RE: Unanimous Consensus and Decision Making for an Integrated and Harmonious Community
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.