About eliminating those who grow successful or powerful in order to establish a stateless society:
In Italian author Dino Buzzati’s short story La lezione del 1980, God decides to eliminate every Tuesday at midnight the most powerful person on Earth. It takes two months for the world population to understand and be fully convinced of the mechanism, and in the following weeks there is a race down the bottom to give up any little power one has and take every decision collegiately. In three months, with 12 deaths, power becomes an outdated concept. In the following years, when once in a while an ambitious strives for a little power, the Tuesday night sentence reminds everyone of the rules.
I really liked this naive anarchist story.
I recently narrated the story to a Chinese friend who “escaped” Xi’s China. She was very surprised of the end of the story. Hearing that God kills the most powerful person every week, she was convinced that it would lead to a continuous race for entering the restricted Pantheon of the “once most powerful person on Earth” and would in fact reinforce the logics of hierarchy and power, especially among old men who care more for their power and legacy than for anything else.
The latter “credible threat” seems to work similarly in Denmark, where 30% of the parliament can initiate a referendum. I think this only happened once in 174 years, because the 30% parliament minority uses this institution to force a compromise or even a “deal” (I assume that it’s most of the time a secret deal) with the parties in majority, not for “the people” to decide.