Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Formal Consensus vs Sociocracy

[Brian Bartholomew (bb]

Eileen Mccourt <emccourt [at] charter.net> writes:

> What seems askew in Brian's analysis though is the assumption that
> giving the community the right to evaluate a block is equivalent to
> majority rule.

I'm trying to compare consensus and majority rule like a games
theorist would: who exercises power over who, under what conditions?
Majority rule is able to do all that analysis/synthesis stuff just as
well as consensus is.  Similarly, consensus overrides consent using
majority voting just fine, only the words it uses for it are "not all
individual desires can be accommodated", and "we voted that your block
was not principled".  Consensus has a period of legislative debate,
and then it takes a vote.  If consensus debate tends to be more
productive than majority rule debate, credit for that should go to the
values of the people participating, not to the consensus process.  All
the pork that Congress passes shows that majority rule has more
productive debate than it gets credit for.

I'm not just picking on one variant of consensus.  As far as I can
tell, *every* process that contains a vote is roughly equivalent, and
the differences are mostly determined by how big the majority must be.
Thus, I believe the modern forms of proportional representation voting
are more respectful of consent than consensus is.  However, not voting
at all is the most respectful of any of them.

-----

> I think (maybe naively) if an individual desire really does appeal
> to the broader community, or if a good rationale can be made as to
> why one person should have the freedom to do a certain thing, it
> will ultimately get through the process to everyone's satisfaction.
> It's just that most people don't want to go through that level of
> discussion - more's the pity.

People have inhabited locations that flood for all of human history.
Approaches to deal with flooding include: build it on stilts, build it
on a boat, build it light so you can move it, build it from stone so
it survives, build a levy or a dam, build it cheap so you can afford
to rebuild it, sell the risk to an insurance company, or socialise the
risk.  Discussing this problem for 15,000 years has not resulted in a
single best approach.  It's unlikely that discussing this problem in
consensus meetings for *the entire rest of your lifetime* will result
in discovering a single best approach.  Yet, decisionmaking bodies are
still determined to mandate one approach and ban the rest.

In the absence of a known best answer, people's free choices are to
bet on different strategies to address the same problem.  This is
great, because monoculture is a disaster in the long term.  What is it
with the urge to stamp out variety?  The sky won't fall if you have a
house on stilts next to a grounded houseboat next to a shack next to a
concrete dome.  If a disaster blows through, maybe it won't destroy
all of them, and your intact neighbors can shelter you.

                                                        Brian