The remaining team members have to work and live together after they eat Whetmore, and not letting Whetmore withdraw even when his life is at stake sets a precedent that will tend to cause the members to allocate more personal resources towards the zero-sum game of getting and holding power and decision-making ability in the team.
Note that electing a leader and giving him the power to make life-or-death decisions does not suffer from the same problem. (That, by the way, is an illustration of Mecius Moldbug’s general observation that formal power is often superior in its effects to informal sources of power like vague personal obligations and the power to persuade.)
Of course there might be other processes that work even better than electing a leader, but having a leader seems to work well for life-or-death decisions and for situations in which there is no time for debate.
The remaining team members have to work and live together after they eat Whetmore, and not letting Whetmore withdraw even when his life is at stake sets a precedent that will tend to cause the members to allocate more personal resources towards the zero-sum game of getting and holding power and decision-making ability in the team.
Note that electing a leader and giving him the power to make life-or-death decisions does not suffer from the same problem. (That, by the way, is an illustration of Mecius Moldbug’s general observation that formal power is often superior in its effects to informal sources of power like vague personal obligations and the power to persuade.)
Of course there might be other processes that work even better than electing a leader, but having a leader seems to work well for life-or-death decisions and for situations in which there is no time for debate.