>but it's not accurate to say it is "wired in" as the primary and inescapable strategy.
The issue is it is an effective strategy. You have to actively control it from taking over. The vast majority of the population must be inoculated against using dominance and to stamp it out, which again comes down to "who is going to teach them that and ensure these teachings don't get corrupted".
Saying that unimportant things like 12-step programs use this is pretty useless. While some individuals may have high stakes in these programs, for most people there is no stake at all. If your local chapter fails under a brutal dictator you can just go to another one. The rate of failure like this won't even be documented.
When someone says fuck your checks and balances in your government it's a different story you're in grave danger, and by watching the news now, I don't think many people are willing to do much about it at all.
Hundreds of millions of people have participated in programs like this.
That's a lot of people to experience first-hand how it's possible to accomplish good things through decentralization, voluntary association, lack of hierarchy, mutual aid and community-driven governance.
That doesn't seem "unimportant" to me, but perhaps it would be easier to see the effectiveness of anarchist principles at work in a different domain, such as open-source software development.
The issue is it is an effective strategy. You have to actively control it from taking over. The vast majority of the population must be inoculated against using dominance and to stamp it out, which again comes down to "who is going to teach them that and ensure these teachings don't get corrupted".
Saying that unimportant things like 12-step programs use this is pretty useless. While some individuals may have high stakes in these programs, for most people there is no stake at all. If your local chapter fails under a brutal dictator you can just go to another one. The rate of failure like this won't even be documented.
When someone says fuck your checks and balances in your government it's a different story you're in grave danger, and by watching the news now, I don't think many people are willing to do much about it at all.