• There is no trap here, a society built on consensus, is whatever the individuals freely identify as positive for them. The biggest issue, is how to provide people with enough information so they can decide by themselves whether (for example) paying 5% more taxes in order to build some thousand miles of railroads, is something positive for their goals, or not.

    this is what i mean by you falling into the trap of assuming what you’re proposing is distinct from anyone else imposing their ideology or social model on people. consensus necessarily begins and ends with people agreeing to a shared set of prescriptions on how society works, which is imposing both ideology and a social model through and through–it doesn’t stop being that because it’s agreed to or because you can hypothetically opt out of it. the Zapatistas operate under essentially this exact form of governance (and with the ability to opt out at any time) and if you described that as not an imposition of either social model or ideology that would be silly both to them and to any observer because the Zapatistas have very clear prescriptions of both.