Alt title: Slouching towards dictatorship
How unjust it was, when people treated the actual as limiting proof of the possible!
— Elif Batuman
I recently joined a book club with some nerds, and we just finished reading Emily Wilson’s new(ish) translation of The Odyssey. It was pretty good! I found it a bit hard to discuss in a book club setting, because I don’t have the foundational knowledge of Ancient Greek culture to say anything particularly interesting about a story where, for the most part, shit just kinda happens. There’s this through-line about guest/host etiquette (AKA xenia), but we’d pretty much mined that vein after our first or second meeting, and there were still 300+ pages of poem to chew through.
To select our second book, I pushed for a ranked-choice poll, which we organized using an online form. I love ranked-choice voting, because it approximates consensus without the need for a lengthy debate. You don’t always end up with something that everyone agrees on, but you usually get something that most people can live with_._ For example, we ended up choosing one of my lesser-ranked books from the fifteen nominees—but it wasn’t literally my least favorite. I’m cool with it! Democracy!!!
[Update from 1 month later: we got trapped in scheduling hell and haven’t started reading the new book. Is book club kill? (Update from 1 year later: yes.)]
The poll only took ~10 minutes to create, and folks had ~24 hours to vote. The decision had basically no stakes, but it was great. it worked!
… But you can’t do everything this way. Even the smallest decisions—“what do you want for lunch?”—often need to be resolve in less than 24 hours [I’m so hungry]. And then there are the so-called Big Decisions, with real stakes, and “stakeholders,” who may have competing priorities.
This has been coming up at my job a lot. The people I work with are incredibly opinionated, even when it comes to tiny decisions that could be easily reversed. But especially when it comes to the Big Decisions, we’re getting bogged down by the need to build consensus on everything, even when we’re working on strict deadlines. Our team has no explicit hierarchy below our first-line manager, and she isn’t in-the-weeds enough to make all of these daily choices unilaterally. Everyone else is a co-equal peer, and so everyone’s opinion is equally weighted (subject to their social capital—but that’s another essay).
“But wait,” the Spirit of Communal Anarchy pipes up scoldingly, “Consensus is good! Why is it so important to make decisions fast? Making the right choice takes however long it takes—you can’t rush these things.”
Reader, I wish it were so.
The problem with consensus is that it is fucking slow. Perhaps we could do it quickly if we were all clones, but alas, we_live_in_a_society.jpg, and we’re usually not making choices on our own time. We’re on the clock, often literally, of employers, markets, changing seasons, (and climate,) and the constant shift of cultural and environmental factors.
Like most folks in the “professional managerial class,” my team and I are under a nonstop barrage of deadlines. Volunteers have to be selected, so they can be trained in time for classes to start; grades must be submitted in time for midterms; yearly budgets, quarterly OKRs, and performance reviews must be written [kill me]. And because none of our work generates any kind of profit, we’re perpetually understaffed and underfunded, so we need to work long hours to meet these not-entirely-arbitrary deadlines. Trying to reach total agreement on every tiny decision means working longer hours. Overwork makes us increasingly irate, which feeds into further interpersonal issues, making consensus even harder to reach, as the vibes spiral down the drain.
Which begs the question, why are we held to these debilitating deadlines in the first place? Capitalism, fucking obviously. Even if we’re not making a profit, we lose less money if we can get our jobs done with fewer people, whatever the costs for our psychic or physical health.
In capitalist markets and political systems, decision making starts to resemble the prisoner’s dilemma. You and your interlocutor (a competing business, nation state, or political party) could cooperate with each other, choosing make slow, consensus-based decisions, which would probably lead to better outcomes for society. But, if one party makes a decision more quickly, however imperfect, they can catch the other flat footed—and the winner takes all.
So to win the race, we lean into hierarchy. If we’re lucky, we become Little Dictators, lording over our microscopic spheres of influence. Otherwise we are Subjects, our agency unraveled, our hands and minds mere tools for others to wield. Of course, the nature of Little Dictatorship is that you are the Subject of another Bigger Dictator, who themselves is Subject to an Even Bigger Dictator. [The word ‘dictator’ is starting to sound a bit suggestive.] But some agency is far better than none, so most of us strive to be the Biggest Dictator we can be.
As always, I am compelled to qualify everything I’ve said with the declaration: “I think all of this is bad and I hate it!” I want to live in a world where consensus is the norm. I don’t want to be on the clock of capital, or politics, or a degrading planetary habitat. But while I dearly wish to believe in this better world, the Specter of Dictatorship cackles at my naïveté.