Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: new consensus resources

[Brian Bartholomew (bb]

> The Importance of Nurturing Dissent in a Consensus Process
> http://treegroup.info/topics/A12-nurturing_dissent.html

| Like that's going to happen.  The power dynamics insist that anyone
| who dissents be kicked out.

| The American way is about power and control.  This unfortunately
| includes too many cohousing groups.

If it's consensus, then dissenters can't be kicked out, and there
structurally doesn't exist power or control beyond the persuasiveness
of an argument.  Those are great features of consensus.

For instance, in the open source software world, there are splits and
rifts between camps that have been ongoing for years, and I think the
participants are behaving like monkeys at the zoo who scream and fling
dung at each other.  However, no set of monkeys can vote any other set
of monkeys off the island.  This is consensus.

Maybe a lot of cohousing groups are actually running on some sort of
majority vote.
                                                        Brian