User:Nthmost/On Blocking
From the Noisebridge Discourse forum, October–November 2020, in a thread titled "Towards an Anarchist Hackerspace." Someone had proposed that a consensus block should be understood as an ultimatum: "if the vote doesn't go my way, I will leave." This was the reply.
Source: Towards an Anarchist Hackerspace — Wayback Machine archive
When the assumption is "this person will leave if we don't resolve his block", then it becomes a de facto method of running roughshod over that person.
Putting up a block doesn't indicate a single state; it indicates two potential states. One state is that the person would like to stop the community from doing something they see as ruinous, and they care enough to talk about it; the community really should consider that the block is well-intentioned and that the person wants to stay.
The other state could be that the person has had enough of this community and is making their final stand to see if anyone will listen to reason before they leave.
Neither state is a problem on their own. The problem is that you cannot know which position the person is taking when they issue their block.
If the community treats a block as saying "I will leave if this goes through", then the community may take the easy (and ruinous) road of not trying to resolve the block and instead forcing that person out by going forward with consensus.
Forcing people out through a funky legalistic interpretation of what a block means, instead of trying to understand where that person is coming from, is a great way to detonate a nuclear bomb in the community that you won't recover from for a long while.
This isn't theoretical, by the way. This happened in 2018.
You seem to think one person leaving is merely about one person leaving. It's not just about that. These events have knock-on effects. They shake the rest of the community's faith. They often take chunks of the community down with them, or at least make people feel disenfranchised to the point where they retreat from the meeting table, which makes communication across the community far worse.
See also: User:Nthmost/Things_I_Said • Consensus