This is an early draft of the beginning of something I've been meaning to publish for a while

What it be like if no one sought to control you?
What would the world look like if we weren't constantly trying to dominate one another?
Come to think of it, how much of our everyday life involves the pursuit of power?

In a million tiny ways we fight to control everything and everyone around us, but to what end? In establishing some control over their lives don't we usually end up more controlled?

Those of us who secure great power over others rarely do anything more than maintain that power. The king or dictator who set out to control in turn feels himself controlled by his throne. We gain social power in some settings only to later realize the restrictions such relationships place on us, and the actions they provoke us to.

It's common knowledge that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Usually this is framed to mean a politician's abandonment of his promises or ideals; the inevitable abuse of his position over us. But isn't it more than that? Power corrupts who we are. It turns us into addicts and dependents, constantly aware of the chains through which we control others.

The more we wrap ourselves up in power the more we are controlled. And it's self-reinforcing because the people who we hold power over begin to worship it as well. They start to seek it too, and pretty soon everyone's out to get everyone else, to the point where we can't even imagine a world without such paranoia, manipulation and domination. At heart, power is a psychosis.

So what would a world look like without it?


When the first great empires formed around the Mediterranean Sea there were many who rejected the pursuit of power and constant struggles of tribe, kingdom and republic.
Faced with slave revolts, peasants who would flee into the wilderness and ornery philosophers who rejected all authority, the Greeks and the Romans created a word to characterize the absence of such hierarchies.

They called it “anarchia.” Without rulership.

And when the rebels called Christians needed a term to describe their God, they chose the word “anarchos.” By which they meant that which was not caused or ruled by something else, but was instead capable of creativity and originality.

Of course the word ultimately retained the fear and incomprehension of the Roman rulers and by the time later Christian radicals rose up against the British empire in the English civil war they distanced themselves from “anarchy.” This was because, unable to conceive of anyone not desiring power over their fellow man, the European elites had gradually interpreted “without rulership” to mean simply fractured rulership; something akin to the paranoid and petty violence of small kingdoms they had seen in the middle ages.

The onset of the Enlightenment, however, reversed this trend. New thinkers began imagining new ways of living, and an outbreak of revolutions broke the Europeans' worship of king and country. Governments, and in fact all forms of domination, were denounced as evils. Perhaps necessary in the short term, but ultimately unacceptable.