david on consensus quick
from 8 pg interview of david graeber – a quick consensus faq – (2013)
reading shared in museum of care convos.. along with name radha d’souza ( writer, critic, commentator..social justice activist) and rather than adding it on david on consensus page.. adding own page..
notes/quotes:
1
Q: But doesn’t all this “consensus process” just come down to manipulation by a tacit or hidden leadership clique?
A: If you operate by consensus without any rules at all, then, yes, inevitably a tacit leadership will emerge—at least, as soon as your group grows larger than eight or nine people. The writer and activist Jo Freeman pointed this out back in the 1970s during the early years of the feminist movement. What we now call *“consensus process” was created largely to address this problem in the wake of Freeman’s critique. The role of the facilitator is a perfect example here. **The easiest way to know you’re dealing with bad process is that the same person is (a) running the meeting, and (b) making all the proposals. In any horizontal group there will be a clear understanding that the facilitator doesn’t herself bring forward any proposals. He or she is just there to listen and become the medium through which the group can think.
*but public consensus always oppresses someone(s).. et al.. freeman structure law (?).. et al..
**rather.. if you’re running meetings and making proposals.. aka: if there is any form of m\a\p
2
Usually, in fact, even the role of facilitator is broken up and divided among several people: one person to actually keep the meeting running, another to keep stack (count of those who’ve asked to speak), another to keep time, another as vibes watcher to ensure energy isn’t flagging and *no one is feeling left out. This makes it even harder for a facilitator to manipulate debate, even unconsciously. Facilitators rotate, which allows the group to constantly maintain gender balance among facilitators, as well as in stacks. This doesn’t mean there won’t be cliques, especially in **very large groups, or that some people won’t end up with much more influence than others. ***The only real solution is for the group to maintain constant vigilance against the rise of cliques.
*to me.. even just saying ‘left out’ is implying there’s an in we all need to be part of.. dave’s campfire analogy.. invited vs invented.. seat at the table ness et al..
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
**if we try nonjudgmental expo labeling.. size becomes irrelevant.. or rather.. there is no size.. or the size is all of us.. or.. it’s ginorm small.. ie: infinitesimal structures approaching the limit of structureless\ness and/or vice versa .. aka: ginorm/small ness
***wack-a-mole-ing ness has killed us (kept us in sea world) since forever.. today we have the means to let go of that.. symptoms banging.. and try something legit diff.. ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)
Q: But if you’re saying such influential cliques will tend to emerge, wouldn’t simply recognizing the fact that there really are leaders, and therefore creating a formal leadership structure, at least be better than
having a secret unaccountable leadership no one acknowledges?
A: Actually, no. People who do more work will, of course, have more influence. This does give a certain advantage to those who have more time on their hands. Inevitably, some will start coordinating together and this will mean some people have *privileged access to information. This is the real problem. In any
egalitarian group, information tends to become the limited resource: if hierarchies develop, it’ll be because some people have ways of finding out what’s happening that others do not.
*rather.. the real problem (here) is that we think there’s something we need to find out.. when what we need to be doing is listening deeper.. first.. to that itch-in-the-soul.. and then org-ing around that.. it matters huge who gathers in a space.. today we have better means to facil/org that.. and we’re missing it.. for (blank)’s sake
3
Formalizing this by declaring those with privileged access to information a “leadership” is not going to ameliorate the problem, it will only make it worse. *The only way to ensure that this group doesn’t actually start imposing their will on others, even without intending to, is to **create mechanisms that ensure that information is as widely available as possible,..t and constantly reminding the most active members that there is no formal leadership structure and no one has the right to ***impose their will. Similarly, declaring members of an informal leadership clique to be members of a “coordinating committee,” but allowing everyone else to decide whether to reappoint them every six months or so, does not make them “more accountable,” as is often suggested (contrary to all experience); it clearly makes them less. One might well ask why anyone would imagine otherwise.
*rather.. group ness already imposing ness..
**makes no diff how good the mech is if still ‘ensuring’ non legit info/data..
***deeper issue.. no one groks their will.. need global detox leap to hear/be that.. need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs
4
Q: I’ll allow that consensus works well enough in a small group or neighborhood or community where everyone knows one another, but how can it work in a large group of strangers where there’s no initial foundation of trust?
A: We shouldn’t romanticize community. True, people who have lived together all their lives in, say, a rural village are more likely to share perspectives than those who live in a large, impersonal metropolis, but they are also more likely to be bitter enemies. The fact that they can nonetheless come to consensus is a testimony to *humans’ ability to overcome hatred for the sake of the common good. As for meetings between strangers: if one just assembled a random group of people off the street and forced them to attend a meeting against their will, probably they would be unable to find much common ground (other than in forming a plot to escape). But no one comes to a meeting of their own free will unless they want to get something out of it, a common goal everyone is there to achieve. If they don’t get sidetracked and constantly bear in mind what they came for, they can, generally speaking, overcome their differences.
*sounds to me like an anti thing (so to me a cancerous distraction, a symptom of being in sea world).. we don’t need to overcome hatred.. we need to grok our interconnectedness so that hatred becomes irrelevant (thurman interconnectedness law et al)
Q: If you have a fallback on a 66 percent, or 75 percent, or even 90 percent vote in larger meetings, why call this “modified consensus”?5
Isn’t that just a supermajority voting system? Why not just be honest and call it that?
A: It’s not actually the same thing. What’s crucial to consensus is the process of synthesis, of reworking proposals to the point where the largest possible percentage of participants likes it, and the smallest
percentage objects. Sometimes in larger groups you will find that despite this someone will block, and there will be fundamental disagreements about whether that block is a genuine expression of the group’s basic principles. In that case you have the option of going to a vote. But as anyone who has actually sat through a meeting based on, say, two-thirds voting can attest, if you just go to a vote immediately, *the whole dynamic will be different because there is never the presumption that everyone’s perspective is equally valuable. Anyone whose views would appear to represent less than a third of the people of the meeting can simply be ignored.
*again.. makes no diff till detox leap
Q: What to do if people abuse the system?
A: There are people who are, for whatever reasons, too damaged or disturbed to take part in a democratic assembly. There are others who can be accommodated, but who are so disruptive and difficult, who demand such constant attention, that indulging them would mean devoting so much more time to their thoughts and feelings than those of everyone else in the group that it undermines the principle that everyone’s thoughts and feelings should have equal weight. If a person is continually disruptive, there should be a way to ask that person to leave.
sound like.. maté addiction law.. aka: a huge red flag you’re doing it/life wrong
6
If they refuse, the next step is generally to reach out to their friends or allies to help convince them. If that’s not possible, the best approach is to make a collective decision to systematically ignore them.
Q: Isn’t the insistence on consensus stifling of creativity and individuality? Doesn’t it promote a kind of bland conformity?
A: Yes, if done badly. Anything can be done badly. Consensus process is often done very badly. But this is mostly because so many of us are new to it. We’re effectively inventing a democratic culture from scratch. *When done right, there’s no other process so supportive of individualism and creativity, because it is based on the principle that one should not even try to convert others entirely to one’s point of view, that our differences are a common resource to be respected, rather than an impediment to pursuing common goals. The **real problem here is when consensus is a decision-making process by groups that are already based on sharp inequalities of power (either recognized or not) or that already have a culture of conformism—to take an extreme example, the way consensus is practiced within a Japanese corporation, or even an American one like Harley-Davidson. In cases like this, there’s no doubt that demanding “consensus” can make all this even worse. But in cases like this we’re not really talking about consensus at all, in the terms being laid out here, but rather, forced unanimity. ***There is no more effective way to destroy the radical potential of such democratic procedures than to force people to pretend to use them when actually they’re not.
*oi.. perhaps until now.. now we have a means to facil itch-in-the-soul of 8b people.. everyday.. ie: nonjudgmental expo labeling
**to me.. yes.. decision making is unmooring us.. but consensus.. any form of democratic admin.. is same song.. still someone(s) in power.. and people conforming.. aka: people telling other people what to do
***rather.. to me.. no more effective way than to pretend we’re not actually facil ing any form of m\a\p
7
Q: Is it reasonable to expect people to constantly attend fourteen-hour meetings?
A: No, it is completely unreasonable to expect that. *Obviously no one should be forced—even by moral pressure—to attend meetings they don’t want to. But neither do we want to divide into one class of leaders who have time to attend long meetings, and another class of followers who never get to weigh in on key decisions. In traditional societies that have been practicing consensus for centuries, the usual solution is to **make meetings fun: introduce humor, music, poetry, so that people actually enjoy watching the subtle rhetorical games and attendant dramas. (Here again, Madagascar provides my favorite example. The kind of rhetoric deployed in meetings is so appreciated there that I have seen particularly skilled orators come out and perform it as a form of entertainment between sets by rock bands at music festivals.) But of course these are societies where most people have a lot more time on their hands (not to mention don’t have TV or social media to distract them). In a contemporary urban context, the best solution, when one is not at a moment of initial ferment when everyone is thrilled to be taking part at all, is **simply not to have fourteen-hour meetings. Be assiduous with ****time limits: allocate ten minutes for this item of discussion, five for that, no more than thirty seconds for each speaker.
*but there is already a forcing people to ness.. in the finite set of choices.. do you want spinach or rock.. et al
**see.. how is that not pretending ness.. oi
***rather.. not have any meetings.. and use tech as it could be to try a different way to gather in a space
****oi.. graeber violence/quantification law et al.. seeping in
8
Constantly remind speakers there’s no need to repeat what someone else has said. But most important, *do not bring proposals before a larger group unless there is a compelling reason.
*so to me.. never bring proposals before a large group.. graeber model law et al
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be you. 