I wrote about Occupy Wall Street today. In the comments, people are having fun with this line from a sympathizer with the protesters describing their decision-making process: “horizontal, autonomous, leaderless, modified-consensus-based system with roots in anarchist thought.” For many, it calls to mind the immortal Dennis the Peasant scene from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”:
DENNIS: What I object to is you automatically treatin’ me like an inferior.
ARTHUR: Well, I am king.
DENNIS: Oh, king, eh? Very nice. And how’d you get that, then? By exploiting the workers! By hanging on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society! If there’s ever going to be any progress–
…
DENNIS: I told you. We’re an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week.
ARTHUR: Yes.
DENNIS: But all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting.
ARTHUR: Yes, I see.
DENNIS: By a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs,–
ARTHUR: Be quiet!
DENNIS: –but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more–