The Beginning of WisdomMaximizing cooperation is a coordination problem. Cooperation involves a mutually beneficial exchange that improves the well-being of both participants. Defection is an interaction that benefits one party at the expense of another. Defection always implies violence, the threat of violence, ignorance, or forced interaction.
Top-down control fulfills its mandate when it maximizes cooperation and minimizes defection. Top-down control also uses fear, violence, and forced interaction. Top-down control is thus only morally justified if the use of those things results in an overall increase in cooperation and a reduction in defection.
The amount of top-down control required to maximize cooperation is proportional to the amount of defection prevalent in the population as well as the capability of individual defectors to do harm. Humans are morally flawed resulting in recurrent excessive concentrations of power and a general refusal to cede power. The recent human condition has been notable for the gradual progression of moral progress with either no accompanying change in top-down control or a counter intuitive increase in top-down control. When this happens the top-down control itself limits cooperation and becomes a form of defection. The situation is like a pressure cooker that eventually explodes in a rebellion resetting the top-down control to more appropriate levels.
Defection and rebellion are thus entirely separate phenomenon. The first is evil and always morally unjustifiable. The second is not only just but a moral obligation once a superior solution to top-down failure becomes available.
Decentralization paradigms are useful and necessary when resetting top-down control to more appropriate levels. However, decentralization paradigms must always be accompanied by a top-down control that maximizes cooperation alongside the decentralization paradigm.
The reality is we will always need top-down control. This may be a bitter pill to swallow for an anarchist. The need for top-down control does not go away just because we don't like it or don't want to think about it.
Religion is also top-down control, but that statement is meaningless without context. We both need top-down control and will always need top-down control. Thus ultimately the relevant question is what kind of top-down control is religion.
That answer of course varies depending on the religion we are talking about. The primitive idols worshiping pagans had horrific gods. These religions were tools of extreme top-down oppression and their extinction is welcome. See:
Pagans and Human Sacrifice.
However, belief in God especially individual belief in God coupled with a fear of God is something else entirely. A society where all individuals genuinely believed in and feared God would have very little defection. What defection did occur would be the result of ignorance not malice and even that would decline with time as knowledge progressed. An individual restrained only by a genuine belief and fear of God has complete operational autonomy he would willing choose only cooperation and never defection limited only by his knowledge of what actions constituted genuine cooperation.
Belief in God is top-down control. It is the purest manifestation of such control enabling a maximization of freedom. Rejecting God leads ultimately to higher levels of defection and consequentially less freedom.
Proverbs 9:10
"The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom"
See:
Faith and Future for more.
