It's not like it was never alluded to:

"Then as elites extract more wealth from the people and the land, they make societies more fragile, leading to infighting, corruption, immiseration of the masses, less healthy people, overexpansion, environmental degradation and poor decision making by a small oligarchy. The hollowed-out shell of a society is eventually cracked asunder by shocks such as disease, war or climate change."

(bold added to highlight indirect mention of overshoot by other names)

The reason that overshoot isn't really a focus in this article is because the author has recognized (correctly, IMO) that overshoot is just a symptom of a much deeper problem - large-scale domination by narcissistic/psychopathic individuals.

When I am talking about narcissism, I am talking about something much broader than NPD. The ICD 11 revised the whole section on personality disorders so that they are no longer separated into clusters (A, B, and C) and are now characterized on a per-individual basis by a combination of atomized descriptors. One of the major reasons for doing this was because there is a lot more overlap between them than the categorization of discrete disorders implied. The lack of empathy that characterizes narcissism was present in basically all of cluster B and frequently occurred with several disorders in clusters A and C.

Narcissism is way more common than you think. I estimate that they make up at least 1/3 of the population, and probably more like 1/2 (and exactly how I've arrived at these numbers is something I'd want to write about). Those "regular" people who are "pushed" into egotistic behavior? They're actually low-grade or covert narcs who are being given permission to be narcissistic by our culture.

The capitalist system does work as intended, but the reason that it is intended to work the way that it does is because it was designed by narcissists from the very beginning (another topic we'd be discussing, with sources), and it serves them very well. They weren't a hidden cabal, though, and the emergence of modern capitalism didn't happen overnight. The system gradually emerged piece by piece as various people tried to solve various problems (and it probably all started with the issue of distributing portions of tribute to one's lackeys).

If you’re going to vilify an entire group of people, do so based on their actual behaviours and not on the personality trait(s) that they share.

We are villifying them based on their actual behaviors. It just so happens that when you look at the reasons for those behaviors, you see that it is caused by a personality type/disorder, and as such, naming the group that behaves badly in this way also essentially names the personality type/disorder. You simply cannot separate the two concepts, because they are causally/definitionally linked. As such, it is paradoxical to simultaneously condone discriminating against the behaviors and condemn discriminating against the personality type.

So yeah, I know what you are talking about, but what is that new community exactly supposed to achive?

The central thesis or hypothesis, if you will, is that all of the issues that we are dealing with today (authoritarianism, late-stage capitalism, fascism, sexism, racism, systemic ecological destruction, the destruction of the concept of truth, etc...) are fundamentally rooted in narcissism. The point of the community is to explore this relationship, and take advantage of that perspective to discuss effective strategies for dealing with these problems (generally via dealing with the underlying cause - the narcissism itself). When you start casting the polycrisis through the lens of narcissism, a lot of the conventional ideas about how to address those issues fall apart (including many ideas that are common in anarchist circles).

I expect that the bulk of the content would be focused on analyzing the connection between the psychology of narcissism and various aspects of politics/economics in both historical and contemporary contexts. For example, one thing I expect that we would spend a lot of time discussing is exactly how authoritarian societies emerged from the egalitarian ones that were ubiquitous prior to the development of agriculture. We would also discuss things like how the dynamics of capitalism map really nicely to the transactional nature of narcissistic relationships, or how various elements of modern social etiquette practically seem to be designed to enable narcissistic abuse (e.g. Gossiping would pretty thoroughly defeat a lot of narcissistic "splitting behaviors", and yet it is often taboo).

Besides analysis, we would also discuss effective strategies for dealing with common problems in a way that is narcissistically-aware. Moderating communities, both real and virtual, would probably be one of the most common topics of discussion in this regard. Maintaining a space so that it is inclusive, especially one that is public, while also preventing abusive behavior is really challenging, and there are lots of subtle ways that things can go wrong that a lot of people overlook because they don't realize just how insidious bad actors can actually be. We can talk about more conventional direct-action strategy stuff too, and in a lot of ways I would expect those discussions to look a lot like similar discussions between anarchists that you've seen elsewhere. It's just that we'll be taking into account the fact that we have an actual psychological model for how the bad actors will really behave, and so we will be able to adapt our strategies accordingly.

I hope this helps you understand what I'm going for here. I'm not trying to make a hate-club or anything. I think there's genuine insight to be had here that could be very helpful for a lot of people.

Honestly, that point you made about authoritarianism being the narcissists perfect political expression really resonated.

As I recall, it was @keepthepace@slrpnk.net who actually raised that thought (as a question). I really like how they phrased it: "authoritarianism is the political expression of narcissism". My response was just an elaborate affirmation.

I don’t always frame it that way myself (I tend to talk about domination-seeking behavior or socialized individualism) but I think we’re circling the same core.

There are some benefits to framing things around narcissism (or psychology at the very least) rather than sticking to more vague political/behavioral terms. The biggest one is that you now have an attachment to a scientific field that you can mine for information about how it actually works. It's hard to argue with a Marxist about material conditions changing behavior if we're just talking about bad actors in the abstract, because it's pretty easy to make a fairly convincing-sounding argument based on rational behavior, incentives, and game theory. The argument is actually flawed, though, because with such a vague definition of what a bad actor even is, the hypothesis is unfalsifiable. If you actually manage to map the bad behavior to psychology, though, the situation changes completely, because now the hypothesis is well-defined enough that we can test it - and the psychologists have already done a pretty good job of showing that this isn't how narcissism works at all. (And to be clear, I'm not trying to be mean to Marxists - this just happens to be one of the things that Marx got wrong that people still mistakenly believe. He did the best that he could with the information that he had, and I think he did a lot of good with his writing, but it is simply the nature of scientific advancement that the ideas of the past are sometimes replaced by new and better-supported ones over time).

Having a concrete idea of the cause of all the bad behavior also gives us a much clearer view of the possible set of solutions. We can disregard the detached philosophical musings about human nature in favor of actual scientific studies that show how things really work. This helps us understand why things like education and messaging haven't been effective at changing the behavior of even the minor bad actors (and also explains why it never will), so we can start redirecting our efforts toward activities which might actually have a positive impact (like educating everyone else about these people and teaching them how to avoid them or otherwise protect themselves from them).

I think centralization can easily slip into hierarchy, especially if we don’t design mechanisms of accountability from the start.

Of course. There's lots of reasons for this. People who are naive to narcissistic abuse will often fall for the manipulation and not see how power gets consolidated even when it happens right under their noses. Also, the common-knowledge mechanisms for holding people accountable are, frankly, really ineffective (probably by design, at this point). Power/authority needs to be based on trust, and it needs to be lost at the same instant as the trust that supports it is. The overhead of getting everyone together to hold a vote of no-confidence is way too high. People will be reluctant to do it out of fear of retaliation, because there's basically no way to do it subtly enough to reliably avoid detection by the target of the vote - yet this is essentially the solution that most organizations resort to. We need better tools for holding people accountable that can still be formalized. Perhaps we can use the methods of those pre-civilized egalitarian societies as inspiration or a starting point?

The reason I made this post in the first place is because I think learning to spot domination-seeking behavior could potentially (and should) be as culturally foundational as reading or math. It’s something that I feel like we’re really missing in todays education system if you ask me.

I completely agree with this.

You mentioned narcissists violating epistemic norms. Do you know if there are specific cultural practices or rituals that could make epistemic hygiene emotionally resonant, not just intellectually correct?

I read a long time ago (I don't remember where) that you have to introduce kids to the scientific method by the age of 6 if you want them to respect science as an adult. I've also been seeing a lot more recently that the primary factor in how well a person is able to change their mind in response to new information is actually creativity (rather than intelligence, like you might expect).

I am not convinced that we need to do anything new per se, but it would be good if we actually taught kids about science starting very early, and it would be especially good if we stopped crushing their creativity. If we just had a population that didn't have the capacity to care about truth beaten out of them, I think we'd already be in a much better place.

Something I'd like to note is that, in my experience, the people who actually resist epistemic norms are people who have either a narcissistic streak themselves (I haven't really talked about it, but narcissism is disturbingly common - way more common than you'd probably expect.), or are otherwise not ready to leave an abusive relationship with one (and are desperately trying to deny the reality that they are in such an abusive relationship, and that that relationship will never become the relationship that they wished that they had with said individual(s)). Although others might not be well-versed or practiced in following epistemic norms, I find that they are usually receptive to learning about them. It may be the case that simply eliminating the influence of narcissism from our society is enough to avoid the sort of post-truth nonsense that we're dealing with now.

In most cases, we can assume that the people bound by the social contract agreed to the social contract as a condition of joining the group. In other words, they were not coerced into that behavior, and any penalties that they suffer as a result of violating the social contract are penalties that they agreed to as well (so long as said penalties are also outlined in the contract up front). It seems like coercion because bad actors typically resist the penalties imposed as a consequence of their bad behaviors, but it actually is not, because they agreed to all of it up front.

Things get tricky only when we consider the case where the social contract is imposed upon people who did not agree to it beforehand, which does apply in the case of a society that is doing external policing, or arguably in the case of children - they are subject to rules that they did not choose for themselves. In this case, we are coercing them, and we have to admit this one exception. We avoid the paradox of tolerance so long as the contract only allows society to coerce those individuals who break the rules of the social contract, which otherwise outlaws coercion. To actually justify this set of rules requires now that we reason about some broader objectives, like maximizing freedom or minimizing harm. I would imagine that the exact details of the social contract would end up as the subject of an ongoing discussion due to the difficult and sometimes ambiguous nature of the underlying objectives, though I still think that the amount of variation that we would see between different (non-narcissistic) groups would end up being rather small. This is the sort of thing that should be refined over time as we learn more about ourselves, our world, and how we would best fit into it.

I love it when people start asking the right questions. I think the absolute mess of responses just goes to show that this is an avenue of discussion that hasn't been pursued nearly enough in leftist circles.

We've interacted before - you may remember my comments on an earlier post of yours. I am generally of the position that narcissism lies at the core of all of the issues that anarchism is fundamentally trying to solve. If we can solve the issue of narcissism in society, then everything else more or less falls into place (though there are a lot of misconception about what is and is not hierarchy that gets in the way of seeing that for a lot of people, apparently - I'll try to address some of that).

What if we started seriously discussing tactics for dealing with domination-seeking behavior?

Since we can reduce our political/social problems down to this particular psychological problem (or at least I claim that we can, more or less), then we can try to understand hoe we might address those political/social problems by understanding how one addresses this psychological problem. Unfortunately, we immediately run into a bit of a trouble. There is no known effective treatment for this personality type/disorder. When we consider that we're talking about trying to change a person's personality, this sort of make sense, and it make additional sense when we consider that impaired empathy generally shows up on a brain scan as a sort of brain damage. In other words, our options are severely limited at the individual level. We also know that this personality type is extremely stable over the lifetime of the individual.

There are lots of things we might be able to argue from that position, but one point that I really want to highlight is that we cannot expect that we can make this problem go away simply by changing the material or social conditions of these people. Even a dedicated therapy effort doesn't really work. While we can largely prevent the creation of these individuals in the first place if we were to create the right social/cultural environment (most are made as infants and children by a variety of bad parenting practices), we cannot completely prevent them from occurring (some are simply born this way - about 1% of the population as I had said before). As such, the solution to this problem isn't going to be a simple change in initial conditions, but rather an ongoing process that is baked into the fabric of society itself.

Let me touch on the issue of how we went from a bunch of societies that existed for millions of years while reliably and robustly preventing these people from gaining power and making a mess of things to a society that is basically run exclusively by these people and seems designed to empower them. As you know but others may not yet be aware, I have a hypothesis about how hierarchical civilization came to be. What's important to observe about this narrative is that the peaceful egalitarian societies did not voluntarily become hierarchical. They were coerced/conquered by hierarchical societies that formed from the aggregation of their exiles. This story of hierarchical societies devouring egalitarian ones via conquest and subjugation then repeats itself over and over again throughout history. A question for the room: Is there any documented instance of an egalitarian anarchist society voluntarily reforming itself to become hierarchical?

My basis for anarchism is fundamentally founded in this perspective that narcissism is the root problem to address. IMO, the indigenous people largely did a good job - they just made the mistake of externalizing their narcissism problems, and then the additional mistake of failing to prepare for the consequences of that decision. We just need to learn from their mistakes, and do what they did not: In addition to aggressively policing the narcissists that emerge from within, we need to account and prepare for the external threat represented by narcissistic individuals that exist outside of our society. Even a society that solves the exile problem for itself will still have to deal with the exile problem from others, and that generally means maintaining a strong military or otherwise maintaining some mechanism for defending itself against organized threats from hierarchical societies.

What mechanisms help us identify and isolate that kind of behavior without reproducing the same old coercive structures?

Identifying these bad behaviors is both easy and hard. If you know what to look for, it's really easy. If you don't, you're liable to fall for their manipulation. Simply learning about the various manipulative behaviors that narcissists engage in is the conceptually most straight-forward way to address this problem, and it is certainly effective. There are other ways, though. One thing that I've noticed is that narcissists will pretty reliably violate the rules of epistemologically sound argumentation whenever they start to try something funny. Simply educating people about logic (and logical fallacies) and the burden of proof would go a long way toward making them resilient to narcissistic manipulation. If we also teach people to take such violations very seriously, rather than just dismissing it with a simple "everyone is entitled to their own opinion", we would catch a lot of bullshit very early and stop a lot of narcissistic machination before it has a chance to gain any real traction. If you think about it, tolerance of unsound argumentation is a necessary condition for a society to be vulnerable to non-violent manipulation from bad actors of any sort.

How do we build systems that are resilient to sabotage without falling into authoritarian logic?

I'm seeing a lot of people in the comments conflating centralization with hierarchy, and vice-versa, and this is a big problem. I want to make something very clear: Centralization does NOT imply hierarchy. This is very important to understand, as discarding the useful tool that is centralization out of fear of creating the horrible monster that is hierarchy will cripple our ability to achieve anything at all. But what is centralization? What is hierarchy? Why do people conflate the two?

Centralization is simply what happens when coordination or decision-making is delegated to a subset of the group. These coordinators or decision-makers take on apparently central roles because everybody needs the information/instruction that they provide in order to avoid doing redundant or pointless work. Centralization is desirable, because it means that people can specialize. Not everyone has to be involved in every process. Decisions can be made by those who are most qualified to make them, and everybody else can get on with their work without being interrupted about every little detail.

Hierarchy is what you get when you define an up-and-down axis of power. Some people are above others. Some people are below others. The people above have the power/authority to coerce the people below. Subordination is a crime that is basically defined as an individual defying the directives of an individual above them in the hierarchy. The existence of hierarchy does not strictly depend upon the existence of a particular social or governance structure within a group.

That said, hierarchies naturally tend to concentrate decision-making power in the hands of a few, and that's why hierarchy always seems to imply centralization in practice. It's hard to find examples of centralization that do not come with the trappings of hierarchy and coercion - you basically have to study the inner-workings of some worker-owned co-ops to find good examples. Combined with the fact that coercion is a concept that isn't part of common discourse (though I think that is starting to change), and it becomes easier to see why people might struggle to separate the two concepts.

We can have all of the benefits of centralized coordination without any of the drawbacks of hierarchy. We just need to establish a binding social contract that outlaws coercion, and aggressively enforce it. With these tools in hand, building public institutions or even a powerful military capable of rivaling modern civilization's best is all comfortably within the realm of possibility.

Could it be that authoritarianism is the political expression of narcissism and that there is literally nothing else there?

I believe that this is actually the case. There are plenty of studies showing strong correlation between political ideology and personality traits. In my personal experience, I've yet to meet someone with authoritarian politics who was not also lacking in empathy more generally.

I think that there is even more to it than that, though. There is a really interesting anthropological perspective on this to be had, where we can actually cast the development of authoritarian styles of governance as an expression of narcissism.

When we look at the actual timeline for the emergence of civilization, we see agriculture, then violence (increasingly organized as time goes on) then governance structures that resemble modern states. This is an account of the development of violence in northwestern Europe to help establish that timeline. That paper also cites other papers about the history of violence in other regions. Contrary to the popular narrative (thanks Hobbes /s), we don't actually see much evidence of violence at all prior to the development of agriculture. It is important to note that agriculture was developed about 40k years ago in response to a major worldwide drought that lasted about 1k years. (I would recommend reading "Civilized to Death" by Christopher Ryan for more on this topic.) Most sources arguing that pre-civilized society was terribly violent points at societies that existed in the 20k years between the development of agriculture and the emergence of modern-ish states (which, in some cases, were terribly violent). The traditional narrative about civilization and war would put the emergence of states before the invention of organized warfare, arguing that warfare was a response to the increasing complexity and scale of the conflicts that arose from the increased societal complexity of states. Archaeological evidence refutes this, so what gives?

There's more that makes this weird. We also know some things about how pre-civlized societies handled narcissism. Surprisingly often, these societies actually had a dedicated word for these people. The exact translation and connotation of the word varied from one population to the next, but the stories that they told were basically the same. (For reference, we learned this by interviewing members of indigenous societies that had not yet been heavily influenced by civilization. Some of these societies still existed as recently as a century ago - now there are almost none left.) These were the people who were 'unteachable', 'lazy', 'troublemakers' - they caused drama while contributing next to nothing. When these people didn't improve their behavior (or they did something heinous like commit murder or rape), they were exiled or killed. (Check out literature on 'rape-free' societies if you want to read more about this.) These individuals were pretty rare - around 1% of the population - so what little violence was necessary to keep the peace would not account for the evidence that we see from post-agricultural societies. We've no reason to believe that these pre-civilized societies suddenly stopped policing themselves when they were pushed into agriculture by the drought (and there's even some evidence that they did not - again, see "Civilized to Death"), yet the vast majority of us now live in a society where such a penalty for mere narcissism would be unthinkable.

Here's what I speculate happened. After settling down for agriculture, exile stopped being as lethal as it would have been before. Exiles could practice agriculture on their own and survive, when they wouldn't have been able to before (due to lack of technology, mostly). Also, stationary groups with fields that they can't watch literally 100% of the time and stores of food (they wouldn't have been storing much food prior to agriculture) are much easier to steal from. As such, we started to accumulate a population of these narcissistic individuals. These individuals are inherently self-centered and lazy. If they settled together (which they would have been incentivized to do, for many reasons), they would inevitably try to dominate each other in an attempt to gain power and status and the ability to exploit the labor power of the other exiles for their own personal gain. They would actually have a chance to learn ways of sneaking into other societies and hiding their toxic behavior with clever words. They could actually start working together as a violent force to bully whole other groups into submission, or even claim control of an area. Incidentally, we actually have some evidence that this sort of thing happened pretty early in the game with a riverhead and a group of bullies demanding tribute in exchange for access. These riverheads were an important source of easy food thanks to the salmon that would swim up there to reproduce, so this was a big deal. Here's an interview with an anthropologist who talks about that.

Naturally, these narcissists aren't very good at maintaining power over each other or their less-narcissistic peers in the beginning, but as time progresses, they would get better and better at it. They'd learn to pit different groups against each other so that no one group can get large enough to overthrow the minority that holds power (+ the other still-loyal groups). They'd learn that growing their population as fast as possible gives them a major edge over other societies, as it is far easier to bully other groups into submission when you outnumber them. Pretty much every major development in human history related to governance and economics gets cast in a new light with this perspective. Money becomes an ingenious solution to the problem of redistributing tribute/favors to one's cronies in order to keep them under control. The state monopoly on violence is the perfect hypocrisy for protecting one's own power with force while denying anybody else's right to do the same, regardless of where the threat to their power comes from. Not only does this allow you to crush any direct rebellion before it happens, but it also allows you to interfere in the development of various political groups, allowing you to maintain control over the entire political playing field. Capitalism becomes a brilliant way of taking power away from more rigid power structures like the church or the throne without needing to foment a violent rebellion.

A few other fun things result from such a narrative. The cause of sexism and the general disrespect for the rights and intelligence of children becomes obvious. Since all power ultimately comes from the use of force, women and children are at an inherent disadvantage compared to men due to their smaller size and lower physical strength. Forcing women to be breeders for that sweet sweet population growth was also a major contributor to their objectification. Agriculture was hard work, and the narcissistic men didn't want to do it, so their wives/children became de-facto slaves. (Note: Slave labor would not have existed prior to the development of these narcissistic societies.) Religious and racial discrimination is fundamentally about preventing foreign powers from interfering with local affairs, while also providing a convenient justification for using those out-groups as additional sources of slave labor. Also, we realize that literally no form of governance that has ever been invented since the development of the state has ever been designed to actually serve the people. They've always been various forms of compromise designed to consolidate and maintain power for the few while preventing the many from organizing a competent rebellion. The only form of governance that has ever existed to serve the people is anarchism, in the form of the aggressive egalitarianism practiced by pre-civilized societies. This isn't to say that we should go back to doing things exactly like we did in the stone age, but it does turn a lot of long-standing cultural assumptions about the nature governance and modern society on their head.

I could keep going, but I'll stop for now. This perspective is a real mind-bender, but way too many things fit into place when you think about history this way. It also makes sense that authoritarianism would be an invention of narcissism generally if authoritarianism was simply the political expression of narcissism on the individual level.

Pretty much everything on the topic by Dr. Ramani (Here's her YouTube channel) is worth looking at. I recommend starting here. She has also published a couple of books on the topic which are also good, and generally consolidate a lot of what she has on other platforms in one place, though her most up-to-date thinking on the matter will pretty much always be on her YouTube channel and podcast. Here's her website so that you can find everything else. If you read any of her books, "Don't you know who I am?" is probably the most relevant one here.

What you'll get from her is mostly information on the nature and behavior of narcissists themselves. The primary value of this information is that you'll be able to spot narcissists and narcissistic behaviors way more easily (and thus, way more frequently) than you would otherwise be able to. We've been culturally conditioned to ignore or even justify a lot of narcissistic behaviors, so learning about them is a big eye-opener for seeing just how prevalent the problem is. Simply being able to recognize narcissistic behavior for what it is will go a very long way in helping you see things from my perspective.

You can also talk to me about this kind of stuff if you want. The intersection of narcissism and politics/economics is something I spend a lot of time thinking about. I actually can't point at anyone else on the internet who is writing about this sort of thing.

I appreciate that someone is trying to have a real conversation about this kind of thing. I don't think leftists have enough conversations where they're acknowledging the actual sources of conflict within their ranks.

I have a little experience with moderation (including in leftist spaces), and one of the things that I've found to be really helpful in understanding these sorts of problems is actually the modern theory of narcissism. A lot has been learned in the last decade about what happens when a person's empathy is physiologically impaired, and understanding this personality pattern is immensely helpful in navigating interpersonal conflicts at all scales. Tankies as you describe them are actually one of the more clear-cut cases of a narcissistic subculture within the left. The constant abuse of language, bad-faith argumentation, hypersensitivity to ideological or personal criticism of any kind, the dismissal of any legitimate concerns or established facts that would threaten their apparent worldview, etc... This is all classic narcissistic argumentation.

And somewhere along the way, that desire got calcified into a set of talking points. It got buried under defensiveness and online clout games. The pain turned inward, and now they lash out at anyone who doesn’t match their script. That’s not an excuse. But it is something to hold with empathy.

Unfortunately, this narrative is simply wrong. One of the things that you really have to understand about these sorts of people is that the cause and effect between their arguments and their beliefs is reversed from what you would expect. They do not believe things because they buy the arguments that they were given. They hold beliefs abut what is and is not acceptable because of how they want to be allowed to behave and what rights and privileges they feel they deserve, and then they seek out a narrative/ideology that allows them to justify all of that. We're not dealing with people who are making decisions based on any sort of rational process. We're dealing with people who are trying to find palatable justifications for them getting whatever it is that they want (power, status, accolades, etc...). The lack of empathy comes first!

The reason that some of these people find themselves in the left is that they can often misconstrue arguments in favor of broad freedom for all into justifications for a system of 'governance' where there is no such thing as personal accountability (at least for them, personally). This is where you get your anarcho-nihilists who don't want any sort of rule-enforcement structures at all, or anarcho-capitalists who believe that rules should be enforced by the people who can pay the private militias to enforce them (and they, of course, would be the sort of people who could afford such a service). Tankies lean on their disordered trait of 'living in their future success' more than most - believing that they will somehow rise to the top (or somewhere near it) of whatever authoritarian regime they're advocating for, essentially escaping any sort of accountability and holding absolute power, all while appealing to the desire for liberation from the disenfranchised.

If you don't believe me, then here's an experiment for you. Try to have a conversation about accountability with anyone who is acting suspect like this. Ask them about what sorts of systems of accountability they would like to see in a society, and ask them about where they see themselves fitting into that system. Ask them how they think that system should respond to some of their sketchier behaviors. Accountability is the #1 enemy of any narcissist. The responses you'll get will be absolutely insane.

It is tricky to do this in a way that allows for complex coordination at scale while avoiding the oppressive properties of systems which we would all recognize as undesirable. The concept that is required in order to properly navigate this is 'coercive control'.

Hierarchy happens when some people are 'above' others, or, in other words, can make decisions for other people and enforce them without their consent. This is coercive control. This is the situation that we want to avoid.

At the same time, the collective does have to be able to enforce rules, so some degree of coercion must be allowed in order to avoid a sort of paradox-of-tolerance situation. To resolve this apparent contradiction, we introduce the notion of a 'social contract'. To be a part of an anarchist organization would require that a person agree to a social contract. As long as the person upholds the social contract, they cannot otherwise be coerced, as that would be a violation of anarchist principles, and could result in oppressive behavior. (Note: For this to be self-consistent, coercion has to be outlawed as part of said social contract.) If a person breaks the social contract, then they are also no longer protected by it, and can be coerced by the group to leave or such.

The social contract bit is sort of an aside to the original question, but I think people get confused by what is and isn't hierarchy because they understand the first part in some way, even if they don't have the words for it, but then they don't know how to solve the obvious problem of enforcing rules so that people's freedoms can actually be protected in practice.

Centralization doesn't necessarily imply hierarchy, as, given an undirected acyclic graph, you can pick any node to be the 'root' and end up with a valid 'tree' - the structure that most people would visualize when they hear the word 'hierarchy'. Of course, we would prefer to not pick any node as the root, as the hierarchical structure implied by such a distinction shouldn't be necessary for the collective to reap the benefits of such centralization. There is a whole discussion that could be had about how to actually implement centralization without falling into various traps, but that isn't really what the question in the OP is about. I simply bring it up because some people confuse centralization for hierarchy, and end up shooting themselves in the foot for doing so.

A common thing that comes up a lot when I see people saying there is no way anarchism could work, is that it’s human nature to be selfish and to attempt to gain power over others etc. I think people are just as likely to be benevolent or at least neutral to each other when the conditions are right.

I think there are two kinds of people. One kind is selfish and attempts to gain power over others, even to their own detriment. The other kind is benevolent and caring and empathetic, and would not willingly exploit others. With this duality present, anarchy becomes the only thing that will reliably work in the long-haul.

When we allow some people to have coercive power over others (as is the case in hierarchies), the self-interested people gravitate toward those positions of power. Because they do not care about how their actions affect others, they tend to make decisions that are destructive to society in the pursuit of short-term personal gain. I would actually go so far as to claim that all of our societal ills fundamentally arise from the fact that pathologically self-interested individuals without any empathy are calling the shots - including the industrial practices that are leading to total environmental destruction.

Only in a society where this coercive control does not exist can we keep those destructive forces in check. When a self-interested person has coercive power over groups of people, they can retaliate against people or groups who try to call them out on their bad behavior. By pitting other groups against each other, they can maintain that power in an extremely large society even when their own group is ultimately a minority and most groups would agree that their actions deserve negative social consequences. As long as an individual can never wield the power of a group, community policing/moderation will always be possible, and these bad actors can be penalized or even removed as appropriate. We want to empower the people with empathy (who will generally work together for a common good, or at least against a common bad - at least, so long as they haven't been tricked into fighting each other over petty nonsense instead), rather than the people without it (who won't generally work together unless they can somehow strike up a mutually beneficial deal - opportunities are limited when they all ultimately covet each other's power and wealth).

OP: The idea that not all people are fundamentally the same ("created equal", if you will) or have positive value is very uncomfortable to the masses, and I think that this is the point where I diverge from the mainstream.