“Power” gets a bad rap; it’s almost a dirty word in civilised circles. This is because an important part of civilisation is to hide the machinery that makes it all work. A bit like how diners at an expensive restaurant don’t want to see the stress and bustle that goes into preparing their food – they just want the nice food, the professional presentation.

If we’re going to have meaningful discussions about how the world works, and how it could work, with the aim of changing how it does work, we don’t have the luxury of the fine-diners. It’s our responsibility to understand how power works, in order to design and implement better systems.

One definition of power is “the ability to influence the behaviour of another person”. Pretty simple, flexible, and morally neutral at first glance. If we’re to live in complex societies, people can’t just do whatever they like. Order must be maintained: roads built and repaired, food and other essential resources delivered consistently, and a certain minimum quality of life maintained for everyone. This requires certain people to do certain things, which in turn requires the exercise of power.

The good news is that, while power is an inevitable feature of human societies (especially complex ones), there’s no fixed law saying how it has to operate. As long as food is served and the lights stay on, power relations can take any form we like. The norms around power can flex and even be re-invented, as long as it doesn’t cause any of the delicate machinery of our complex society to break.

One big question we could ask about power is this: how often is it abused? How often is it used for personal gain, or as a tool to bully and torment those nearer the bottom of the pyramid? The ideal would be “never”. While this might never be achieved, there’s a lot of opportunity to ensure that abuse of power becomes harder, and rarer as time goes on.

The simplest and most reliable way to do this, is to enforce an equality of power. Or at least, make sure nobody has either too much or too little. Some variation is normal and maybe even good, as long as more power comes with an equal increase in responsibility, and scrutiny.

Inspired in part by the excellent book “The Dictator’s Handbook”, we propose that abuse of power is more likely to happen when it is excessively concentrated. By extension, systems that tend to concentrate power will tend to have see it abused more often. There are nasty people and psychopaths in every country, every culture and every sector of society. This is a constant; what matters is how many opportunities these people have to cause problems for the rest of us.

Forum’s philosophy is to squash these opportunities down to zero. To leave no room for a petty tyrant to exert their will over even one person, let alone a corporation or a nation. Our tools explicitly enforce an equality of power, using decentralised systems to do away with the need for hierarchies of power, which in turn dissolves the possibility for the abuse of power.

Useful though these technologies are, they’re not foolproof. They rely on the goodwill and common sense of a majority, in order to work well. This doesn’t mean anyone has to be perfectly wise or perfectly decent. It just means that people make good and smart decisions often enough, to correct the occasional mishaps of their fellow citizens. And tomorrow, those same citizens will correct your mistakes.

Can abuse of power happen in a decentralised, democratic system. In theory, yes, but it’s less likely. Mob violence is one example, where a majority of a group turns on a minority. This is just as much of a problem in centralised and un-democratic systems; whoever’s in charge could very easily hold the same prejudices of the angry mob. The mob could vote one of their people into power, and use the tools of office to abuse a minority group.

What’s uniquely possible in a decentralised system, where power is equally distributed, is for people to oppose violence and abuse out of an enlightened self-interest, as well as simple compassion for their fellow human beings. Everyone will be in the minority at some point, on some issue, so it’s in everyone’s interest to develop rules and norms that protect the minority. To craft laws and policies that respect the will of the majority, while accommodating the minority, creating the greatest good for the greatest number.

About 1% of the general population qualifies as psychopaths. If anyone’s ever been nasty to you for no reason, or is just a bit cold and creepy, there’s a good chance they’re high on the psychopathic spectrum. Things get creepier still as we climb up the ladder. It doesn’t really matter which ladder: corporate, government, religious – any position of authority will attract people who are high in self-centred ambition and low in empathy. 3.5-4% of executives, for example, are thought to be psychopaths.

This is why decentralised management, and a relative equality of power, are more than mere academic curiosities. They’re vital to making sure that the dangerous, manipulative individuals among us have no opportunity to wreak havoc. To use the influence that comes from commanding a state, a multinational corporation, or multinational religion, to harm others for their personal enrichment and gratification.