A fundamental part in the organisation of societies is the question how order can be established. This desire is clearly expressed in the conservative communities, but actually spans across the entire political landscape from right to left. Even (some) anarchists value order highly.

And there is a good reason for it. Order allows long term perspectives that drive prosperity. Order helps making qualified decisions and provides safety. I think it is not an overstatement to say that order is a fundamental building block for any civilisation.

Order and Authority

The problem begins with the association between order and authority. Historically there is a strong correlation between both, so strong that for most people these are almost identical concepts. Authority creates Order and Order gives Authority.
And it has been like this for a long time. At the french revolution the loyalists stated that the king is order and without him there would just be chaos.

Example correlation. A similar graph would be found correlating order versus authority in traditional structures. source

But this connection is too simple and has historically been disproven many times.
We know now that democracies, even though they have less authority than monarchies, can provide more stability and order.
Dictatorships sit on the very extreme of authoritarian spectrum and while they still provide a high level of order we know that all dictatorships are full of corruption and arbitrary rule. Too much authority corrupts the order.

But generally a lack of authority creates instability and chaos. For most classical forms of organisation a tight relation between authority and order holds.

Can there be order without authority?

The big question is if we can have a system that provides order without authority. And possibly much more order than any authoritarian approach can ever realise since all authority gets corrupted.

And in fact there is a lot of reason to be optimistic. We know free markets as a great example how game theoretically order can emerge without authority. Free markets are limited to the economy, but other ideas may emerge that have a wider scope.

Another such example is Bitcoin. It was long thought to be impossible to create a currency without involving any form of authority that guarantees its value. Yet bitcoin exists and provides more order than any other currency that exists. Nobody is in charge and yet the system is deterministic and has public rules that are strictly enforced without any exceptions.

The remaining task is taking that success from the blockchain into the real world and build systems that can provide a high level of order in society without invoking authority. Do we already know and understand such a system? No. But can it exists? Most likely. All we need to do is discover it.

It seems that order and authority are in fact not linked. That connection only holds for the simplest models that are discovered first. But when trying to achieve high levels of order, authority actually seems to be an obstacle that needs to be overcome. The resulting systems are highly complex and based on multiple levels of game-theory. But once we understand them we can finally get rid of the toxic authority that causes most of the problems that are left in the world.