Claim
A legislative system that seeks to approximate the General Will must balance progress against harm and prevent coalitions from becoming sovereign. Solidarity achieves this by giving the opposition a disciplined power to resist domination through a costly, system-wide mechanism: a floating threshold for passage.
Relies On:
Supports:
The goal of this project is not to maximize legislative output, but to approximate the General Will as closely as a large society allows. As argued earlier, unanimous agreement is the clearest and least harmful way to do this. When everyone agrees, no one must be coerced, and the outcome reflects a shared understanding of both the problem and its solution.
In practice, unanimity does not scale. It depends on dense communication, shared context, and sustained mutual understanding—conditions that exist only in small, tightly connected communities. As societies grow, communication complexity rises, lived realities diverge, and compromise increasingly feels asymmetric: my sacrifice for someone else’s benefit. In large societies, unanimity produces paralysis. The few decisions that are reached may reflect the General Will, but so little is decided that collective action becomes impossible.
Because inaction is not an option, any workable system must permit decisions without full agreement. But moving away from unanimity introduces harm. The further the system drifts, the more people are forced to accept outcomes they oppose. Modern governance cannot escape this tradeoff. The real design question is not whether coalitions will exist, but how large they must be to impose decisions on everyone else.
Every legislative system implicitly chooses a point on the spectrum between progress and harm. Lower thresholds allow faster action but increase the number of people coerced by each decision. Higher thresholds slow action but reduce harm by demanding broader agreement.
Simple majority rule is not a moral law. It is a design choice. Constitutional amendments, for example, require supermajorities to protect legitimacy, while corporate boards often operate with minimal coalitions, enabling rapid action at the cost of widespread harm to those affected.
A useful way to expose this tradeoff is with a deliberately crude heuristic.
Suppose each supporter of a policy experiences a gain of one unit, and each opponent experiences a loss of one unit. Under unanimity, gains are maximized and losses eliminated. Under simple majority rule, gains and losses nearly cancel out. A policy supported by 51% and opposed by 49% produces almost zero net value, while still imposing real harm on nearly half the population.
Now account for the fact that agreement becomes harder as support increases. Persuading the first half of a population is relatively easy. Persuading half of the remaining population is harder, and persuading half of what remains after that is harder still. If we assume—conservatively—that each successive halving of dissent requires roughly twice the effort, then moving from 50% to 75% agreement is half as costly as moving from 75% to 87.5%.
Under these assumptions, thresholds near three-quarters maximize total societal value. Below that point, the marginal increase in progress is outweighed by the marginal increase in harm. Above it, the cost of persuasion rises faster than the benefit of additional agreement.
The exact percentage is not the point. The point is that 50% + 1 is not special. It is not neutral, fair, or efficient. It is simply the lowest threshold at which one group can impose its will on another. By contrast, higher thresholds trade speed for legitimacy and often produce more common good, not less.
Any system that treats simple majority rule as the default has already made a moral choice about how much harm it is willing to accept in exchange for progress. Solidarity makes that choice explicit—and allows it to change in response to abuse.
As shown in Sovereign Coalitions, coalitions naturally optimize for dominance once they can reliably enact policy. When coalitions become sovereign, governance shifts from persuasion to control, and the General Will is replaced by coalitional will.
Equality among representatives is therefore essential. No representative may gain power merely by joining a coalition. If coalition membership amplifies influence, then elections cease to communicate Individual Will and instead reward strategic alignment.
To prevent this, the opposition must retain a meaningful ability to resist any coalition, even one commanding a strong majority. Without this, coalitional sovereignty is inevitable.
Granting the opposition the power to block legislation introduces a new risk. If blocking is free, a determined minority can recreate unanimity in practice and grind the system to a halt. Any system seeking to approximate the General Will must therefore attach a cost to obstruction.
This requirement changes the nature of disagreement. A binary “yes or no” vote is insufficient. The system must distinguish between:
Disagreement — opposition that accepts the outcome
Refusal — opposition that judges the proposal harmful enough to justify slowing the entire system
Under Solidarity, a negative vote alone signals non-support. It says, “I disagree, but I can live with this.” Blocking is a stronger claim: “This proposal is unacceptable, and I am willing to accept systemic consequences to stop it.”
The goal of proponents therefore shifts. Instead of seeking consensus—an unrealistic aim in large societies—they must seek consent: proposals that others may not support, but will tolerate.
Solidarity introduces a floating threshold for legislative passage.
At any time, the legislature functions under a passage threshold T, expressed as a percentage of total voting power. A proposal passes only if support meets or exceeds T. The threshold may be lowered, but only through passage under the same legislative rules.
The opposition may also attempt to block a proposal. A block succeeds only if opposition meets the same threshold T, calculated against the share of voting power not required for passage (1 − T). Blocking is therefore a collective act, not an individual veto.
Crucially:
When a block succeeds, T increases. This raises both the level of agreement required to pass future proposals and the proportion of the opposition needed to block again. Blocking thus becomes progressively harder the more it is used.
Because any attempt to lower the threshold must itself pass under the elevated standard which can be blocked in turn, obstruction is never free. Those who slow the system necessarily accept the long-term consequences of doing so.
Solidarity therefore transforms refusal into a disciplined signal rather than a weapon of convenience. Power is constrained not by fixed limits, but by shared exposure to the costs of delay.
Solidarity transforms legislation from a zero-sum contest into a negotiation under shared consequences.
For proponents:
For opponents:
No side can advance alone. The coalition controls the proposal. The opposition controls the progress-harm tradeoff. Power and restraint rise or fall together.
This mutual exposure is the essence of Solidarity. Progress is possible only when harm is broadly acceptable. When it is not, the system slows until better terms are offered.
A common concern is that Solidarity invites paralysis: the opposition will block everything until the threshold becomes unworkably high.
This may happen. People are accustomed to systems in which a large enough group can impose its preferences outright, where winning means the other side loses. Under Solidarity, everyone shares the consequences. Periods of stagnation are not necessarily failure; they are evidence of genuine disagreement.
If differences cannot be resolved through persuasion and compromise, the only alternative is coercion. Learning to govern without dominance may require discomfort and delay.
The alternative is worse. As shown earlier, unconstrained coalitions optimize for self-preservation, marginalize outsiders, and hollow out governance. History offers no shortage of examples. Temporary paralysis is preferable to permanent capture.
Solidarity does not promise harmony. It promises accountability.
By coupling the power to advance policy with exposure to shared consequences, it prevents coalitions from becoming sovereign while preserving the possibility of progress. It restores the conditions under which compromise is meaningful and domination is costly.
In large societies, the General Will cannot be found through unanimity. But it can still be approached—if no one is allowed to move forward alone.