Page:Consensus Decision-making.pdf/4

 There are five possible methods of decision-making :

Autocracy— One person makes the decisions for everyone.

Oligarchy— A few people make the decisions for everyone.

Representative democracy— A few people are elected to make the decisions for everyone.

Majority rule democracy— The majority makes the decisions for everyone.

Consensus democracy— Everyone makes the decisions for everyone.

The first four methods have been tried, and are being tried everywhere for making decisions.

They have proved highly unsatisfactory in solving the people's problems; they have rather aggravated conflicts. Instead of empowering the people, they have strengthened the forces that exploit them, dominate over them. Consensus decision-making has hardly been tried; it is dismissed as Utopian.

This booklet seeks to show that it is not so; it is possible. In fact, this is the method that must be tried if human emancipation is the goal.