The skills of leadership can be used for good and for evil. One of the necessities of peaceful co-existence is obtaining agreement of all parties in contact with one another. In a government of the people and by the people, a majority consensus is required before a law is passed to enforce behavior. For example it is a consensus among us that one person shall not take property from his neighbor. To enforce this consensus, a law is recorded that whoever steals will be forcefully imprisoned. That is considered good because the weak person needs protection from the stronger person who decides he can steal without adverse consequences.
But what happens when the consensus is used in an evil way? For example, it may be a consensus or majority view that one citizen must pay six times as much as each of his six neighbors for the equal use of a common road. To enforce their consensus, the five neighbors prohibit the property owner from using his property for his necessary activity of earning a living.
Adolf Hitler was a master at building a consensus. He built a consensus within just a few years to a point that he had crowds of tens of thousands in the streets shouting in unison, “Fuhrer wir folgen dir” (Leader we follow you). At that point it was a very fearful thing for anyone to stand up in the crowd and say what Hitler wants to do is evil. It wasn’t until starvation was staring them in face, bombs were demolishing entire cities, and they could hear the cannon fire in the distance that most of the citizens realized that the leader of that consensus was an evil one.
North Ogden City, just prior to the last election, had obtained a consensus in the city council to spend millions of dollars on a city maintenance shop. Part of the consensus building maneuver was to purchase a very expensive “study”. Since the last election, a renewed effort has and is being made to obtain a consensus in the present city council by calling a special committee which is instructed to pay attention to the expensive “study”.
Special committees and expensive studies are common methods of obtaining consensus. Typically, these “studies” and “committees” are given special parameters and goals such that the results may vary but will have the essential outcomes envisioned by the instigators. This is well exemplified in the recent meeting called by Pleasant View City in conjunction with Farr West City. Many people were invited to the meeting, and were asked to give their opinions about how the property along 2700 North should be developed. All of these ideas were to be coalesced to form a consensus on where the City should proceed to pass ordinances to take control of the land development without purchasing the property from the land owners. Who would dare stand up in city council meeting and disagree when there was such a large consensus. After all, the meeting was held for so many citizens and plans were prepared and presented by the City’s expensive staff members including the City Development Director, the City Manager, and the City lawyer! Who was leading the consensus building?
Another good example of this consensus forming was exhibited recently in the Central Weber Sewer Board meeting made up of the mayors of the involved cities. A “committee” had been appointed to “study” the employee pay. The “committee” came to the board meeting with a recommendation that a hundred thousand dollars increase be budgeted for the “necessary” salary raises which were to be advanced disproportionately to the employees based on “merit”. There was also a discussion on staggering increases for citizen user fees - which increase would give the district better ratings in relation to future increased bond debt for the district. When the motion was put forward for these things, not a single mayor voted against the “consensus” of the “committee”. This was even though the mayors just recently denied they had any control of sewer usage fee increases and the mayors said that there was nothing they could do about it.
The German consensus to support Hitler was extremely expensive, and in the end, the price was paid by the people. There were probably many good German people who truly couldn’t see just how evil Hitler’s consensus was. There are also probably many now who do not realize just how serious it is for local governments to use a manufactured consensus to incrementally take control of private property.
