Unanimous Consensus and Decision Making for an Integrated and Harmonious Community
Social cooperation, harmony and integrity is based upon values being understood and agreed upon. For a society to be the most integrated and harmonious it can be, people need to have their voice heard, and not only that, everyone's voice needs to be taken into account in a unanimous decision making process.
From Latin ūnanimus (“of one mind”), from ūnus (“one”) + animus (“mind”).
Unanimous decision making is to form a consensus where everyone is on the same page, in agreement, harmony, equilibrium, alignment and integrated towards the same direction.
Unanimous decision making requires each member to interact to be able to share knowledge and discuss an issue in order to all agree on the course of action to take. This is not democracy of majority rule, or a majority consensus, or mob rule. Everyone can understand an issue if the information is shared.
All objections can be made to invalidate an option from being a valid choice to take if everyone agrees. Objections that demonstrate harm coming about from a course of action will invalidate an option, even if only 1 person recognizes it and everyone else wants something else. Harm automatically invalidates any course of actions from being taken unless everyone agrees to bear the burden of the harm or negative consequence.
Interaction is required for any choice to be applied throughout a community. There are limits to this interaction based on the amount of people in a community for them to all be able to share and have their voices heard. The larger the community, the less someone's voice can be heard in a fair unanimous representation. There is only a certain amount of time to go around for everyone to hear everyone else's voice.
Not having your voice hear creates a sense of disempowerment and disillusionment from a sense of being ignored and unable to affect any change. If you can't change anything, you have no degree of influence or control over what is happening in your community. Feeling of exclusion, alienation, rejection, not belonging and being ostracized can result, even if it's not explicit or intentional.
If your community goes beyond the interaction/interconnection each member can have with other members, exclusion from the process to affect change in the community takes place. Some people are less heard, or not heard at all, because we all have limited time and we can't all speak and have everyone here us. If your voice is not heard, you are "drowned out" and the affect you have on the direction of the community is reduced.
There are logical limits to interaction in a community that affect how a person is represented within a unanimous decision making process for maximal integrity and harmony to occur. Limiting the ability of people to be heard and have influence in decisions creates disharmony and disintegrity of the overall communal structure. Feeling connected, belonging, inclusive and integrated within a community requires being empowered to have your voice heard by others when there is an issue. Being ignored creates the opposite feelings of disconnection in a community.
Large communities fail to empower and include individual members. Eventually, people who are more excluded from the greater interaction/interconnection will form their own sub-groups of connection and interaction with others who are being excluded as they attempt to have their voices heard. Another community forms within the larger community. This is what happens all over the world, from planetary, to national, to regional, to municipal, to familial levels of interaction.
The social integrity is not there when the limits of interaction are exceeded too much, such as major towns and cities. People's voices are not represented in their autonomous unanimous power as an individual. Everything gets relegated to representative voting through elections. People are not representing themselves in a unanimous community direction. They have less personal responsibility to direct their own lives. Their personal responsibility is abdicated through having someone else represent them and being responsible for directing aspects of their lives, instead of them representing themselves in self-governance and forming unanimous, integrated and harmonious decisions as a united community.
When there are too many people, there is too much disconnection between all members for a voice to be heard all around in a unanimous fair representative way of living. Eventually true individual consent is replaced with group collective consent dynamics of majority consensus formation, not unanimous consensus formation of all individually truly united on the same page of understanding and going forward together.
There are groups within groups with different interests, and then eventually one ring to rule them all, one leader that decides things for everyone. Centralized governance and globalization is headed this way for a global order and rule. This is not unanimous decision making. This is a progressive degeneration of freedom of the individual towards a collective centralized authority of control. More external control and governance gets centralized and taken away from individual control and governance. People have less power to have their voices heard, become more excluded, alienated, disempowered and disillusioned with the false sense of community.
The external centralized control structure is maintained through confusion, ignorance and fear by having people abdicate their personal responsibility to represent themselves in life and having someone else represent their interests and responsibilities in life.
There is also a tendency to only care about others close to us, that we have interaction with, and created closer relationships and trust with as a result. Generally for most people, those we don't interact with are of less concern to us and are not heard by us. Subgroups will still produce exclusion within the larger context unless everyone can represent themselves in a unanimous manner towards harmonious integrated decision making that invalidates choices based on the harm it produces unless everyone agrees to bear that negative consequence unanimously. This is not what centralized authority does. They make choices that harm others without the unanimous consent of everyone agreeing to it.
The disconnection in cooperative mutual agreement brings about a centralization of control. A unanimous society has decisions acted upon when everyone agrees. Objection are valid if they can demonstrate why a proposed decision is wrong, because it creates harm or injures. Everyone has a say and is heard, to agree or object to how the community will progress forward.
This process can be applied from the small-scale to larger-scales, as units within units. Once a unanimous decision is reached by individuals within certain limits of interactivity, then a representative of that decision can do the same to unify smaller communities into a larger direction overall for everyone in a wider or global community. But it all starts with the individual power of their voice being heard fairly.
Unanimous consensus and decision making isn't the easiest way to do things. Majority consensus mob rule is easier, or a dictator easier and quicker. But I'm not talking about what is easiest or quickest. I'm talking about the ideal and best way to do things for each individual to be empowered and have more control in their own lives through what is allowed or not allowed to happen in their community.
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Individual freedom and self-governance and collective integrity, harmony and unity of the community is maximized through unanimous consensus and decision making. This is the synergy (working together) of a win-win-win for everyone, at least a community level. Individuals still have to work to get things in life; to put in time, energy, effort, dedication, determination and persistence. Some people can win and some people can lose in life.
These are two different things, please don't confuse the two. Trying to coerce or force others to make all the fruits of labor blindly "equal" or "shared" is not synergetic unanimous consensus and decision making, unless everyone voluntarily agrees to the burden of that harm and loss to self.
Thank you for your time and attention. Peace.
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The thing about consensus is that is based on decisions made by a unanimous group of individuals. That's not easy as you said, but it is acheivable. First, the group has to acknowledge the rights of individuals, so rules have to be made so any individual surely feels that his voice is heard without going against the rights of others. That's priority #1. Then, people must be educated to follow these rules. That's quite complex because frankly there will be individuals/groups that would want to impose their opinion, because that's human nature.
Then, any discussion about proceedures, policy, decision making surely could follow the path of consensus.
Yes, it's double, by living by moral principles, such as the rights of the individual ;)
The concept of a unanimous consensus is great, but in practice getting everyone to agree on anything once you are beyond a few people is unrealistic IMO. Heck I can't get 4 people in our house to agree on what to have for dinner.
A majority may not be enough for people to feel they had a voice as loosing by 1 vote a side will feel slighted or even cheated in some way. But using a super majority with plenty of time for all to be heard in advance seems like a a fair middle ground for most issues.
Just begin given the opportunity to speak your mind and have your thoughts count towards the decision making process allows those with concerns one way or another to have a chance to sway enough votes to block a super majority. But if the concerns weren't founded or viewed as worth stopping the passage of an idea things can still move forward. Those who opposed an idea had the chance to be heard and after consideration the good for the masses outweighed the objections of the few.
If it was a unanimous consensus required 1 holdout could stop progress in their tracks. This one holdout might even be a bad actor who doesn't want progress to be made for some reason.
Unanimous consensus gives far to much power to any single person/voting entity as they can act as a dictator blocking any change at will and hold progress hostage.
Those are preferences for what you want to eat. How to live is to be based in principled living, not preferences. Preferences don't produce harm. If they do, they are not valid choices.
1 vote losing means that there was no harm being done. Any one can freely prefer to live another way. Society can;t stop them unless there is harm to be shown.
If people can be heard and influence a way of society, then when issues arise changes can be made to correct it rather than wait for politicians or elections to make a change, or believe in the fantasy of change...
Can you provide an example where 1 holdout stop things? I said in the post that you can only validly have your objection block everything if you demonstrate harm or injury to result. How is that not a good thing to stop fools from doing something when it creates harm? It is good to stop it. If it's unknown, then when it does occur, that when things can be corrected quicker because everyone recognizes the harm because people can talk about influence the change to happen. This won't likely work if people don't care or don't understand some moral principles to live a principled life.
We can use voting bots as an example. I would venture to say if the math of it was presented to all steemians that a very large majority would feel that they are not healthy for the long term success of steemit. But all the whales with very large stakes in voting bots will argue harm if these are taken away as they will loose a passive income stream. But which harm matters more? The one to the community as a whole or the one to the whales? In this case those with the move voting power will win, not the masses as the whales decide who the top 20 witnesses are. (sure I just made a few friends there...lol)
Ideological ideas like unanimous consensus forget that many decisions in the real world require making a decision that does cause harm no matter what decision is made. In the case of bots right now the thought is "it's allowed" so I'm going to take advantage of it. Problem is way to much of the potential voting power is now siphoned off to these bots making sure that the rich get richer.
Sure I can give who gets harmed in almost any real decision that needs to be made here on steemit. Each issue is serious enough that someone is going to feel harm is being done and that is why the issue has been kicked down the road for as long as they have been.
Real life isn't about what is good or bad, most of life falls somewhere in the middle.
Agreed. Unanimous decisionmaking is totally unworkable, for a variety of reasons. The key to unity is not universal participation in decisions. Unity comes from shared values and a shared world view.
A group that has shared values and a common world view can easily elect, by simple majority, decisionmakers that everyone is comfortable with and confident in. The difficulties come into this process only because not all voters have the same values or the same world view. In the latter situation, it really isn't a community at all. It is a frontier, with multiple "colonist" groups vying for power over everyone.
We can not build an extraordinary life with ordinary courage. Courage is a maximizing quality. If We dare, We will maximize the greatness and height of what We want to achieve. What is more, is the limitation of freedom of heart.
The basic concern of the various communities or individuals who want to exercise the freedom to make the world better is with high spirits. Your posting about the community is amazing @krnel
Yes courage and the will to act. It's takes strength from within. Thank you.
Unanimous Consensus and Decision Making is surely the best way to move forward. Sadly though it is much harder to implement in large groups. Folks are apathetic , lazy and busy. We need to address the attitude and lifestyle before we can reach this unification. I so agree with your well written blog. Blessings @krnel.
Yup, from apathy to care, from ignorance to knowledge, from lazy to willed to act. It can be done if people want to be free. But they prefer the easy street of partial enslavement... :/
sir @krnel, Mahatma Gandhi said, "Unity to be real must stand the severest strain without breaking." Unity is our strength. These types of inspiring posts made me your fan sir. You are great. Thanks for your sharing sir. Keep posting. I support your thinking sir.
Indeed, the strain is much to bear. Only truth can make us stronger in unity, true unity. You're welcome, glad it provided you with value :)
happy to hear that sir
This kind of thinking could change the world.
Really great post. Keep it up. The world needs you.
Thank you :)
Really great article
We must keep one hand for success and survival
Well done
I recognize the difference between man's law (Bullshit) and God's Law (Liberty). In the Western World there is only one real law. "Harm No One". Thus a s/he can do whatever they want as long as they are responsible for any harm they do.
In America society is supposed go a little further in protecting the whole by protecting the individual through social conventions. A good example is the right to defend oneself from any violence. In our society the initiator of violence creates the right for their victim to use whatever force is necessary to put that violence down. The victim is not liable for using force, but the initiator is.
This is actually a stabilizing social convention, because it discourages crime providing a safe environment for business. sadly the Law is and has been ignored for quite some time now and the social convention that once kept society safe are starting to break down.
u are right unity is the main theme any success.Thanks for give us interesting post.
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