How each model solves the same problems
Instead of “democracy versus anarchism”, compare the concrete ways collective problems get solved.
| Question | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| How are decisions made? | Open village assemblies of adults, dominated by men, seeking consensus; councils of lineage elders holding the ofo; title societies; women's assemblies for women's affairs and markets.Popular assembly | A stratified random sample of 523 voters deliberated in moderated groups and plenaries and answered questionnaires before and after; no decisions were taken.Sortition / citizens' assembly | Kings of small kingdoms (túatha) under over-kings; assemblies (óenach); customary law expounded by hereditary jurists rather than legislated. | |
| How are conflicts resolved? | Escalation from family to lineage, elders, assembly and oracles; oaths and ordeals; fines, ostracism and collective shaming such as 'sitting on a man'. | Balanced briefing materials, trained neutral moderators and competing experts structured disagreement. | Brehon judges; sureties (naidm, ráth, aitire); distraint of livestock; ritual fasting against higher-ranking defendants; body-fines and honour-price compensation.Arbitration | |
| How are public goods funded? | Paths, markets, shrines and defence supplied by age grades and communal labour; land allocated by lineages. | Privately funded; produced published results, media coverage and a peer-reviewed study. | Rules on shared grazing, co-operative ploughing, mills and fencing; obligatory hospitality; churches and monasteries; few public works. | |
| How is AI used? | None; a pre-colonial polity. | No AI role. | None; a medieval legal order. | |
| What are the main risks? | Exclusion and stigma (slaves, osu), oracle abuse and slave trading, limited capacity above the village-group, and conquest by a centralised colonial state.CLM-0390 | Self-selection into attendance; artificial setting; analysis by the method's designers; no institutional uptake. | Status-graded and unequal protection, unfree labour, endemic raiding and dynastic war, and vulnerability to a centralising conqueror.CLM-0385 |
This illustrates differences in design; it is not a universal claim about outcomes. Each cell links to mechanisms and the claims behind them.