The Dilemma of the Deserted Husband was not solved by the unilateral decision of a single leader. Nor did people raise their hands in a majority vote. Instead, it was the product of long deliberation. For months, there were discussions, disagreements and compromises. The goal of the process was consensus, to find a solution that everyone could live with, even if it was imperfect (the new throuple ‘did not exactly live happily ever after’, according to Silberbauer).
For the vast majority of human history, people made group decisions through consensus. It is perhaps the most conspicuous feature of political life among recent hunter-gatherer societies, from the Ju/’hoansi to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia to the Indigenous societies of the early Americas. As an anthropologist, I have observed consensus-based decision-making myself among hunter-gatherers in the rainforests of Malaysia.
Though the small-world life of hunter-gatherers may seem far removed from our own digitalised and global world, the problems of group life have remained fundamentally the same for hundreds of thousands of years. In the face of conflict and polarisation, ancient human groups needed processes that yielded good outcomes. What can we learn from a political form shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of trial and error? By examining how hunter-gatherers achieve consensus, perhaps we can develop better strategies to solve the problems we face today.
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