I’m a big fan of strong communities and I don’t mean to say not to do them. The place that utah mormonism caused severe chafing in my life was related to rules and social structures that are reasonably core to mormonism. That’s not to say the things I found to cause problem don’t serve a purpose, but I don’t think they’re worth the significant cost. I only wanted to bring up the warning that it’s not just the case that all is well in mormonland, even though there are some things which do seem to be kinda nice there that are somewhat missing elsewhere. Covertly powerseeking is something I’ve heard about and had suspicions about locally, but I’d put much higher probability on it in the core priesthood.
I agree that refusable assignments might be a pretty good idea for an intentionally organized community, though I would propose that some sort of unusual local democracy might be a better option for how to choose people. zany idea, derived from straightforwardly turning mormon callings into local democracy: something where everyone is electable as [ranked choice/probabilistic vote/liquid democracy/star voting/etc] by default, and then refusal happens after the election, and the first non-refused option is the one who takes it? that might still have the problems with having a single person assigning. and I don’t like how expensive it ends up being to do elections. (...what if you had a cryptographic pseudoRNG seeded once per person from something unchangeable about them generate the subset of people who will vote this year...)
Ministering—home teaching/visiting teaching, when I knew it—seems sus to me. I don’t trust it to not cause toxic groupthink. If I saw a group doing that from a distance my first impulse would be to avoid them, and it would take a lot of transparency and epistemological soundness on the part of everyone involved for me to take that guard down much at all.
I think you’d be interested in Tocqueville’s description of how New England towns worked in the early 1800s. My guess is that the system of callings descends from it, and it was substantially more democratic.
Search: “Limits of the township” to find the relevant section.
I’m a big fan of strong communities and I don’t mean to say not to do them. The place that utah mormonism caused severe chafing in my life was related to rules and social structures that are reasonably core to mormonism. That’s not to say the things I found to cause problem don’t serve a purpose, but I don’t think they’re worth the significant cost. I only wanted to bring up the warning that it’s not just the case that all is well in mormonland, even though there are some things which do seem to be kinda nice there that are somewhat missing elsewhere. Covertly powerseeking is something I’ve heard about and had suspicions about locally, but I’d put much higher probability on it in the core priesthood.
I agree that refusable assignments might be a pretty good idea for an intentionally organized community, though I would propose that some sort of unusual local democracy might be a better option for how to choose people. zany idea, derived from straightforwardly turning mormon callings into local democracy: something where everyone is electable as [ranked choice/probabilistic vote/liquid democracy/star voting/etc] by default, and then refusal happens after the election, and the first non-refused option is the one who takes it? that might still have the problems with having a single person assigning. and I don’t like how expensive it ends up being to do elections. (...what if you had a cryptographic pseudoRNG seeded once per person from something unchangeable about them generate the subset of people who will vote this year...)
Ministering—home teaching/visiting teaching, when I knew it—seems sus to me. I don’t trust it to not cause toxic groupthink. If I saw a group doing that from a distance my first impulse would be to avoid them, and it would take a lot of transparency and epistemological soundness on the part of everyone involved for me to take that guard down much at all.
I think you’d be interested in Tocqueville’s description of how New England towns worked in the early 1800s. My guess is that the system of callings descends from it, and it was substantially more democratic.
Search: “Limits of the township” to find the relevant section.