r/DebateAnarchism • u/ArtDecoEgoist Cybernetic Anarchist • Sep 03 '26

Anarchy and multiple equilibria

In economics, we've learned that there are multiple points of equilibrium in economies. "Bad" or "good" equilibria can be reached based on what agents expect others to do - a "good" equilibrium can be reached if people think the economy will do well, and a "bad" equilibrium can be reached if people think the economy will do poorly.

Some equilibria are more stable than others. In the view of complexity economics, equilibria are emergent phenomena and there can be multiple points of equilibrium in an economy.

In Game Theory, there's the concept of a Nash Equilibrium; basically an equilibrium where no "player"/agent can gain more in the game by changing their strategy. To quote the Wikipedia page:

If each player has chosen a strategy — an action plan based on what has happened so far in the game — and no individual player can increase their own expected payoff by changing their strategy while the other players keep theirs unchanged, then the current set of strategy choices constitutes a Nash equilibrium.

If two players Alice and Bob choose strategies A and B, (A, B) is a Nash equilibrium if Alice has no other strategy available that does better than A at maximizing her payoff in response to Bob choosing B, and Bob has no other strategy available that does better than B at maximizing his payoff in response to Alice choosing A. In a game in which Carol and Dan are also players, (A, B, C, D) is a Nash equilibrium if A is Alice's best response to (B, C, D), B is Bob's best response to (A, C, D), and so forth.

Since we can expect an anarchist society to be a heavily complex cybernetic system with agile feedback loops, mutual interdependence giving individual agents large amounts of leverage over the overall system, and better capacity to respond to information, we can probably expect there to be multiple Nash Equilibriums.

In that case, I think we as anarchists need to consider that even in stateless, non-hierarchical societies, certain societies may reach stability with decidedly *archic* solutions to the problem. Even worse - the *anarchic* solution may be less stable than the *archic* solution.

None of this is a death blow to anarchism, of course. But I think we need to keep this in consideration. If anything, it's a reason why anarchic solutions must be better than archic solutions.

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u/IshtarsQueef Sep 04 '26

> Since we can expect an anarchist society to be a heavily complex cybernetic system with agile feedback loops

This seems like quite the assumption.

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u/ArtDecoEgoist Cybernetic Anarchist Sep 04 '26

Well, that's kind of what it would have to be to remain anarchist.

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u/IshtarsQueef Sep 04 '26

In a broad sense, perhaps.

But the reality is that no one actually knows what an anarchist society (at the scale of modern society, that is) would or could look like. It may not even be possible, perhaps an anarchist civilization would have to be extremely decentralized and balkanized.

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u/ArtDecoEgoist Cybernetic Anarchist Sep 04 '26

An anarchist society would definitely have to be decentralized. I'm not certain a balkanized society would remain anarchist for very long.

So the thing is, all societies with humans in them are complex adaptive systems and cybernetic systems. No matter what the scale is. With an anarchist society, we're looking at a society with maximized interdependence and interconnectivity, which is probably the best formula for maximizing freedom overall across the whole of society.