Recall two arguments from your life: an argument about who is moral, and an argument about what a team needs to buy to build something. We’ll call this the consensus argument and the constraint argument. One argument moves and flows to discover. The other stops and repeats, like a mayday distress call. It is often difficult to find an agreed definition in a consensus argument. In a constraint argument, agreement eventually happens (or the project stops).
Changing definitions to fit the present is fun in improv, and in a consensus argument, it lets everyone see who follows who quickly, which scales very well in millions of people. A constraint argument, on the other hand, does not usually scale well. First of all, how many people feel moved to look at a constantly changing spreadsheet? So we often use consensus arguments to find people to follow that will have the constraint arguments for us. They in turn tend to delegate the constraint arguments to subordinates.
Definitions change in consensus arguments to fit the moment. If everyone involved remembers this, they can flip back to more standardized definitions.
A problem happens when the people who are supposed to be having a constraint argument forget to leave the consensus argument mode, and cannot go back to constraint arguments. A sort of getting high on one’s own supply, which has occurred systematically with many of our rulers in the last handful of generations.
Historically when this happened, some other group of constraint-aware rulers would eventually replace them. With unprecedented access to energy and an unusually well-behaved populace, we found a way to simply continue like this. Costs that would have been apparent to a subsistence society can be hidden in an energy-abundant one for centuries.
So any time you’re in a conversation that approaches disagreement, it’s helpful to delineate between a consensus and constraint argument. While in the past, consensus arguments were of utmost importance because of the ability of the people around you to work around the constraints necessary to get you banished, ostracized, or killed, that is no longer the case in most groups today. You may also gauge how to prioritize time by whether the likely argument in a gathering will be a constraint or consensus argument, whichever your preference.
