These failures reveal a complementary structure when factions are involved.
The most accurate mapping of Individual Wills to Factional Wills occurs only when elections attempt no compromise at all. Conversely, the generation of General Will requires that all wills participate in compromise, each with an opportunity to veto.
Thus, any system that works with factions must have two independent stages:
This division is intuitively familiar; many people already believe this is how republics operate. The latter is explored in the Chapter “Compromise”. The former has a straightforward solution described below.
The compromise of General Will is a difficult thing to create. It requires several things to bring about:
The easy solution to this problem is to subvert the power of factions and their Factional Will by requiring unanimous consent. There is no system that comes closer to identifying the ideal of the General Will. This follows simply from the definition of General Will, a compromise by all. When unanimity holds, nobody is burdened unfairly and no one is coerced. Everyone has the power to block factional will if they do not see it to be as good or better than the status quo. Thus, it becomes impossible for a faction to substitute their will for the General Will.
Unfortunately, unanimity can generally emerge in only small, highly interconnected communities where people share a lived reality, negotiate face-to-face, and directly observe each other’s stakes. In such a community people are able to compromise because they have a shared understanding of each other’s needs. They also have a willingness to compromise, because everybody’s well-being is intertwined.
Once a community grows beyond Dunbar’s number, this is no longer the case. Community fragments, trust weakens, and communication becomes indirect. The understanding of other people’s needs fades, and their requests look more and more alien. Needs that mirror my own appear valid, while the ones that don’t look less and less credible. It is not long before I view these desires with suspicion and group with like-minded people and form a faction. Politics then becomes a struggle among groups rather than a collaboration among citizens.
Thus we face a dilemma. A government should identify and advance the General Will but the General Will is often hijacked by Factional Will. The best way to distinguish between the two is unanimity. However, in a society as large as ours, unanimity is unviable because many pockets of people are isolated from one another. Thus to have a government that can make a decision we need to lower our threshold for consensus, but that opens the door for Factional Will. There appears to be no path to the General Will.