Martin Elson
The Door That Stays Open asked whether people can leave. This page asks a harder question: why so many people stay under rule they could, at least on paper, walk away from. Force is part of the answer, but never all of it. Most rule rests on something quieter, people expecting it and accepting it. Geert Hofstede tried to measure that acceptance country by country and called the measure power distance. His number is shaky. The question behind it is the right one, and this page’s answer is that acceptance is learned, kept up by constant work, and can be unlearned.
A number for deference
Hofstede built his model from surveys of IBM employees in more than fifty countries, taken between 1967 and 1973, and published it as Culture’s Consequences in 1980. He and later collaborators settled on six dimensions a society has to come to terms with in order to organize itself: power distance, individualism, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, long-term orientation and indulgence. Power distance is the one an anarchist should care about. It is the degree to which the less powerful people in a family, a firm or a country expect power to be spread unequally, and accept that it is. Austria scores near the bottom of the scale; Malaysia and Slovakia near the top. Masculinity and individualism may matter here too, but they can wait.
The index has one feature worth keeping. It defines power from below. It doesn’t ask how much the boss can do; it asks how much the people under the boss expect him to do, and think he should. That is the right place to look. A rule no one obeys isn’t a rule, and most of the obeying happens without anyone giving an order.
What the number can’t carry
The trouble starts at the borders. The scores end neatly at national lines, as if everyone in a country deferred by the same amount, while the people who actually live there mix, move, and differ more within one city than between neighboring states. A country score says nothing about any one person in it; reading it that way is the ecological fallacy. Brendan McSweeney made the wider case in 2002. One company’s employees are a thin base for a nation’s culture, he argued, and the nation may not be the right unit at all.
Hofstede’s own site concedes more than his critics do. It notes that each new study uses different respondents and different countries, that the same questions can come to mean different things, and that different data sets rarely yield the same dimensions. Hofstede also said the dimensions don’t exist: they are constructs, worth keeping only if they help explain what we see. Fair enough. Then the numbers are only as good as their fit, and the fit is loose.
The index also measures the wrong verb. It records what people expect and accept, not what they would choose if they could. A high score can mean people approve of their rulers, or that they have learned what disapproval costs. Deference is a symptom, not a verdict. And there is a sharper worry, which comes back below with Foucault: a number that ranks whole populations by how readily they defer is the kind of tool rulers find useful.
“None of today’s societies could run”
Hofstede’s site dates power distance to the coming of agriculture and large societies. Before that, it says, people knew their leaders personally. After it, tens of thousands had to coordinate, and without accepting leadership by powerful entities “none of today’s societies could run.”
The anti-civilization crowd will cheer the first half. John Zerzan, and Edward Abbey before him, blamed the plow. This site doesn’t follow them back to the Stone Age, for reasons William Gillis sets out well. The second half is the claim worth fighting, because it runs two things together: coordination and command. Huge numbers of people coordinate every day without anyone commanding them, through prices, languages, protocols and customs, as Order Nobody Designed shows. And leadership can be accepted without a power differential behind it. A guide you follow because she knows the trail isn’t a ruler, and she stops being followed when she’s wrong. What scale makes hard is not coordination but accountability. Ostrom’s nested commons and delegates who can be recalled answer that problem. A ruler doesn’t.
So the question to put to any society that “runs” is whom it runs for, and whether the people being run can say no. A society run by a powerful entity is less a society than an estate. Authoritarians have always been around, but what is happening now is worth worrying about. Leaders who win elections and then hollow out the courts, the press and the opposition are spreading, and the V-Dem Institute now finds this backsliding in Europe and North America as well as elsewhere. That is where the opposite assumption leads.
How staying is made
If acceptance does the work, someone has to keep producing it. Political theory has names for how it gets produced. Start Here kept them off the site’s front door; they belong here.
| Name | Who, when | How it keeps people in | What loosens it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leviathan | Thomas Hobbes, 1651 | Fear: accept a sovereign or face the war of all against all | Evidence that order doesn’t need one |
| The Machiavellians | Mosca, Pareto, Michels; gathered by James Burnham, 1943 | Inevitability: every organization grows a ruling minority, so revolt only swaps elites | Recall, rotation, the right to leave |
| The panopticon | Jeremy Bentham, 1791; Michel Foucault, 1975 | Visibility: people who might be watched police themselves | Watching power back |
| Biopower | Foucault, 1976 | Management: populations counted, sorted and steered as numbers | Local knowledge no census captures |
| The spectacle | Guy Debord, 1967 | Images: life watched rather than lived, rule taken in as a show | Doing things together, directly |
Hobbes is the frank one. He doesn’t pretend people love the sovereign; he argues they should fear life without one more. Start Here traces how his assumption, that order has to come down from a ruler, turned anarchy into a synonym for chaos.
The Machiavellians are the hardest. Gaetano Mosca held that every society is ruled by an organized minority. Robert Michels studied the German socialist party, founded on democracy, and concluded that whoever says organization says oligarchy. Burnham, collecting them in 1943, called them defenders of freedom, because they thought the only liberty on offer was the friction between rival elites. They come back below as the strongest case against.
Foucault turned from who holds power to how it works on people. Bentham’s panopticon was a prison design: cells ringed around a tower whose guard could see in and couldn’t be seen. Prisoners who never know when they are watched learn to act as if they always are. Foucault found the same logic in schools, barracks, hospitals and factories. Later he named biopower, power that manages life itself: counting births, deaths, illness and habits, and governing populations through the numbers. The site’s first purpose, as Start Here says, is to reverse the panopticon and watch power the way it watches us. Michael Parenti’s point belongs here too. States don’t hide that they plan in secret; they call it covert action and national security. The watchers don’t like being watched.
And now the tower is private, solar-powered and on a pole at the corner. Flock Safety sells police departments, businesses and neighborhood associations cameras that log every passing car, its plate, make, color and dents, into a database other agencies can search. No one driving past knows who will look, or why. In Dayton, Ohio, the police announced this spring that outside agencies had searched the city’s camera data more than 7,000 times for immigration enforcement over three years, more than half of them by the U.S. Border Patrol, though the city’s own policy forbade it. Dayton covered its cameras in trash bags. This is the pattern the site keeps finding: private equipment and public force, each covering for the other. Flock also shows the panopticon can be turned. Volunteers at DeFlock have mapped more than 122,000 license plate readers, and dozens of cities have canceled or refused contracts once residents could see what was watching them.
Biopower is also the source of my unease with Hofstede. An index that ranks countries by how readily their people defer is a population statistic about obedience. It can describe. It can also tell a manager, a general or a marketer where people will go along most easily, and much of the market for Hofstede’s dimensions has been management training. A tool for reading power can become a tool of it.
Guy Debord added the spectacle: a society where relations between people pass through images, and people watch life more than they live it. Rule taken in as a show asks for an audience, not consent.
The capital that buys deference
Of all these, Pierre Bourdieu maps the machinery best. He saw that people hold more than money. Economic capital is wealth. Cultural capital comes in three states: embodied, in accent, taste, manners and the way a person carries themselves; objectified, in the things they own and live among; and institutionalized, in the diplomas, licenses and titles that certify their rank. Social capital is the network a person can call on, worth as much as the capital the people in it hold. Each can be traded for the others, and together they buy position.
Habitus is what that capital leaves in a person: habits, tastes and know-how, mostly below awareness, that make some rooms feel like home and others like enemy ground. A field is any arena where capital is played, whether academia, art, law or a neighborhood. Doxa is what a field takes for granted, the rules no one argues about because no one thinks to. Zander Navarro, summarizing Bourdieu, points out that hierarchies built this way need constant work to keep people from seeing where they came from. Bourdieu’s word for that not-seeing is misrecognition.
This is power distance with the inside showing. People accept rank partly because rank wears the look of merit, taste or nature. The boss’s ease in the boardroom looks like talent; the worker’s discomfort there looks like his own failing. Intersectionality has firm defenders and real critics, and the site weighs it properly in Dissecting Intersectionality. Here it is enough to say what Bourdieu adds. Categories tell you who ends up ranked; Bourdieu shows how the ranking is kept in place. A mechanism can be named, taught and refused.
Unlearning it
Deference that was learned can be unlearned, and it has been. Order Nobody Designed tells how footbinding, kept going for a thousand years by status and the marriage market, ended within a generation once families pledged together to stop. No decree did it. People coordinated their way out of a deference no one had planned.
The Black Panthers’ slogan “all power to all people” comes to the same thing as no power over anyone. Push power distance to zero and Hofstede’s index stops measuring anything: every country gets one color. That is the anarchist aim in Hofstede’s own terms. Robert Ingersoll’s rule, which Start Here adopts, says it person to person: give every other human being every right you claim for yourself. William Gillis calls anarchism a direction rather than a final state, one that wants not just bread, and not just the bakery, but the stars too.
David Graeber added a warning about method. In Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology he wrote that “policy is the negation of politics,” because policy presumes an elite that knows better than others how their affairs should run. Anarchists need theory about real, immediate questions, he said, but theory that rejects any trace of vanguardism. Policy is vanguardism with a budget.
This site’s name comes from the same hope. Libertarianous began as “block the chains,” after blockchain. Daniel Krawisz of the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute described proof of work as a way for self-interested people, none subordinate to any other, to reach consensus against strong incentives to resist it. That is a beautiful idea. It is also a warning, because mining has since concentrated in a few large pools, and power distance crept back into a system built to have none. No mechanism keeps the chains blocked by itself. People do.
The strongest case against
The best case that power distance is permanent comes from the Machiavellians, and from inside the movement. Michels watched a party built on democracy produce, within a generation, leaders, staff and a press with interests of their own, apart from the members. Jo Freeman found the same in feminist groups of the 1960s that abolished formal structure. In “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” she argued that a group without formal leaders still has leaders, only informal ones, chosen by friendship and unaccountable because no one admits they exist. On this view, deny hierarchy and you only hide it. Hofstede’s claim about scale points the same way.
I grant the tendency. Power gathers wherever it isn’t stopped, which is why this site treats anarchism as a direction and not a final state. But Michels studied parties built to win state power, and Freeman’s remedy was not a ruler. It was rotation of tasks, delegation by people who can take it back, authority spread thin, information shared, and jobs assigned by skill. Those are anarchist tools. The aim was never zero distance at every moment. It was distance that can be closed: a leader who can be recalled, a role that rotates, a member who can say no and can leave. That is the test in Start Here, and it holds here too.
Where this lands
Rule lasts because people accept it, and acceptance is made: by fear, by the belief that elites are inevitable, by being watched, by being counted, by the show, and most quietly by the capital that makes rank look like nature. Hofstede put a number on the result and called it culture. Naming how it is made is the first step in refusing it, and refusing it is a daily practice, not a final victory. Voltairine de Cleyre put it as self-responsibility, and not leader worship.
Good luck on your journey. Leave us some bread crumbs, bakeries and stars in your wake.
Sources
- Geert Hofstede, Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values (Sage, 1980), and Geert Hofstede, Gert Jan Hofstede and Michael Minkov, Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, 3rd ed. (McGraw-Hill, 2010). The six dimensions; power distance defined from below. 6-D model · on the data
- Brendan McSweeney, “Hofstede’s Model of National Cultural Differences and Their Consequences: A Triumph of Faith – a Failure of Analysis” (Human Relations 55, no. 1, 2002). The strongest critique of the method.
- William Gillis, “A Quick and Dirty Critique of Primitivist Anti-Civ Thought” (The Anarchist Library). original
- William Gillis, “Your Freedom Is My Freedom: The Premise of Anarchism” (Human Iterations, 2017). Anarchism as a direction; the stars too. original
- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), chs. 13 and 17. Fear as the ground of the sovereign.
- Robert Michels, Political Parties (1911; English 1915), and James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (John Day, 1943). The iron law of oligarchy; Mosca and Pareto.
- Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975; English 1977), part 3, “Panopticism,” and The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (1976; English 1978), part 5. Disciplinary power and biopower.
- Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967). Relations between people mediated by images.
- Michael Parenti, “Conspiracy and Class Power” (talk, April 2, 1993). Covert action as the state’s ordinary business.
- V-Dem Institute, Democracy Report 2026: Unraveling the Democratic Era? (University of Gothenburg, March 2026). Autocratization in Europe and North America; the US decline. An expert-coded index, with the same caveats this page raises about Hofstede. report
- “Map Shows Cities That Have Kept Flock Cameras” (Newsweek, October 2026). The pushback, DeFlock’s count of mapped cameras, and the cities keeping them with new limits. original
- Sydney Dawes, “Dayton releases Flock camera data: Here’s how system was used for immigration enforcement” (Dayton Daily News, July 2026), with the paper’s earlier reports on the suspension. 140+ agencies, Border Patrol the largest. original
- Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital” (1986), in J. G. Richardson, ed., Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (Greenwood), and Distinction (1979; English 1984). Economic, cultural and social capital; habitus, field, doxa. copy
- Zander Navarro, “In Search of a Cultural Interpretation of Power: The Contribution of Pierre Bourdieu” (IDS Bulletin 37, no. 6, 2006), pp. 11–22. Misrecognition and the field of power. original · copy here
- David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004), pp. 9–10. Against policy; low theory. PDF
- Daniel Krawisz, “The Proof-of-Work Concept” (Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, 2013). Consensus among people none of whom is subordinate. original
- Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” (written 1970; The Second Wave 2, no. 1, 1972; Berkeley Journal of Sociology 17, 1972–73). Informal hierarchy, and her remedies for it.
- Robert G. Ingersoll, “The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child” (1877). Give every other human being every right you claim.
- Voltairine de Cleyre, “In Defense of Emma Goldman” (lecture, New York, December 16, 1893). Anarchism as self-responsibility, not leader worship, said while declining to advise her audience what to do. Public domain. text · voltairine.org