consensus history
From: Tree Bressen (treeic.org)
Date: Fri, 1 Mar 2002 14:54:02 -0700 (MST)
(Name of thread altered from sociocracy.)

>> This kinda talk makes me feel goosebumpy with excitement!  My experience,
>> living in community, is that we are trying to do something that we haven't
>> had the opportunity to absorb from our culture.

>Interestingly, there was an old Dutch  tradition of neighborhood
>associations that were ruled by consensus. They set rules about who shovels
>snow and sweeps the walks and stuff like that. They ran their own
>neighborhoods.

The Polish parliament made decisions by consensus until the mid-18th
century.  The book that i read about that in (The Polish Way, by Adam
Zamoyski) states:

"Some such convention originally existed in virtually every parliamentary
body in Europe, and survived in areas such as the English jury system. . .
.  It originated in the twin convictions that any measure not freely
assented to by all lacked full authority and that no genuinely dissenting
opinion should be simply disregarded by the majority.  As the saying went,
votes should be weighed, not counted.  Dissenting minorities were listened
to, argued with and persuaded, and only when broad agreement had been
reached (the word used was the Latin 'consensus') was a measure passed."

I personally find it very inspiring that only a few hundred years ago, in
the cultures of "White" peoples as well as other peoples, consensus was
well enough established that it was used at the highest levels of
decision-making.  

Zamoyski also explains the role of the facilitator in that system, and how
the system itself became so badly abused (mainly when power and money
interests resulted in frivolous blocking, but there were also obvious
challenges with using consensus in a representative rather than direct
democracy) that eventually it was dumped entirely.  When i read stuff like
that i think the difficulties of governance haven't changed much in the
past few centuries.

Cheers,

--Tree



-----------------------------------------------

Tree Bressen
1680 Walnut St.
Eugene, OR 97403
(541) 484-1156
tree [at] ic.org
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