Submitted by The Needle Blog on ZeroHedge
Why I Don’t Vote
Democracy has become a religion and anyone who criticises it is labelled a heretic.
How many times have you heard the mantra that ‘if you don’t vote, you can’t complain’? Whereas, actually, the opposite is true, ‘if you do vote, you can’t complain.’ It is no coincidence that the emergence of the philosophical concept of the ‘Social Contract’ runs parallel to democratic development in the modern era.
In political philosophy the social contract or political contract is a theory or model, originating during the Age of Enlightenment, that typically addresses the questions of the origin of society and the legitimacy of the authority of the state over the individual. Social contract arguments typically posit that individuals have consented, either explicitly or tacitly, to surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the authority of the ruler or magistrate (or to the decision of a majority), in exchange for protection of their remaining rights. The question of the relation between natural and legal rights, therefore, is often an aspect of social contract theory.
Democracy legitimises authority.
Every time you vote you sign the Social Contract.
If you vote and your ‘favoured’ candidate does not win, you have absolutely no right to complain because by voting you have accepted the process and are bound by it’s result. It is not a coincidence either that you are asked to put a cross, also used as a replacement for a signature for a person who is illiterate and thus cannot write their name, next to your choice on the ballot.
The policy differences between different candidates are exaggerated. This encourages you to sign the Social Contract by making you believe that you have a real choice. But the choice is an illusion because the true policy differences are slight and 99% of leadership is management, keeping the bureaucratic apparatus of state moving and reacting to events.
For the overwhelming majority it makes little difference which candidate wins any election. Only the wealthy and powerful who can expect some kind of reward, in the form of patronage or largesse, Government contracts etc, for their financial, political, and media support have a dog in the fight.
Your role, by voting, is to legitimise this corruption.
Democracy encourages short-termism. Instead of our leaders planning for a sustainable future they pander to a selfish and fickle electorate who only want jam today and who will punish any politician at the polls who does not give it to them. As a consequence the farsighted, fairminded and responsible leadership that the world needs in the 21st century, is completely absent, made obsolete by an evolutionary process which rewards the shortsighted, corrupt, ambitious, greedy, and vain.
This is a genuine story, In 1974 in the UK there were two general election. The first in February was inconclusive and it led to another in October. In the run up to this second election the leaders of all the main political parties made the most extraordinary undeliverable promises to buy the votes of the British electorate.
I was six years old, and attending my local infants school, when the teaching staff there taught me one of the most important lessons I’ve ever learned. They decided to hold their own school election at a special assembly at which all the parents were invited to attend, though only the children would vote. Before the assembly they took myself and a young girl into separate classrooms, to the young girl they explained the needs of the school and what changes would be beneficial to the pupils education,. To me they just gave one simple instruction “Just get elected.”
The young girl addressed the children, parents, and teachers and made a very sensible address, “more books, longer school hours, and a healthy diet”.
I, on the other hand, decided to stand on a very simple platform of “Chips (fries) everyday, and longer break times.”
The result will come as no surprise, I won by a landslide. As I grew older and began to reflect more on this the lesson became clearer. The electorate will always vote for what they want, rather than what they need. The electorate are no better than a cohort of infant school children.
Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
Sir Winston Churchill, Hansard, November 11, 1947
Aristotle would have disagreed with Winston Churchill. Aristotle thought that democracy was a perverted form of Government which served the indignant (or capricious) mob at the expense of the broader interests of the state and it’s citizens.
Voting for Libertarianism is oxymoronic. You can not vote for your freedom because the ballot is a signed contract which binds you to a democratic system specifically designed to defraud you of any choice. Only by not voting can you opt out. This does not mean that you will not be subject to the tyranny of the majority but you will be free.
The Archdruid Report blogger dealt with the question of democracy a while back and I tend to agree with him.
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2012/05/democracys-arc.html
“I’m very much in favor of democracy; despite its problems, it beats the stuffing out of most systems of government. It has three benefits in particular that you don’t usually get in other forms of government.
First, democracies tolerate much broader freedom of speech and conscience than countries ruled by other systems. I can critique the personalities, policies, and fundamental concepts of American or British government without having to worry that this will bring jackbooted thugs crashing through my door at three in the morning; in nondemocratic countries, critics of the government in power rarely have that security. Equally, I can practice the religion I choose, read the books I prefer, carry on conversations with people in other democratic countries around the world, and exercise a great many other freedoms that people in nondemocratic countries simply don’t have. These things matter; people have fought and died for them, and a system that makes room for them is far and away preferable to one that doesn’t.
Second, democracies don’t kill anything like as many of their own citizens as most other forms of government do. The history of the twentieth century, if nothing else, should have been enough of a reminder that authoritarian governments come with a very high domestic body count. All governments everywhere kill plenty of people whenever they go to war, and all governments everywhere go to war when they think they can get away with it; imperial democracies also tend to build up very large prison populations—the United States has more people in prison than any other nation on Earth. Still, all other things being equal, it’s better to live in a nation where the government doesn’t dump large numbers of its own citizens into mass graves, and democracies do that far less often, and to far fewer people, than nondemocratic governments generally do.
Finally, democracies undergo systemic change with less disruption and violence than nondemocratic countries do. Whether we’re talking about removing a failed head of state, coping with an economic depression, dealing with military defeat, or winning or losing an empire, democracies routinely manage to surf the wave of change without the sort of collapse such changes very often bring to nondemocratic countries. The rotation of leadership hardwired into the constitutions of most successful democracies builds a certain amount of change into the system, if only because different politicians have different pet agendas, and pressure from outside the political class—if it’s strong, sustained, and intelligently directed—very often does have an impact: not quickly, not easily, and not without a great deal of bellowing and handwaving, but the thing does happen eventually.
All three of these benefits, and a number of others of the same kind, can be summed up in a single sentence: democracy is resilient. Authoritarian societies, by contrast, are brittle; that’s why they can’t tolerate freedom of speech and conscience, why they so often murder their citizens in large numbers, and why they tend to shatter when they are driven to change by the pressure of events. Democratic societies can also be brittle, especially if they’re newly established, or if a substantial fraction of their citizens rejects the values of democracy; still, all other things being equal, a democratic society normally weathers systemic change with less trauma than an authoritarian one.”
I think it’s fair to say that the US democracy, certainly at the federal level has become corrupted by big money, the Citizens United decision was disastrous, there is a serious problem with populism and I would also argue that the US constitution is flawed in many ways but that is not a reason to give up on democracy; it’s a reason to fight for it against the Plutocracy.
I guarantee that the Koch brothers and their associates would like nothing better than to abolish democracy altogether in the name of “libertarianism”
This is a great article, I fully agree with it. The mention of Aristotle also coincides with my own ideas, as I think he is one of the authors we should return to in order to move away from the disastrous mistakes of modern politics. Basically, Aristotle’s study of politics have two advantages over modern (post-Machiavellian) politics:
1- There is no essentially good form of government. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages, but what really matters is that all are equally subject to corruption. A good government is one that rules in the benefit of all (monarchy, aristocracy, democracy); a bad one is the one that rules for a few (tyranny, oligarchy, demagogy). The current idolatry of democracy, preaching that peace will only exist after every country is democratic (with also a very peculiar understanding of which countries are democratic and which not: Iran and Venezuela, for example, aren’t considered as such), is just a cover-up for imperial policies, and it is high time it is rooted out.
2- most important: politics is the continuation of ethics. By proclaiming politics to be autonomic and above ethics, Machiavelli created a very long-term damage that persists to this very day, the ideas that the ends justify the means, and that the ultimate end of a politician is to remain in power.