2.3.3   Increasing Acceptability

(This is an archived page, from the Patterns of Power Edition 3 book.  Current versions are at book contents).

Acceptability can be progressively increased from the merely tolerable:

Governance increases in acceptability if it more successfully meets that person’s requirements, as defined by their understanding of the suggested list above (2.1) or an equivalent list.

Governance is more acceptable if it is negotiable, i.e. if people can initiate the meaningful renegotiation of unsatisfactory aspects within an acceptable timescale – as described in the next section.

Given people’s inherent diversity (2.2), more of them are likely to be satisfied if they can choose for themselves where possible.  This is perhaps an argument for restricting the role of the State and it is certainly an argument for avoiding a monolithic system of imposed uniformity.  Different ways of providing choice are explored in the next few chapters (and these are linked in the Index).

People’s acceptance increases if they have to make fewer reluctant concessions.

People prefer to pay less tax.

These points are particularly important to people who, when they join a society, are subject to governance which has been negotiated by other people – by previous generations, for example. 

The acceptability of governance can be thought of as being on a scale between what is tolerable up to the (improbable) state of people feeling that no further improvement is possible.  There is no means of quantifying acceptability, but each individual is able to judge that one arrangement is more acceptable than another. 

© PatternsofPower.org, 2014