# Decentralization

Explore how decentralization intersects with Mormon theology and transhumanist thought—reshaping governance, technology, and human flourishing for the future.

Scripture repeatedly moves burdens of judgment from a single leader to many hands while keeping a center for the gravest matters. Restoration teaching on agency and common consent gives Latter-day Saints a way to judge decentralized technologies by whether they spread capacity and accountability together.

“Center” comes through the Latin *centrum* from the Greek *kentron*, a sharp point or goad, and by extension the fixed point of a compass around which a circle is drawn. To decentralize is to move power, decision, or data away from that single point. Read quickly, the word suggests the absence of authority, and a church led by one prophet would seem to have little to say about it. Yet the first great reorganization of Israel’s government was a decentralization, undertaken on the counsel of Moses’ father-in-law.

## Jethro’s Counsel and the Seventy

[Image: Jethro told Moses the burden of judging was too heavy for him alone and proposed dividing it so rulers would handle small matters while Moses handled the weighter ones.]

The Hebrew Bible records two occasions on which Moses' burden of governing was divided among others. Watching Moses judge the people from morning until evening, Jethro warned him, "Thou wilt surely wear away, both thou, and this people that is with thee: for this thing is too heavy for thee; thou art not able to perform it thyself alone" (Exodus 18:18). He proposed rulers over thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens, who would judge small matters and bring only the great ones to Moses. Later, when the Lord placed his spirit on seventy elders and two of them prophesied in the camp, Joshua urged Moses to forbid them. Moses replied, "would God that all the Lord's people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit upon them" (Numbers 11:29). The first passage distributes administration and the second distributes revelation, and both treat concentration as a weakness to be remedied.

## Agency, Order, and Common Consent

[Image: D&C 58 teaches that “the power is in them, wherein they are agents unto themselves,” paired with shared order through common consent.]

Restoration scripture joins broad individual initiative to a single channel of revelation for the Church as a whole, and the tension between them is real. A revelation of 1831 declares that "it is not meet that I should command in all things," and that people "should be anxiously engaged in a good cause, and do many things of their own free will," because "the power is in them, wherein they are agents unto themselves" (D&C 58:26-28). The same Restoration also established that only one person would "receive commandments and revelations in this church," while requiring that "all things must be done in order, and by common consent" (D&C 28:2, 13). Church governance has developed along both lines. Leaders teach that revelation comes to many participants in ward, stake, and family councils, while curriculum, finances, and programs are directed from headquarters. Some Latter-day Saint writers have argued that this centralization, whatever its strengths of scale, leaves congregations too little room for local initiative.

## Every Man Bearing His Part

The Book of Mormon records both a deliberate decentralization and a collapse into fragments, and the contrast clarifies what distributed government requires.

[Image: Mosiah’s reform replaced kings with judges chosen by the voice of the people so “the burden should come upon all the people, that every man might bear his part.”]

King Mosiah persuaded the Nephites to replace kings with judges chosen by the voice of the people, teaching that "the burden should come upon all the people, that every man might bear his part" (Mosiah 29:34). The reform asked more of ordinary people and made each answerable for the choices of the whole. Over a century later the system failed in a different direction. After the chief judge was murdered, "the people were divided one against another; and they did separate one from another into tribes," and "thus they did destroy the government of the land" (3 Nephi 7:2). The tribes kept an uneasy peace with no common law, and power had been dispersed without a shared covenant to hold it together.

## Distributed Systems and Their Risks

Decentralized technologies promise to spread power as Jethro and Mosiah spread the burden of judgment, and they carry the same risks of recentralization and lost accountability.

[Image: Decentralized systems spread decision-making across many participants, but the key test remains whether accountability for claims stays traceable to those participants.]

Blockchains, federated social networks, open-source software, and openly released AI models distribute control that would otherwise rest with one company or state. Mormon transhumanists welcome this pattern, since Restoration scripture warns that nearly all who receive authority will abuse it, and the creation of other creators requires capacity spread widely. Decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, come closest to Mosiah's reform: members hold tokens that let them vote on proposals, and a program on a blockchain carries out the decisions. 

Reputation-weighted consensus platforms attempt the same reform in a different register. [Canonizer](https://canonizer.com/) lets competing positions on a question each gather named, weighted support rather than putting the question to a simple vote, and preserves minority positions rather than erasing them when a majority forms. The design distributes the production of consensus even though the platform itself runs from a single site and a small maintaining team—a reminder that centralized infrastructure and decentralized function are not the same question, and that the harder test is still whether responsibility for a camp’s claims stays traceable to the people who hold them.

Groups that reject formal structure often end up with unacknowledged leaders no one can hold to account, and courts still debate who answers for the decisions of a DAO's decisions. Restoration theology seeks to join distribution to accountability. The Lord established just laws "that every man may act in doctrine and principle pertaining to futurity, according to the moral agency which I have given unto him, that every man may be accountable for his own sins in the day of judgment" (D&C 101:78). The test for a decentralized system is whether it places both power and accountability in many hands, so that each participant can bear a real part of the burden, or whether it disperses responsibility while power quietly gathers again at a new center.

*See also*: [Blockchain](/topical-guide/blockchain), [Community](/topical-guide/community), [Consent](/topical-guide/consent), [Decentralized Autonomous Organizations](/topical-guide/decentralized-autonomous-organizations), [Liberty](/topical-guide/liberty), [Mass Surveillance](/topical-guide/mass-surveillance), [Subsidiarity](/topical-guide/subsidiarity)