Governments promise rights, but they can only take liberties. The idea of rights implies a central power to grant and guard them. Yet anything the state is powerful enough to guarantee, it is powerful enough to take away; empowering government to solve one problem only opens the door for it to create more problems. And governments do not generate power out of thin air—that’s our power that they wield, which we can employ far more effectively without the Rube Goldberg machine of representation.

The most liberal democracy shares the same principle as the most despotic autocracy: the centralization of power and legitimacy in a structure intended to monopolize the use of force. Whether the bureaucrats who operate this structure answer to a king, a president, or an electorate is beside the point. Laws, bureaucracy, and police are older than democracy; they function the same way in a democracy as in a dictatorship. The only difference is that, because we can vote about who administers them, we’re supposed to regard them as ours—even when they’re used against us.

Dictatorships are inherently unstable: you can slaughter, imprison, and brainwash entire generations and their children will invent the struggle for freedom anew. But promise every man a chance to impose the will of the majority upon his fellows, and you can get them all together behind a system that pits them against each other. The more influence people think they have over the coercive institutions of the state, the more popular those institutions can be. Perhaps this explains why the global expansion of democracy coincides with incredible inequalities in the distribution of resources and power: no other system of government could stabilize such a precarious situation.

When power is centralized, people have to attain dominion over others to gain any influence over their own destinies. Struggles for autonomy are channeled into contests for political power: witness the civil wars in postcolonial nations between peoples who previously coexisted peacefully. Those who hold power can only retain it by waging perpetual war against their own populations as well as foreign peoples: the National Guard is brought back from Iraq to be deployed in Oakland.

Wherever there are hierarchies, it favors the ones on top to centralize power. Building more checks and balances into the system just means relying on the thing we need to be protected from for protection. The only way to exert leverage on the authorities without being sucked into their game is to develop horizontal networks that can act autonomously. Yet when we’re powerful enough to force the authorities to take us seriously, we’ll be powerful enough to solve our problems without them.

There’s no way to freedom but through freedom. Rather than a single bottleneck for all agency, we need a wide range of venues in which to exercise power. Rather than a singular currency of legitimacy, we need space for multiple narratives. In place of the coercion inherent in government, we need decision-making structures that promote autonomy, and practices of self-defense that can hold would-be rulers at bay.