Do any of you have arguments for or against voting? For context’s sake, let’s assume I’m referring to the US system in a presidential election. If you have an argument FOR voting, please keep it short and simple (as I think we all agree on the importance of voting). I’m more interested in hearing your arguments AGAINST voting. Any anarchists out there? I’ve neither an argument for OR against, I’m just a politically lame individual seeking some wholesome conversation on the topic of NOT voting. I think it’s an interesting topic, don’t you?
Just to call you up on a detail some people might be offended by: you made it sound like anarchists are intrinsically against voting - they’re not. You’re probably thinking of some kind of chaotic system that’s leaderless (and therefore technically is anarchy) - but anarchy as a political term is used to describe an organised system that operates without leadership. There would be democracy and/or voting, just not for leaders.
Anyway, one thing you’ve not made clear is whether you’re talking about individuals refusing to vote, or voting not being an option.
Assuming you’re talking about the latter, there are advantages. You get no “mob rule” - decisions would be left in the hands of only those who knew what they were talking about and who were fully informed. There would be less bureaucracy than in expanding the process to a nationwide scale, quickening decisions. The masses would not be confused by notions that they actually have a shot at influencing high-up important decisions, so would develop a “sense of place” more in proportion with their actual influence - this higher degree of separation in society might reduce jealousy and nosing around in matters that aren’t your business - reducing slander, the need for “politically correct” facades and uninformed public action getting in the way of imporant decisions: the masses might be kept more focused on their actual business.
The fact that there are multiple parties to vote between, each with a substantial backing by top quality intellectuals, reveals something about the significant lack of clarity as to what the best strategy for running a country actually is. If this was known, there would be no need for democracy - there would just be one party that everyone knew was the best. Widespread support for not voting could be a symptom that everyone was actually happy with one way only of running the country.
In case you’re talking about the former (individuals refusing to vote), the effect is quite different. Acting on the freedom to not vote, by not voting, casts a vote of no confidence in the powers that be. This shows that they are either doing a bad job, that adequate realistic alternative strategies for doing a better job aren’t on offer, that there is not enough transparency or effective translation of complex matters into simple laymen’s terms, that voting procedures aren’t easy enough for today’s modern lifestyle - or that there is too little incentive to do so because there is too little difference between parties and/or too little knowledge about what they actually do and why… all sorts. Not voting can be a very powerful vote.
Silhouette,
Thanks for the correction, I didn’t make much sense. I’m looking for discussion on the former; the arguments behind individuals refusing to vote.
Playing devil’s advocate here, as I too am against voting, but I think your point here is incorrect.
If the government actually gave a shit about people, you’d be right. They’d say, “hey, 40% of the legal adult population isn’t voting, I wonder why.” However, the case IS that 40% of the people currently don’t vote, and the government doesn’t seem to mind. Empirically, the idea that not voting sends a message doesn’t really work out. It doesn’t send a message. They don’t care.
However, as I said, I don’t vote and don’t believe in voting, but for other reasons. The act of voting feels…violent to me. Violent and arrogant. When someone votes, they’re essentially saying, “I think I’m smart enough to make decisions for everyone in my state/country. I know so much about ethics and morality and economics that I’d like to impose what I think is good on everybody else via state violence.” The act of voting is so repulsive to me. Ugh.
I sure hope so. In such a society, every person is the absolute unlimited leader of his property. First and foremost his body, and the fruits of his labour. Nobody is the leader of others, except by their explicit (and revocable) choice. Such a society would necessitate private (as in non-state, not necessarily single-person or for-profit) ownership of disputable assets.
As for voting, the problem, of course, is not with voting per-se. It is with a statist system in which there are no theoretical, and very little practical limits on the scope of government power. Voting lends legitimacy to the system.
Beyond the urgent issue of personal freedom and property rights, a representative democracy suffers from an additional severe shortcoming. Since voters do not generally get to separate their vote on different issues (referenda being an exception), people base their vote on a single issue (or a very small number of issues) they deem most important. That means that on the vast majority of issues, the public’s voice is unheard. What is heard is the voice of special interest groups for which said issue IS the most important one.
At a personal level, it is easy to demonstrate that voting is an altruistic action in the sense that the direct personal benefit will always be smaller than the effort. Thus an argument against voting is that it is a waste of time. The only reason people do vote, I contend, is because it makes them feel good.
I wasn’t talking about rugged individualism and property ownership. I was talking about a society where every child grows up connected to the whole, no one owns property and everything is shared or gifted, and everyone grows up to take leadership roles for the benefit of the whole.
That would be nice. I guess you can have different people lead at different times or on different issues. Otherwise, when everyone is a leader, the term loses its meaning, doesn’t it?
Life would be particularly nice if no disputes arose over use of scarce resources. Then we wouldn’t need the concept of ownership at all. In fact, if no one owns property, even the term “gift” loses its meaning.
All in all, that doesn’t sound like a human society so much as a society of angels (or ants).
Okay, I have two strong cases against voting, both derived from Plato’s Politeia. They both are arrived at from the very first simple consideration that if everybody would vote a form of consensus would have to be found between the ideas of the voters. This means that:
The best solution will never be attempted since the vast majority doesn’t know anything about any topic, so the specialists will always be overruled by the majority. The majority basis itself on what it has heard or is trendy at that moment to think: The delusion of the day will rule.
The minority will try to persuade the majority to see reason, which will force the state to act on behalf of the majority and repress the minority, since the majority’s opinion is ‘the good’ according to electorial systems. The repression of a minority by a majority is what is called national socialism.
We can see both taking place in all democracies in the world.
NOTE:
Both can only take place when one understands democracy as following the majority as ‘the good’ (which is national socialism), not is one understands universality as ‘the good’. However, we see democracy being marketed as ‘the good of the majority’, even argued by nonsense such as: “There is always one”. This is why we also see that national socialism tries to posit itself against a description of what is possible with a situation by saying that this is only an opinion
and giving an opinion contrary to it, without any solid arguments supporting it (since it is only an opinion). From that moment on it becomes a battle of which has the majority and thereby a game of influencing people by means of their frame of reference (propaganda…). I hope this is understood by one and all.
National Socialism has involved the repression/oppression of minorities by the majority ONLY according to nation and/or race. And this is only due to the National element in the title. There is NOTHING inherent in Socialism that necessitates oppression!
The repression of a minority by a majority is just as easily called Liberal Capitalism. Those with alternative interests have access to only limited markets at best, which are unable to proliferate or benefit from the same profits and discounts that much larger majority-pleasing firms enjoy. The minorities are marginalised and the incentive is against them. This system also manages to encourage the oppression of the majority by the minority too, as success accumulates around the rich, making them richer relatively to the poor majority who are made poorer. The majority are kept poor by not being able to afford education and capital - all of which, along with rare/highly in demand/expensive improved technology, go to the rich to enable them to get more rich.
This is absurd.
If everyone was a leader, who would be led? If people were part-time leaders and part-time followers, how would it be fairly decided who lead who and when? Who would lead this decision? If the leaders were on a rota, wouldn’t the decisions average out as arbitrary? If there was a group of leaders, would any of them actually be leaders?
Groups of people need leaders, and leaders always naturally emerge within groups of people anyway because people are DIFFERENT. These modern Liberal ideas are ridiculous, dreaming that “if only everyone was equal”. They’re not, and can’t be. The problem is how to lead well and how to follow well. These abilities just seem to have been lost, only to be left with the rise of Liberalism.
The government has to care about the people to the point that they don’t rebel, and actually continue to vote them back in. But yes, with that in place, they don’t need to care.
However, if people band together and start powerful enough movements around the desire to not vote - in the knowledge that this a widespread problem - the government will have to care.
One of the advantages of a Capitalist society is that it is very individualistic - the onus is AWAY from banding together against anything. So even in the case where the majority aren’t satisfied, they have no culture in doing anything about it!
Believe it or not, such human societies existed for ages before they were decimated and destroyed by white Europeans. I’ve been reading about how they worked, the way their language developed, and how there was such a close connection between the mind and nature… and I must say I’m impressed.
And then white Europeans (migrants from these ancient tribal societies) made more powerful societies which proved more effective than having a close connection between mind and nature.
Those tribal societies only worked because they were small, and they involved a great deal of hard labour and short unpleasant and brutish living. Whilst they may be impressive in some ways, they have no doubt been glorified by bourgeois idealists who sit in their armchairs dreaming about Buddhism and Shaman Animism.
There was a reason why they died out, and not a bad reason either.
I understand your reasoning, but you should not disregard the role of the socialistic element here:
The socialistic element plays the part of the definition of way to strive for ‘the good’: to care for. By elevating the caring for the nation (or its inhabitants) to ‘the good’ this can become a danger.
Anyway, it is not socialism an sich that is the problem, it is the combination with the limitation of socialism to a specific group (the inhabitants of a nation for instance) that creates the problem. I hope you see that this is what I meant in the first place and that this is the cause of the repression of a minority.
In its beginning, Capitalism in America terrorised the local natives until nearly extinct. It then went on to exploit Africans as slaves, and now it holds the entire continent in a prison of debt from which it can never return - selling them arms and spreading privatisation that forcibly claims communally tended tribal lands, all the while encouraging sweat shops throughout Asia… all in the name of a better American way of life.
I hear what you were saying in the first place, it’s just ridiculous that you narrow it down to Socialism being the only form of government that allows the repression of a minority by a majority. Nationalistic discrimination is a problem for any form of economy, and even then, it is only an egalitarian problem. It is a very natural human impulse to want to look after your own - even at the expense of others… and in some cases especially at their expense.
Humans aren’t equal, and that is a major argument against voting for a single system to rule over all equally.
I always thought it was weird how people blamed American capitalism for exploitation that takes place in distant and non-capitalistic countries. Just doesn’t follow… Perhaps you should look into what allows exploitation like that to happen in those countries. That’d be the next logical step.
Also, consider what would happen to those people being exploited if the companies chose to stop exploiting them and leave the country.They’d all be out of a job and starve to death. Is that really preferable?
Last time:
That is not what I am saying. The socialism in national-socialism is the part which makes nationalists benefit their own. That to an extreme can be a problem (by removing all of the non-own for instance). I hope you see the difference between what I am saying and what you are saying.
Now, lets get back on topic. I cited two great points against from Plato…who was citing Socrates… What does everybody think about that?
Places in Africa that are physically rich HAVE been ‘sold’ Capitalism, in order for the trade of cheap physical resources to be freed up in exchange for the arms needed to secure the privatisation of these physical resources etc. The Africans are duped into believing they’re better off with the material wealth they receive in exchange for participating in Capitalism, trading in their simple spirituality and healthy community for an eternity in debt and oppression by those who have the arms and who forcibly took land by force and impose the artificial option of work or starve - which brings me to your next post:
Before Capitalists seized communal land by COERCION, due to FRAUDULENT reasoning, the problems of jobs and starving were non-existent!!!
People lived off the freely available land, working when they pleased - as long as it was enough to sustain the life of the communal tribe. There was no starving unless conditions “even out of the control of Capitalism” caused it.
When Capitalists first attempted to colonise Africa, they assumed everyone wanted a job and that without employers they’d be much worse off. So they tried to take on the role of employer, and the unhappier tribesmen just ran off into the bushes and started again somewhere else.
So the myth of people starving to death because they don’t have jobs is just Capitalist ignorance and myopia. They just can’t seem to conceive of a happier life without Capitalist measures in place. Some people really do want to be left alone by Capitalists because their life really is so much better without them!
In the case of exploitation in non-capitalistic countries, that’s the result of technologically insufficient nations trying to keep up with more technologically advanced nations. Either that or some incapable unmerciful megalomaniac tyrant is in power who wants to work all his subjects too hard… - but the association of Socialism with such characters is only anecdotal, and far from an essential part of Socialism.
Arjen -
So you don’t want to debate further than you stating your point as correct - that’s fine, I’ll just cease to challenge you so you can be correct in your own mind. We can just forget about the fact that the freedom of Capitalism involves the freedom to not choose the “non-own” as employees, and ganging up against the “non-own” minority who are currently employers: nationalism by ostracisation that makes the socialism in national-socialism non-essential for enabling nationalists to benefit their own. If you do reply, feel free to just repeat what you’ve already said rather than explaining it differently and better since I so obviously continue to ‘not get’ your simple, best way of saying your point.
N.B. if you read his second post on this thread, you would know he was talking about choosing not to vote in a democratic nation - not the pros and cons of a nation that doesn’t utilise the voting system. This nulls your Platocopying.
I don’t have any background in Africa, so I couldn’t say whether or not your claims hold any water. I’m mostly referring to India and other Asian countries, in which a lot of this “capitalist” exploitation occurs. In these countries, specifically India, the government has complete control over business. (IE it’s not capitalistic at all) And they flex that power regularly and tyrannically. It’s incredibly expensive and time-consuming to start a business. Basically nobody in India can afford to do it. The quickest way to start a business, without having to go through all the bureaucratic bullshit, is to bribe the officials. The only people with enough money to do that effectively are - you guessed it - American corporations. And, since the market in India is so hard to get in to without considerable capital, there’s very little competition for labor between companies, resulting in lower wages. And trust me, these employees would rather be exploited than die. That’s the only other option their government has given them. And it’s because their government has so much power over the market. Take the government’s choke-hold of the market away, and after a few years you’d see wages rise and rise and rise, and legitimate business would flourish. As long as the government has control, though…you’re not going to see improvement.
As another example of how lessening government power over the economy helps the economy, compare Hong Kong to the rest of China.
An individual vote makes no difference to what actually gets done. Manifestos are meaningless promises. The entire edifice of representative democracy is specifically designed to allow a chosen cabal to make decisions as they fit whilst paying lip service to the ‘will of the people’.
The only thing voting does is allow the majority of those who deigned to vote to kick out one set of masters for another set when they get sick of them.
But hey, that’s just what I think when I’m feeling especially cynical.
I always vote and I often play the lottery.
Not because I believe it does much but because it’s better to believe in hope than not to.
Without hope there is no point getting out of bed.
