Hot Take - Vote Or Not To Vote

"Now we have a right to vote, and if one so chooses…Not to vote!"

If your morning coffee didn’t give you enough of an adrenaline and cortisol spike, this piece might. If you don’t drink coffee, let me guess, you’re miserable. 

Anyway, put on your big boy/girl pants, ladies and gentlemen; this one is a doozy.

We just came from elections, and most of you feel pretty good that you exercised your right to vote, because why not?  

For a long time in human history, people had no say over who rules them. And boy, did our ancestors fight a good fight putting up with that and doing their best to stay alive! Here we are today, and so much has changed over the years.  

Now we have a right to vote, and if one so chooses…Not to vote!  

There are people who believe that anyone eligible to vote must vote, or else they are ungrateful, irresponsible, borderline stupid or all of the above. And anyone who disagrees deserves the utmost righteous indignation, and they better explain themselves.  

So here goes, starting right at the top with the system.

There is no perfect form of government in this world of sin and woe. Democracy has some glaring systemic failures that make me sing “not yet uhuru” at 2 AM. Freedom may be a euphemism for democracy, but it’s not the same thing.

Freedom is the absence of rulers, and our representative democracy is nothing more than an oligarchy (a small group of people ruling and pretending to be acting in the best interest of the majority).

We delegate the “right” to this group of people to confiscate an arbitrarily chosen percentage of our labour (in the form of taxes), and prohibit people from doing what they choose to do to/with their bodies (what drugs they ingest, criminalise sex work); people even need permits and licenses to perform certain actions, and the list goes on. And you can’t say “no” to the state without punishment. What happened to free will?  

Whenever the issue of taxes is brought up, folks always talk about services. Yes, I don’t have a right to refuse services, and I’m forced to put up with them irrespective of the quality. We can complain amongst ourselves at a grocery store, but public opinion has proven to have a statistically insignificant impact on service delivery.  

If you think the best way to solve these issues is putting a different guy in power every five years, LOL. Ultimately, your vote only matters to politicians because it elevates them above the realities of an average person and gives them the power they are after. To quote the legendary George Carlin, “Politicians want more for themselves and less for everybody else. Politics is a big club, and you’re in it”.  

Democracy is further eroded by the idea that it is virtuous. Morality is universal and immutable. If it’s morally wrong for a bus driver to intentionally drive off a cliff, killing passengers in the process, this action will forever be wrong even if 99% of the population endorse it. A wrong can never be magically turned into a right through majority approval. The power of the majority is one of many problems of this world. I don’t like taking chances on things where I have low perceived control over the outcome. There is a possibility for anyone over 18 years old to win a lottery jackpot. I don’t play it because my odds aren’t great.

I don’t like any of the available options on the ballot, and I don’t think expending effort to randomly pick a self-selected wanna-be president/mayor is gonna change my life. There is one thing I’m sure of, and that is, for this thing to work, we’ll have to passively comply with the government of the day.

And sooner or later, we’ll share our cynicism about the effectiveness of the ruling party. I have a feeling it’s going to be something we can live with, thanks to democracy. I’m grateful, after all.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I’m a “things aren’t looking good, and it’s obvious” kinda guy.