Originally tribes of extended families and like-minded individuals joined together to create a community. They were self-governing and consenting associations of individuals, a unified whole. The head patriarch acted as a king, the head of the community, ensuring justice and leading them in defense. He served the people and their customs; their laws, representing their governance ideals, were the authority. Lords and warriors defended the tribe from subjugation by outside forces.
Now imagine a larger tribe overpowers this smaller community, compels them to labor, exploits their resources, and forces them to obey their laws. We can all condemn such an action as immoral.
To prevent these occurrences, tribes assembled in more significant numbers, built fortifications, invested in weapons, and established laws to outlaw and punish such heinous acts. In other words, they protected the individuals’ and communities’ desire to be governed as they wished from others who would use their numerical superiority to dominate smaller communities.
However, in modern times, we have legalized the exploitation of minorities through voting. Our political system is at war with human nature; it is fundamentally unjust.
Democracy gives the mob back its ability to plunder the minority, denying them self-governance. The modern state keeps the ransacked minority in check with its monopoly on legal violence (police force, prisons, military, etc.), threatening force and fines against the non-compliant. Libertarian political philosopher Jason Brennan wrote, “In a Democracy, we are not volunteers, we are conscripts, we cannot opt-out, we are forced into it…governments do not merely advise us to follow their rules…they enforce their laws and rules with violence or threats of violence.”
Thus democracy indulges the worst part of human nature; the desire to rule others. It brings out the Saruman and Sauron within us as we seek to use the One Ring—or in our case, government power—to coerce others to do our bidding. Democracy is not progress but a return to the worst of our tribal origins. It is a corrupt, backward, and oppressive system.
To give control to a majority seems to be adding insult to injury or kicking someone (the minority) when they’re down. Under democracy, the minority group must then spend time and energy evangelizing their political cause to their neighbors while dumping money into political parties to avoid further punishment for being in the minority. If the minority succeeds in ending their subjugation, they have only accomplished placing the former majority in the situation they were just in; democracy ensures a steady supply of the strife derived from people who cannot be governed as they wish.
We can choose our own “gender,” but we are not afforded the same privilege regarding our governance. Instead, like slaves, we are born into subordination to a government we can do nothing about. Brennan observed, “unlike a consensual transaction, where saying ‘no’ means no, for the government your ‘no’ means yes.”
I never consented to be under a secular government or a national political party. I was born a serf to many lords in Washington DC, forced to obey, forced to fund what, in my eyes, is evil (such as government education, specific military actions, the subjection and extraction of labor of others, the stealing from one and giving to another, and so on). I have no semblance of self-government whether I “participate” in my subjugation by voting or not. What free person would willingly consent to such a situation?
Politicians utilize people’s participation in voting as the justification for extracting our labor, regulating our lives, punishing us, coercing us, micromanaging and molding us. The “privilege” of voting is the supposed rationale for their monopoly on legal confiscations and coercive measures. This being so, they desire as many of us to vote as possible, to lend credibility to their claimed justification to rule us, and maintain the facade society is consenting to their rule.
Politicians, the media, and all the state’s tentacles continually bombard their subjects with the importance of being politically active. They must convince you of the importance of elections to justify their authority over you. They seek to eradicate the potential threat of a population questioning the validity of suffrage as a justification for their own continued subjugation. If too few people vote, some may question why these politicians are ruling over other people (such as nonvoters, those who lose the election, etc.) without their permission in the first place.
Most voters would admit that millions of citizens have never consented to their subjugation or even participated in voting. Further, millions of voters never approved of those who won the election or the laws (often created and enforced by non-elected officials) they must submit to. Even so, they say you can achieve self-governance if you desire it; you can vote!!!
Democrats believe everyone—after discriminating against age, criminal record, place of birth, and those deemed of unsound mind—should vote because everyone deserves self-government. I agree with them on the second part, but that is why I reject the first.
It is commonly believed voting provides self-governance. Your vote is your voice; if you dislike a candidate, you can vote for another. Further, if they underperform or do not do as they advertised, you can replace them in the next election; this method, they say, allows the voter to attain self-governance. This would be true if each voter made up the entire population; the problem is, they do not.
Voting does not provide self-governance; if you had self-governance, you could prevent any decision you disagreed with by voting against it. For example, I have voted in almost every election since I was eighteen and have yet to vote for a winning national candidate. Further, I have never desired them to rule over me in the first place. I was voting to prevent an even worse politician from controlling me. But instead, someone others have voted for has always supervised me.
In other words, I did not consent; someone else appointed my sovereigns. Therefore, I no longer perceive voting as a chance to choose a government representing me. When I do vote, I only vote third party. And I do not intend to ever again, at least not at the federal and state level, so I can symbolically give the middle finger to everyone.
You are more likely to win the Powerball three times than change an election by voting. If by some miracle, your vote changes a seat from a Republican to a Democrat or vice versa, the chances one seat affects the power balance are even more unlikely. In the tiny chance your vote swings the majority in the House or Senate, most likely, your vote has been for someone other than who you desire but who is on the party ticket. They represent a national party more than you as an individual.
Voting amounts to an astronomically remote chance of choosing the “lesser of two evils.” It is terrible at providing what it claims to deliver; representation.
Voting is not about getting the government you desire; it is more about preventing others from having theirs. It propagates a mindset saying we must fight over Tolkien’s “One Ring to Rule them all.” We puritanically believe we are better than the other dumb peasants, those who do not vote like us. So we must vote to coerce them away from their self-governance and into our mold. Democracy is one big war of people denying each other self-rule.
We universally agree it is immoral if one person forces another to do his will when it is against their own. Unfortunately, this principle is forgotten when election time comes. If someone desires to control another, he can vote, or worse, make a good living by entering politics. Democracy creates an entire tax-funded system of bullying. It is not a loving but a mean system of governance.
We don’t allow the collective to decide essential questions because we desire to choose for ourselves how to live—subjecting more choices to the majority necessitates losing liberty and happiness. Loss of liberty is the automatic consequence of democracy, yet we uncritically accept it and even have the audacity to label it self-governance.
