Tyranny of Consensus

Erik Loomis posts a brilliant attack on the idea of consensus-based decision-making by Gerry Mackie:

In the late 1970s, some new members imported a belief popular on the liberal-left, that democracy requires consensus. Consensus groups could function, but were unstable and usually the first to fall. There are several problems. Those with the least to do elsewhere in life have the greatest power in the interminable consensus process. Trust, ironically, is absent, in that no delegation of decision is permitted. The thought of a meeting then becomes so horrifying that a larger and larger scope of decisions is left to informal leadership and clandestine process, an undemocratic outcome. Consensus is always biased to the status quo, but problems usually originate in the status quo; rapid external change worsens the conservative bias. Further, consensus invades the individual personality and demands conformity; dissenters may acquiesce but in doing so are implicitly judged to have compromised the moral ideal. The healthy legitimacy of openly holding different views becomes suspect. Finally, rational unanimity is impossible for a larger class of goals. Just to illustrate with a trivial example, suppose it is time to decide where the crew works in the Spring. Six people want to work in Montana because they have friends there. Two people want to work in California because they have friends there. Three people don’t care. Under majority rule, the crew goes to Montana, and those in the minority might feel they are owed a little deference in some future decision (know to political science as “logrolling”). Under consensus, the different sides are denied the legitimacy of their individual interests, because there is only one rational goal for the group, which one side or another must adopt, or the group disband. Under majority rule one is subordinate to shifting impersonal majorities, but under consensus one is permanently subordinated to every other member in the group.

This is from Mackie's masters' thesis, which was written circa 1990 and draws on his own experience in these collectives in the 70s. This is not some new-fangled idea, and its failures are quite well documented.