The glaring, dare I say Lovecraftian, nightmare that characterizes the current election year and its respective candidates aside–I mainly want to comment on the extent to which the masses (still) believe they are the vicarious co-creators of their political destiny–due in large part to their ability to vote in tightly controlled, party-driven elections.
I see this phenomena directly tied to the indoctrinated desire to preserve the notion that despite the imperfections of the “system”, we must hold out some idealistic hope in the individuals who “represent” those who vote for them. By now, the preponderance of evidence suggesting the contrary–that those who seek political power have no interest whatsoever in representing the common voter but rather seek personal enrichment, in-group status, outsized influence, legacy, fame and insider prestige for themselves at the expense of those who wish for fair representation in the halls of power–this reality ought to have swayed the vast majority into a furor by now.
That is, even the most justifiable upending of a failed political order can only amount to success when a sufficiently sized portion of the polity in question:
1. Are thoroughly aware of the depth of the corruption
2. Have a sense of moral indignation strong enough to organize in numerous ways to combat such corruption outside the voting booth while organizing to create superior alternatives.
3. Have enough intelligence to realize that the effort required within steps 1 and 2 is miniscule in comparison to the amount of effort it will take to survive and repair the damage from the decaying edifice that is “progressive democacy” if it continues to grow as it already has.
However, if the primary method most people think of when it comes to addressing the reality of corruption is to vote-the-bad-away, we can begin to see why the bad is doomed to get worse until we abandon the false hope in an external political order that will protect the interests of genuine civilization and its citizens. Indeed, when corruption has become so endemic to the process whereby candidates are selected and subsequently presented to the public as the “most realistic options”, there are very few reasonable and scalable options left beyond syndicated self-governance, better known as Autarchy.
Unfortunately for folks who continue to defend the practice of voting (and the incessantly fallacious idiocy of “lesser evil” conjecturing that it produces), next to none of the voted-in representatives are anywhere close to even posturing as though they are willing to sacrifice their neo-aristocratic status within their elevated roles over the body politique. They’ll all just continue their customary lies on the campaign trail because this behavior has become their job description and they are typically rewarded with ongoing appointments as a result of their obsequious obedience to their comfortably odious deceptions and their cavalier fleecing of the public trust and treasure.
The realization that the changing tide of what constitutes the “silent majority” has thus begun to dawn on not only the faux representatives and the operatives of the failed state, but the voters themselves. Only about 1/3 of adults decide on derby day who sits in the “representative” seat. While it is on good estimation that some 2/3 of the total adult base in “modern democracies” fall into 4 major categories centering around not voting: those who aren’t able to vote, aren’t eligible to vote, don’t end up voting due to indifference or choose to abstain out of a position of personal principle.
It is the author’s conviction that the last category is representative of a general percentage of people among the population who have, more or less, started to realize just how deep the rot of corruption is at virtually every level of organized political economy. They have stopped voting (or have never voted) because they realize how essentially ineffective it is in contributing to substantive improvement within the political climate.
It is this category of personage who becomes more and more frustrated with each and every election cycle not only due to all the rampant fraud and shameless disingenuousness of the politicos but perhaps especially when it comes to why the average voter has failed to grasp that no one they vote for will ever solve the problems they want fixed.
This category of personage is more likely to see how this socially engineered political charade of false choice paralells the perils of false expertise when it comes modern medicine: if the doctors were in the business of curing people most doctors would eventually put themselves out of work because people might learn how to be their own doctor the vast majority of time after awhile. The same principle is true of modern politics. If politicians were in the business of fixing the problems indicated by the grievances of their respective voter bases, there eventually wouldn’t be much to campaign about and people might start to think that politicians weren’t really necessary because people could start solving problems amongst themselves with more regularity and effectiveness.
Indeed it is this category of personage that most likely harbors the highest concentration of potential political ideas that could truly upset the dominant paradigm and ironically but perhaps intentionally, they are also some of the least acknowledged and openly disrespected voices when it comes to the political landscape.
However, I think the tide is turning in favor of stoic cynicism and its incisive hermeneutic of suspicion. More and more folks are elevating their consciousness of power and its myriad forms, much to the chagrin of the degenerate gatekeepers of the current establishment of course. To this end our resolve must be continuous and as unwavering as possible.
While there are many aspects to this voting illusion, I want to conclude by deconstructing two of the leading purposes of modern voting:
1. The perpetuation of the myth that the industrial scale of problems associated with the political machine called the state can somehow be adequately addressed if not substantively solved by this same state, so long as the “representative personnel” of the state are voted in and “the people” have some kind of say via their votes.
In the face of this myth, it is essential to ask “And what of all the appointed, non-elected, careerist positions that uphold the innards of this state like the courts, the agencies, the advisorships, the ambassadors, the diplomats, the military leaders and the heads of dozens of bureaucracies? Why shouldn’t every single position and policy decision in government that wields power and entails public funds be subject to nationwide elections?” As should be obvious by now, Democracy Inc. is an absolute joke at trying to combat the inevitable nepotism and kakistocracy within the wide ranging and far reaching “non-representative” aspects of the state. Yet, despite this obvious fact, people still think their vote signifies some kind of noble and hallowed duty over all the “important parts” of government. It is truly a sad state of affairs when it comes to showing some people this fact when they would rather believe the myth.
2. The reinforcement of the behavioral conformity to the myth that the state’s systems of governance are legitimate since they are presumed to be obligated to respect the “sanctity” of the populace’s votes. This produces two mistaken assumptions that dovetailed together: that the more people who participate in voting, the better or more responsive the government will become and the less people vote the more evil and out of control government will become.
In the face of this myth, we can ask the following: “Is it really true that the act of voting on the part of the citizen actually has any real bearing on the functioning of the state’s apparatuses of power? Is the extent to which we think voting to be important to the functioning of the state possibly a product of a ceremonialized habit to which we have merely grown accustomed rather than an essential practice designed to uphold the crucial or even logistical operations of the modern state?” It is the author’s observation that voting increasingly serves only to signal one’s subjugated, plebian status as someone who is conditioned to declare ongoing fealty to the ever-expanding coercive power of the state, however right or wrong the policies produced by the state may be, so long as the voter can be convinced by campaign rhetoric to rally behind a preferred spokesperson that more or less appeals to them on a purely speculative and hypothetical “promisory” level.
Yet despite the routine abrogation of these rhetorical promises time and time again, it is still the citizens who lend legitimacy and grant validation to this deception industrial complex better known as contemporary politics by continuing to participate in an activity that only perpetuates the lies, fraud, theft, tyranny, corruption, war, hypocrisy, duplicity and depravity that have become, by all reasonable measure, inseparable features of the modern state.
The mass mind control ritual called elections serves only to acclimate the populace to these odious features by erroneously claiming that their votes are a unique and magical entity that affords them power in determining how the state conducts itself through its personnel. Despite the seemingly unending plethora of broken promises demonstrating that the supposed efficacy of voting is predicated on little to nothing more than naive belief preservation upheld by wishful thinking and conformity programming, people still line up to pull the lever not because they feel empowered by wasting their time standing in line to check a box, but because they have been so incrementally and fundamentally disempowered over time that they know not what else to do.
Thus, in an effort to not succumb to a sense of hopelessness, defeat, disgust, loss of decency and insanity the typical voter reasons that they must produce a litany of politicized, regurgitated talking points as justifications for why they “might as well” vote anyway. This psychology of perpetual subjugation under an unaccountable governing structure is what underpins the fallacy of “lesser of two evils”. The irony is, the voters are actually emboldening the very things they wish to not succumb to by continuing to lend credence to the failed and duplicitous system by voting. Instead of seeing the activity as a contemptuous process whereby the state conives assent amongst their subjects, voters cling to their worn out bromides amounting to “maybe it’ll be different this time” or “my sellout liar is better than your sellout liar”!
This is why autarchy, as in self-determination, self-reliance and decentrality within the context of a polity that embraces the intrepid sovereignty of what I like to call Syndicated Autonomy is due for a massive uptick. Indeed, this shift in political consciousness away from dependence on an oligarchically managed circus masquerading as a democratic republic to a self-governance model based on mutual reciprocity, freedom of association and communal transparency will likely be out of necessity rather than preference, like with all major transformations of society throughout history.
