Posted by Erik
“Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
Some reasons why I don't and won't vote:
mp3 audio--
Democracies of any type make decisions via elections, the very essence of which transfers one’s will, thought, autonomy, and freedom to an outside power. It makes no difference whether one transfers that power to an elected representative or to an elusive majority. The point is that it’s no longer your own. Democracy has given it to the majority. You have been alienated from your capacity to determine the conditions of your existence in free cooperation with those around you.
There is an important distinction here. Parties are political in their claim to represent the interests of others. This is a claim to alienated power, because when someone takes power with a claim to represent me, I am separated from my own freedom to act...
In summary:
also see a newer post:
Democracy Take 2
My issues with Democracies are more with representative Democracy than direct/participatory democracy, but neither is perfect.
"Democracy is freedom" is what I was taught, but no longer what I believe. How is it "freedom", when the 'debate' or arguments are framed by the power elite as The Way, and The Light, and only its ends are sanctioned as solutions? Solutions outside the frame are excluded-- freedom, diversity, and autonomy die.
Our freedom of "choice" is typically A vs. B, yes vs. no, voting. Freedom is presented as a vote, but its a box. There is an illusion of participation, an illusion of freedom, and a presentation of right vs. wrong. The box becomes team against team, polarization, reductionism, sloganism, and often wedge-issues. The box is a predetermined narrow choice. Thesis vs. antithesis, and rarely synthesis. The teams become reactive, not proactive, and arguments outside the box may be ignored or rejected as outside the realm of acceptable because they are not the choices presented by the polity. The "Choice" given is believed/accepted as representing truth, the sanctity of democracy, and democracy as an end in itself. But it is the end of the self. The end of freedom. The end of choice. The end of autonomy. The individual becomes a subject of the voters, the subject of a master sovereign. The so-called freedom to decide via democracy is the right to kill the freedom of another (with the ballot box).
There is an illusion of a market of ideas, but voters are essentially consumers, if not spectators, feeding from the trough of A and B choices given to us by the producers that create and frame the agendas-- a shell-game we are supposed to care about or believe in. A game many think means freedom and power, but its merely the relinquishment of control. Some people do not vote for this reason, or the fact that the outcome is despised, or even the debate itself. As noted above, many people have to be urged to vote, and many are disgusted no matter what the outcome, or doubt anything real will emerge. This sentiment may lead to a complete lack of interest in voting at all.
The irony is that a failure to vote is viewed as a consent to be ruled. "If you don't vote you can't complain." "Can't complain"! F*ck off! I can and I will complain. "Can't complain" is exactly the retort I would expect from someone that believes in the freedom found in a box. Why should anyone have to submit to another, or a majority? Democracy is tyranny, it is the despotism of votes. The voter becomes a tyrant/despot by entering a voting booth. That's worth complaining about, vote or no vote. Besides, with A vs. B, someone is going to get the shaft. Is this OK? "Why would they vote (rule) in favor of their own defeat?"
Ian Mackaye
The lesser of two (three or four...) evils may still be evil in the end. Not OK. That is not choice. "A" may be suicide, and B homicide. Democracy is the loading of the bullet by the ballot that triggers the death of freedom.
A fundamental issue is this: the freedom democracy purports to represent is not freedom. Democracy breaks the link between thought and action, or desire and fulfillment. The self organization of individuals, or unmediated interaction of free individuals, is crushed for a box of tyranny (of the majority or minority...and the majority may not even be a true majority if everyone doesn't vote. But that's besides the point.) Democracy creates a system where the conditions of our existence are not under our control. It is Rules, Rulers, and Ruled. Our desires are separated from our power to act. Voting transfers the will, or thoughts, or autonomy, or freedom, to an outside power. Democracy is not freedom, it is slavery, it is servitude. We are alienated from our own decisions, own actions, and free cooperation.
Oppression is supposed to be relieved by voting, yet voting is an act of aggression, and an act to become an oppressor. Voting asks that someone else submits, like it or not, and the State will carry out the act triggered by the vote, even if it requires the use of force or violence against others. Some sanctioned actions the State acts upon are "criminal" in nature. Freedom dies under authoritarianism.
Freedom is choice, not rights, but believing in rights goes hand-in-hand with democracy, as an outside force is necessary to protect those rights. However, "choice" in a democracy is usually an A and B dichotomy of submission to the gang's right to rule based on A or B. It is rights that limit choice, it is democracy that limits choice, and it is freedom from rights, or just freedom in choice, that is freedom.
You just have to realize that it is individuals standing up for their own moral choices who are the only defense of liberty. You don't have to wait for someone else to deliver whatever "right" you believe you are entitled to enjoy. Make the choice to defend those freedoms you value. And if someone tries to stomp on your freedom, you will have to choose what to do about it. You can accept the stomping, and lose your freedom, by default. Or you can fight back. If you do so impulsively, stupidly, ineffectively, you can still lose and get stomped. But with planning, ingenuity and perseverance, you can win. Especially if you have help from like-minded friends and allies. Maybe you won't, but it's a chance, and you decide if it's a chance worth fighting for. Your own choices are the only control you have over your life; they are also the source of any security or liberty you will achieve. Dabooda
Society can exist without the State, but reaching civility is not obtained by acting against sectors of society by voting, i.e. strong-arming others into the box of servitude. The result is not order, but chaos and disfranchisement, the election of a gang into the halls of authority with a league of bureaucratic thugs to see the racketeering is carried out.
The current mafioso election, and the 57th time we'll be duped:
OBAMA: Our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's no evidence of that in their daily lives. (actually said during the 56th primary?)
ROMNEY: My job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.
In the end its not voting that really matters, but how we act with and towards others. With or without the State apparatus and voting, the real change or difference is in our actions towards or with others. Its not like voting really changes things, it is the actors in a "society" that do-- as Obama and Romney point out above. Although democracy manifests itself as legit, it essentially amounts to gang violence by ballot.
People whose agenda for building a better society depends on electoral politics are like rubes in a carnival audience, so distracted by the pretty assistant that they don’t pay attention to the magician’s hands. The real action is the stuff people are doing outside the state, without waiting for the state’s permission, to create the building blocks of a new society. Kevin Carson
"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." Emma Goldman
With suffrage, or the universal vote, it is evident that the law is neither direct nor personal, any more than collective. The law of the majority is not my law, it is the law of force; hence the government based upon it is not my government; it is government by force.
That I may remain free; that I may not have to submit to any law but my own, and that I may govern myself, the authority of the suffrage must be renounced: we must give up the vote, as well as representation and monarchy. In a word, everything in the government of society which rests on the divine must be suppressed, and the whole rebuilt upon the human idea of contract.
When I agree with one or more of my fellow citizens for any object whatever, it is clear that my own will is my law; it is I myself, who, in fulfilling my obligation, am my own government.
Therefore if I could make a contract with all, as I can with some; if all could renew it among themselves, if each group of citizens, as a town, county, province, corporation, company, formed by a like contract, and considered as a moral person, could thereafter, and always by a similar contract, agree with every and all other groups, it would be the same as if my own will were multiplied to infinity. I should be sure that the law thus made on all questions in the Republic, from millions of different initiatives, would never be anything but my law; and if this new order of things were called government, it would be my government.
Thus the principle of contract, far more than that of authority, would bring about the union of producers, centralize their forces, and assure the unity and solidarity of their interests.
The system of contracts, substituted for the system of laws, would constitute the true government of the man and of the citizen; the true sovereignty of the people, the republic.
The Contract is Equality, in its profound and spiritual essence.—Does this man believe himself my equal; does he not take the attitude of my master and exploiter, who demands from me more than it suits me to furnish, and has no intention of returning it to me; who says that I am incapable of making my own law, and expects me to submit to his? Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Vote for yourself, elect no one.
Legislation – at least the kind of legislation practiced by states – is not an alternative to violence but is rather a mode of violence. Those who favour persuasion over coercion should be seeking to reduce or eliminate it, not to glorify it.
Nor is violence an accidental feature of the state’s way of doing things. It is essential to states that they compel dissenters to go along with their projects; if they ceased to do this they would become mere wholesome voluntary associations, without the monopoly power that characterizes the state as such...
The state, after all, is just a particular (pathological) pattern of social activity, one constituted and sustained by the actions not only of the rulers but, crucially, of the ruled. The libertarian revolution is the only kind of revolution that doesn't by its nature require violence, since it doesn't need to take over the reins of power (either by electoral or insurrectionary means). Such a revolution can be nonviolent because it proceeds by building alternative institutions and gradually winning more and more people’s allegiance (if that’s not too statey a word) to those institutions. The pillars that uphold the state are, like Soylent Green, made of people; when the people walk away to form new patterns, the pillars dissolve and the state crumbles. No need to storm the barricades; just cease to prop them up.
By contrast with the all-or-nothing character of conventional political reform, where proposals have to be approved by 51% of the voters (or by 51% of a bunch of politicians elected by 51% of the voters) in order to be implemented, the libertarian revolution spreads incrementally, the way new products do – a few customers at a time. The revolution is complete when those still participating in the state’s institutions and practices are too few to cause any trouble to the rest of us. In Paul Goodman’s words: “A free society cannot be the substitution of a ‘new order’ for the old order; it is the extension of spheres of free action until they make up most of social life.” Roderick Long
“It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
Representative democracy asks that we select a master, yet somehow unable to be masters ourselves, but the ability to make the leap from sovereignty to the selection of a sovereign begs whether we need to select the later at all, as we are capable of discerning what it takes by ourselves— representation leaves power with the representative once selected, at that point the voter sits on the sidelines and hopes for the best, practically powerless.
