it doesn't have to be an endless hierarchy of people looking over one another. For example, we could watch the people that watch us.

We watch, we note abuses, they launch internal investigations, and they conclude that nothing was wrong.

Case closed. Pay your taxes, citizen. Thank you; drive through.

> We watch, we note abuses, they launch internal investigations, and they conclude that nothing was wrong.

And then, occasionally, there are protests in the streets, people start running for office pledging to fix the abuses, we vote for them, and things slowly start to change.

Alternately, sometimes we sue them, or else a state or federal attorney general sues them; the matter ends up in the judicial system, and the behavior is reviewed by an independent judge – albeit only for violations of law, not of sense.

As avenues for redress, both of these are highly imperfect, with well-known limits and failure cases; but they’re not nothing.

Exactly: soap, ballot, jury, and hopefully we never get to the last step.

Yes, that's basically democracy in a nutshell.

Even if we're all watching each other, we still all have our own incentives and not so obvious irrationalities.

Then the problem becomes identifying and accounting for these incentives and irrationalities.

We solved these kind of problems: electronic systems in space have multiple redundancies, where the result returned by most of them is picked as input to other systems. This ensures that one system's quirks are kept in check

We don't even have a handle on what constitutes rational incentives/behavior, let alone irrational ones.

Careful, this might sound intuitive but be deathly wrong

Care to elaborate on your concerns? We're obviously speaking theoretically here at a high level of abstraction

My concern is that it might be possible to watch each other while keeping authority. You say it's not possible as if there was some kind of proof.

If everyone can watch everyone with equal transparency, that would seem to imply a distributed system with information symmetry, which is antithetical to centralized authority. If there was a central authority/super admin in such a system, how would you keep them from covertly creating information asymmetry?

That's why free/leisure time to figure WTF is going on politically/economically socially and an education not to get lost on the way of getting there have been considered as pre-requisites for a functioning democracy.

Ideally, the electorate.

In a small government scenario, who watches those providing services?