The Culture is an anarchic democracy: if all but one single GSV had voted to disband, or to become a dictatorship, that lone GSV could disappear elsewhere without anyone stopping them.

They were up for, and welcoming of, even quite extreme changes; compare with humanity today, where being transgender is considered controversial by a significant percentage of the population of a nation that likes to self-promote on the idea it is the beacon of liberty and freedom, versus the way Culture bodies are written to be able to flip gender more completely than our best biotech and just by conscious will, with most people being expected to try it, and with some couples flipping gender while pregnant and pausing the pregnancy just so both can give birth together.

Even species changes are, for them, easy and of no great consequence or dispute. While you may be seen as weird if you choose to give up the visual accuity of an owl and the cerebral resliliance to survive decapitation in order to live out your life on this quaint rock recently discovered to be hosting an atomic age civilization, the Mind won't refuse to change you into a mere human just because you found Jesus.

> to be able to flip gender more completely than our best biotech and just by conscious will

a constant hedonic self modification and individual reinvention is obviously no sign of extreme change but the opposite, banality and powerlessness. As Augusto de Noce used to point out about the sexual revolution of the 60s, the sexual dimension became an obsession precisely because all other revolutions had been rendered impossible by an atomized society. There was nothing radical at all in it.

It's no accident that the Culture puts so much emphasis, and in that it reads ironically enough like satire of modern consumer society, on choice only at a level of reshuffling your sexual organs or bodily characteristics. The minds in the culture are by no means just a sort of voting mechanism that summarize the attitudes of the population of the Culture. They control the culture which we even get to learn in the books in the series that delve into the minds as characters.