already stated my bias, so I now feel the need to rebalance my view. Engels wasn’t a bad person. He steadfastly supported Marx, both materially and intellectually. He fiercely supported a socialist future and vehemently criticized capitalism for the exploitative system it was (and is). My dislike for him stems from a difference of opinion laid out in texts that he is no longer around to defend, recant, or adjust. It is unfair of me to expect him to incorporate ideas that we have the hindsight to understand today. So instead of saying that Engels was a bad influence on Marx (which is a contested debate among Marxist scholars to this day), I will amend my statement instead say that Engels’ conception of authority as inevitable and permanent is in no way different from the common Western conception I have already elaborated on. Marx, on the other hand, in writings like The Civil War in France (written in 1871), demonstrates an anti-authoritarian streak when he praises the Paris Commune as the first worker-controlled government and celebrates that they managed to smash the state, stipulating that it would have been a bad idea for the proletariat to simply take control of the state apparatus as it was. Or in The Eighteenth Brumaire (written in 1853), where he uses historical materialist analysis to warn that when society chooses “order” over liberty, it paves a direct path to tyranny.

Now, before I get painted as a Marxist for having favourable views of Marx, I will instead pivot to being labeled a Marxist for further critiquing Marx’s anarchist contemporaries.

First, Kropotkin, for all that I agree with his vision of a federated society in which state power becomes a thing of the past, still conflated authority with the state. In Modern Science and Anarchism, he wrote, “The authority of law, imposed by force, the authority of government, the authority of the priest, these are the obstacles which prevent society from developing freely.“. Now, there is some nuance here; a decade earlier he wrote, in Anarchist Morality, “When I go to a bootmaker, I ask his advice concerning boots. When I consult an architect concerning the building of my house... I do not therefore recognize their authority. … I reserve my incontestable right of criticism and censure.” He’s conceding something important here, by stipulating that the authority of experts is conditional, but note that while other forms of authority are rejected and the authority of expertise is accepted, all are positional. There is no understanding of any authority as the result of a relationship. All authority, to Kropotkin, is a possession to be held instead of a property of the relationship between people or the environment. He is demonstrating that even though he studied the mutuality and interdependence of the natural world, the positional and institutional conception of authority had become so ingrained in Western thinking that even those opposing hierarchy tacitly accepted this understanding of authority.

And Bakunin fared no better, echoing Kroptokin almost verbatim when he wrote in What is Authority, “Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others.“ (More on this a little later)

Nowhere in the Western world do we find the notion of authority treated from a truly relational perspective by the most prominent and influential thinkers. It is always given to us as a positional and institutional concept, regardless of whether the proponents think it must be abolished or utilized.

I will be honest and say that it is hard for me to separate my ethical instincts (to call this depiction of authority “harmful”) from the intellectual understanding that, if my hypothesis is correct, this Western version of authority is merely a product of the social ecology within which each of the big thinkers laid out their worldview. Yes, a lot of it is self-serving, but it is also extremely difficult for a fish to understand the nature of water while it swims through it and breathes through it.

The Social Ecologies from which they arose were hierarchically structured because they were predicated on logics of extraction, oppression, and control. From the Roman Empire to The Feudal territories, to the Absolutist Monarchies, or the colonialist nation-states, we have the Western repetition of Social Ecologies built on domination, which got inherited and iterated at every subsequent level.

What I learned from the world

It is here that I need to return to my adventure around the world. I started my intellectual journey with the wide-eyed fascination that comes so easily in our youth, and armed with an understanding given to me by Bookchin about social ecology. And this understanding let me see the places I visited in ways that are not possible for a regular tourist. I also had Marx by my side, highlighting all the flaws of bourgeois society I encountered along the way. But I also got to see all the ways in which Western hegemony had reshaped the cosmologies that it had spent centuries colonizing, and in some cases, the same hierarchical social ecologies were there before the Western world arrived.

In some places, Western authority reinforced existing hierarchies, while in others it imposed new ones, or destroyed older, more relational forms of authority and replaced them with positional ones. The result was a patchwork of hybrid systems where some were built on domination, others were built on resistance, and many were built on a complex mixture of both.

Before we continue, I want to make it very clear that I’m not writing any of this as an anthropologist. I’m a layman. I don’t know how to conduct ethnographic research now, and I certainly wasn’t attempting it during my travels. I took some notes while I traveled, but nothing structured enough to use as evidence for robust scientific research, so most of what follows is my own personal observations framed by the anarchist and socialist writings that had been the backbone of my intellectual life up to that point, and could possibly result in a misreading of some of the cultures I interacted with. The people I lived with were not subjects of my curiosity. They were hosts, inadvertent teachers, and many of them remain my friends. What I learned from them was not knowledge extracted so that I could further my theories, it was given as a way for me to exist among them in respect. So when I describe what I saw, I ask you to read it not as a claim about “how that culture works,” but as an observation of a single moment, in a single place, that challenged my inherited understanding of authority and showed me something I had not previously imagined. Nonetheless, I still feel like I was taught invaluable lessons by the people I lived and worked with, and after many years of reflection, I feel confident that the concluding thoughts I’ve had are on the right track.

I will start explaining my understanding of non-Western authority with the family in Cuba that gifted me Marx’s collected works. Miguel, the eldest son, who was several years younger than me, was an anarchist in full rebellion against his parents and Cuban society. Like me, he was entirely opposed to the very notion of authority, because like me, he had inherited the concept from the Western depiction he found in stories, magazines, and TV shows. But it was his mother, Yanet, who sat us both down on my third night with their family and started the conversation that has resulted, all these years later, in my view of Western authority as warped.

If I’m being honest, it was my presence that led to the conversation, because it was my anarchist views that emboldened Miguel to lash out at his father, Ernesto, earlier that day when he insisted that Miguel needed to go to their neighbors to help with the community harvest, and Miguel wanted to go and hang out at a friend’s house to listen to music. Their family is of Taino descent, and this comes with a long and complex history that many in the West had thought ended with the complete eradication of Taino society with the arrival of Europeans. Yanet had not previously or explicitly taught Miguel about their cultural heritage. Miguel had been too young to fully grasp what had been shared before that night. Too wrapped up in the contradictions between the epistemologies he had inherited from his own culture, and those foisted on him by Western Hegemony. But Yanet understood these contradictions. When Miguel railed against the authority of the Cacique (their community leader) who had called for the harvest, Yanet pointed out that the Cacique was a servant asking for help, not a master giving orders. She asked Miguel, and myself, “Who waters your roots? Who eats from your harvest?” Neither of us answered. With a single question she laid bare the nature of the Cacique’s authority. It wasn’t authority derived from the position of leader. It was position derived from the authority emerging from connections to the people as a responsibility for the stewardship of the community they offered.

After a long silence, giving us enough time to absorb the lesson, she asked us, “How can you dismantle the master’s house if you don’t know the bones it’s built on?” This one took me longer. I thought she was talking about the Cacique at first, and then realized she meant that targeting the authority of the Cacique was bad aim. The real oppressor is the one with bones in the foundation. Those of the oppressed that were erased in the construction of dominion.

She asked many questions of us that night, and never once imposed an answer on us. She let us work through the complex philosophy all on our own. It was years before I truly understood all the lessons she imparted. And I will forever be grateful for her wisdom.

After a few more stops in the Caribbean, where I encountered this same relational authority, prevailing in many of the rural communities (but oddly absent in urban areas) I had earned enough to allow me to sneak into the US (they wouldn’t give me a visa because I couldn’t show strong ties and property owned back home in South Africa) on a fishing trawler that dropped me off on an isolated beach in eastern Florida. I hitch-hiked and dumpster-dived my way up the eastern seaboard and slept rough most nights, saving the little money I had for food instead of shelter.

In New York state I eventually found someone that took me in for a few days. His name was Cody, and he helped me get across the Canadian border, and into a community of his extended family. I had read previously about the Iroquois Confederacy, and now I was temporarily living among the Ongweh’onweh. It was one of the most enlightening stops in my long journey.

The Haudenosaunee, as the 6 nations of the confederacy are known, is the world’s oldest continuous participatory democracy. It predates the arrival of Europeans in North America, and while it has struggled in the centuries since European arrival, especially due to attempts by Western authority to impose colonial structures on the community, they continue to thrive.

I had the privilege of attending several gatherings where decisions were made, but couldn’t follow most of what was going on because of language barriers and an unwillingness to impose my need for translation on people attempting to govern their own communities. After one of these gatherings, I sat around a fire with some community members, which included both an Oyaner (Clan Mother) and a Hoyane (Clan Chief). Cody was there by my side, translating what he thought I needed to know, and then I was put on the spot when the Hoyane asked me to tell my story for the group. I did, and was deeply humbled to find a lot of them nodding along and smiling and laughing, mostly for undertaking a journey like this alone in a world that would likely want to eat me up. The Oyaner then asked me what I thought about the Haudenosaunee, and I hedged a bit before saying that their hierarchy was somewhat strange to me, and that I was not in favour of the concept of authority. She laughed and said this was because for the white man, authority is a privilege, but for the Ongweh’onweh it is a burden. The Hoyane must have skin that is “seven spans thick”, meaning that he must be able to endure criticism, gossip, and anger, without retaliation or losing his temper. At any point, if the Oyaner and the community feel that the Chief has lost Orenda (a spiritual power that runs through the entire universe and is increased when the Hoyane cares for, stewards, and protects their community) the Hoyane would be stripped of their authority.

The group sat in silence for a while, letting me process what the Oyaner had told me, and then the Hoyane told me solemnly that Orenda required the community to recognize the need for deliberation, not this voting nonsense everyone else is so obsessed with. The community as a whole, but especially the Oyaner and the Hoyane, had a responsibility to ensure that all Ongweh’onweh understood every matter the clan had to decide about, and deliberation strengthened the community’s Orenda. This was how they could decide as a people what would be of most benefit to the seventh generation. Because the Hoyane doesn’t exercise authority for the present moment, their primary responsibility is to protect the earth and the culture for Ongweh’onweh born seven generations from now.

It was a deeply humbling experience. I started my journey so sure of my self and my beliefs. I rejected hierarchy and authority without ever questioning the very structures I was rejecting. I was not just learning, but actively being taught, what the theory I had learned actually meant in practice.

The West doesn’t have a monopoly on Positional Authority

Not every place I travelled to had this kind of indigenous cosmology of relational authority. When I was in Pakistan on a 2 month work visa training staff at a hotel (the result of a truly strange set of circumstances I might talk about at some later date), I was faced with disparate people that quietly (predominantly subconsciously) resisted and resented the dominating cosmology of authority that ruled over pakistani society. I was fortunate to have a former historian as one of my “students”. He had a masters in history from oxford, and had returned home to try and rebuild his community’s connection to the past in the midst of the complex geopolitical dynamics of the region. Sadly, after half a lifetime of working at the local community level, he was near what the rest of us would consider retirement age with very little money, and no family to speak of. So he was learning how to manage a concierge desk because of his vast local and historical knowledge. He sat with me every night after the lessons over the last three weeks of my stay, discussing the genealogy of inherited ideologies and how they had impacted Pakistan as a whole. We didn’t specifically discuss the narrow concept of authority directly the entire time, instead, he spent those weeks walking me through the history of the region to describe the lineage of what he felt had gone wrong over the centuries.

He traced the current dominant conception of authority within Pakistan back to Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire. Genghis Khan’s cosmology of authority was rooted in the divine mandate of Tengri (the Eternal Blue Sky), which granted him the right and duty to unite the world under one political order. We have to remember that Genghis Khan wiped out all Aristocratic and hereditary systems when he united tribes and established the Mongol Empire. He replaced these systems with one of merit, in which authority could be granted from above to those that most readily embodied the ideals espoused by Genghis. Whatever the previous cosmologies were before the Mongol Empire, were utterly replaced by the new understanding of the nature of authority.

And in Pakistan this genealogy could be traced through the Timurid Empire that aimed to re-establish the Mongol Empire, and then the Mughal Empire, and then the Punjabi Sikh Misls, then the Sikh Empire that eventually faced the arrival of the British East India Company. And because the Punjabi conception of authority was already positional, rigidly hierarchical, and highly institutional, it was easily co-opted under British rule after the Anglo-Sikh Wars.

I noticed a similar pattern in a vastly different context, when I did some volunteer work helping to build houses in the town of Bakel in Senegal about a year later. I had befriended Amadou, a 24-year-old student recently returned from Dakar, where he was studying English literature, of all things. His studies were fortunate for me, since the only other bridge language was French, and I don’t speak a lick of it.

While all the young men did the hard manual labour, community elders (many of whom were still in their 30’s) would sit under the shade of the trees and direct our work. And occasionally, other groups of people would show up and praise the workers with specific family names, and in return they would get tips for this, with actual money being handed to them.

I asked Amadou about this decidedly strange arrangement, and he explained that it was the specific social hierarchy of the community that traced back to the Wanagu (The Ghana Empire that ruled over West Africa for half a millennium). The guys under the tree are descendants of the Tunkalemmu (Royals and the Warrior class), the groups that come to call praises to the workers are descendants of the Gesere (the storytellers and song keepers that hold the cultural memory of the Soninke people), and the labourers are the descendants of the Konu (those that were enslaved by the empire).

What Amadou described was startling to me, because as a clear division of labour, you almost couldn’t ask for a clearer example. Which brings me to an insightful conversation I recently had with a fellow substacker for whom I have the deepest respect and admiration

On Mana

Recently, Kaimataara wrote an essay on here titled “The Problem with Selective Sovereignty”

The Problem with Selective Sovereignty

in which they describe the Maori concept of Mana. That essay beautifully articulated from the inside what I have been describing (essentially as an outsider) for a few thousand words now.

They started with the etymology of the word rangatira (the Māori term for chief), which comes from two words: raka, meaning “to weave,” and tira, meaning “a party, company, or group.” A chief is someone who weaves the group together. To even be a chief, they explained, you inherited a burden (a responsibility) that if you did not uphold, you would be stripped of your mana by the hapū (the sub-tribe). As they put it: “You inherit the responsibilities, not the position.”

This is a key insight. In the Western conception, you inherit the position which includes the title, the office, and the right to command. The responsibility is secondary. In the Māori conception, you inherit the responsibility. The position is secondary. If you fail to uphold the responsibility, the authority evaporates.

In a follow up conversation I had with them, Kaimataara elaborated: “The ideal is that the more mana you have, the more responsibility you have to eliminate your own exclusivity.” They gave an example:

“I know how to garden, because I have mana, I’m responsible for teaching others to garden, not guarding the knowledge. If I deliberately keep gardening knowledge to myself, I’m failing in my responsibilities. That failure reduces my mana because I’m no longer strengthening the collective and it will be stripped.”

This describes responsibility as the fundamental building blocks of authority, which we can contrast with the Western depiction where responsibility is a secondary issue of constraint. They called mana “a kind of enemy of monopolisation”, and they went on to say, “Mana regulates society before the formulation of power … Because my mana is always contingent, I never have the opportunity to transform a temporary competence into an unquestionable social position.”

In their essay, they offered a reading of Bakunin’s line about the bootmaker that I quoted above, and their reading is one I had never even considered. Bakunin wrote: “In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker... But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me.” I had always read this as an acknowledgment that expertise can be respected without being obeyed. But Kaimataara saw something different:

“The boot maker is an authority that is subordinate to the boot. Had he become an authority outside of the boot... that authority, when challenged, begins to tear.”

The bootmaker’s authority is not in his position; it is in his relationship to the boot. It is in his responsibility for the thing he makes. If he is a good bootmaker, he is not commanding me; he is serving the boot, and his authority emerges from that service.

In our conversation, Kaimataara made another connection I had not considered. “Now there’s pretty much no such thing as a bootmaker,” they said. “Now the boot is spread out between multiple people, one doing the laces, one doing the sole.” The division of labour fragments relationships. It turns authority into something abstract and distant. It replaces the bootmaker (whose authority was subordinate to the boot) with a system in which no one is responsible for the whole. You can unionise and appropriate a factory, Kaimataara noted, but you could still struggle to supply boots without the capitalist, because the boot is spread out so far (sometimes over different countries), becoming an external superordinate authority rather than an internal one.

This is what I had seen in Senegal, Pakistan, the urban areas of the Caribbean, and a hundred other places. The division of labour fragments relationships. It turns authority into something abstract and distant. It replaces responsibility with procedure, and relationship with transaction.

Kaimataara also wrote about the difference between challenging someone’s authority in the Western frame and testing someone’s mana. “Western beliefs often get trapped in legitimising the opposition … Whether one loves the king or hates the king, the king remains the centre of the story... a type of Hegelian master/slave dialectic. Through this, they get trapped into a relationship with the dominant class, whereas challenge as a test of mana is different because it’s trying to discover whether there is a relationship worth legitimising.”

This is the trap I had fallen into as an anarchist. I was so focused on opposing authority that I never asked whether the authority I was opposing was the only kind that existed. I never asked what authority might look like if it were not a possession but a relationship. I never asked what it might mean to challenge someone’s authority not to destroy it, but to test whether it was real.

Let’s wrap this up shall we?

This understanding of authority didn’t come to me just now. It was something slowly cultivated over many years, through hundreds of small shifts in my understanding of how the world actually works. I’ve gone back and read things I railed against in my youth, only to find invaluable insights in them now, later in life. And while some anarchists might find my acceptance of ANY authority problematic, or might argue, as Bakunin and Kropotkin did, that anarchism opposes authority but respects and engages with expertise, I find this position too utilitarian and meritocratic for my liking.

It is possible that my exposure to hundreds of cultures throughout my life has cultivated my subconscious perception of subtle signals and shifts in social dynamics, but I’ve always been a pretty good judge of people. When I meet people, they sometimes “raise my hackles” and rub me up the wrong way, even though everything about their language or their behaviour is perfectly socially acceptable within the given cultural context. At other times, I will meet someone that soothes my spirit and I trust them immediately, implicitly, and explicitly. I have been wrong on rare occasions, but I’ve been right enough times that I trust this instinctive response to people. There’s an unqualifiable quality to some of the relationships we have with people around us, and it is in that quality that mere meritocracy and utility fail to provide us with sufficient reason to trust the Orenda, or the Mana, of the person burdened with authority. Those who live in communities with deep relationality as the foundation of community, have a strong sense of the precise quantity, and quality, held by everyone in the community. Had Kropotkin applied his understanding of interdependence and cooperation within the mutual aid networks of the living systems he studied, to the bootmaker’s authority, he might have better understood the relationship the way Kaimataara does, the way the Oyaner and Hoyane do, the way that Yanet, and now Miguel, do.

When we build social ecologies horizontally, relationally, and with ethics of care, the kind of authority that emerges is so vastly different from the western world’s obsession with domination, control, command, position, and status that we might automatically seek to name it something else. But it is still authority. What changes is not the word, but the entire universe surrounding the word.

I urge you, regardless of whether you are an anarchist, marxist, leninist, mutualist, conservative, libertarian, democratic socialist, social democrat, or hell, even a liberal … reconsider what you have inherited from the history of the West in your conception of authority. Because when you accept authority that is fundamentally relational, you find ways to challenge authority that is positional. And every time you challenge positional authority, you will find a hollow husk that must resort to coercion, domination, force, and violence, to maintain itself. Through relationality, we learn to see the real enemy of us all. It is the enemy that has brought the entire world to its knees through centuries of extraction, and oppression, and subjugation. It imposes its logic on us until we forget how to connect to each other without that logic. It has deprived us of shared meaning. It is Domination.

I would like to thank Kaimataara. First, for writing their most excellent essay, and second, for helping me more clearly understand the nature of Mana through our conversations. Everyone should absolutely subscribe to them and read more of their brilliant and unflinching articles.