For reasons that will never make sense to me, many on the political left don’t like leaders. What’s more, many of them go so far as to say that their groups don’t even have leaders. The various “Occupy” groups around the country claim that they make decisions by consensus and that none of the groups has leaders.
I don’t know whether they actually believe this, but I do know it’s not true. Unless you have a very limited variety of people, opinions are going to diverge quickly in any group. When a group is new and goals are fuzzy and everybody is happy with everybody, consensus might be easy. Pretty quickly, though, things can turn ugly. For instance:
- At the original Occupy group — the one on Wall Street — the issue has become drums. That’s right, drums. Some of the protesters have brought in drums and beat on them incessantly. It attracts attention, but it would get irritating very, very quickly. (Here’s a short video to give you an idea of what it’s like.) Because it was annoying so many people (and preventing some protesters from sleeping and preventing kids from studying at a nearby school), the group decided — allegedly by consensus — to limit drumming to two hours a day. However, if you read the details, the people who wanted unlimited drumming say they were prevented from bringing up their own proposal. That’s clearly not consensus. It’s clearly a matter of the majority forcing its will on the nuts who wanted to beat on drums all day. (I have no sympathy with the drummers, but the actions make it clear that “consensus” is a lie.)
Man who’s leaving infertile wife thinks world revolves around him
Who needs due process? Kangaroo court gets power to kill citizens
We hate ourselves for needing other people’s approval so much
With changed priorities, it’s time to re-evaluate my long-term goal
The moon represents what I seek, but words are all I can offer now
Reality no longer seems to matter to dysfunctional culture in denial
It’s time to change my story and reinvent myself — one more time