Mock the Vote

Unfortunately, at the same time they were knocking down one pillar of the Old Order, another writer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was planting the seeds of democracy worship. In Rousseau's mystical vision of a society governed by what he called the "general will," each of us would put "his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we [would] receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole."  The resulting sovereign, "being formed wholly of the individuals who compose it, neither [would have] ... nor ... [could] have any interest contrary to theirs; and consequently the sovereign power [would] need give no guarantee to its subjects." In his imagined world, "[t]he Sovereign, merely by virtue of what it is, [would] ... always [be] what it should be." According to James Bovard, who calls Rousseau the "modern state's evil prophet," contends that in promoting his concept of the "general will," Rousseau "unleashed the genie of absolute power in the name of popular sovereignty, which had hitherto been unknown."

Rousseau's concept of the general will proved irresistible to future court intellectuals, as it perfectly conflated society and state, as useful trick indeed. "With the [subsequent] rise of democracy,"- Rothbard wrote, "it is common to hear sentiments expressed which violate virtually every tenet of reason and common sense: such as '-we are the government.' The useful collective term '-we' has enabled an ideological camouflage to be thrown over the reality of political life. If 'we are the government,' then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and tyrannical; it is also 'voluntary' on the part of the individual concerned. If the government has incurred a huge public debt which must be paid by taxing one group for the benefit of another, this reality of burden is obscured by saying that '-we owe it to ourselves;' if the government conscripts a man, or throws him into jail for dissident opinion, then he is '-doing it to himself' and therefore nothing untoward has occurred."

Observing the power of "the myth that says we are governing ourselves,"- Lew Rockwell notes that whereas "[k]ings of old would have been overthrown in short order if they had tried to grab 40 percent of people's earnings, or told them how big to make their toilet tanks, or determined how schools taught every subject," modern Americans "turn a blind eye to petty tyrannies in our midst." As Bovard comments, it is as if "[b]eing permitted to vote for politicians who enact unjust, oppressive new laws magically converts the stripes on prison shirts into emblems of freedom."

Wise up, America. There's nothing special about 50% plus one. Truth and justice cannot be determined by a show of hands. We are not the government. Voting is not a sacrament. And as it stands today, when we're only given a choice between two Establishment approved candidates, voting is a joke.

Voltaire, the undisputed leader of the Enlightenment, used humor and wit as two of his primary weapons, and, as Robert Ingersoll remarked, "In the presence of absurdity he laughed". It was largely by making the divine right of kings a laughing stock that the Enlightenment writers destroyed it. It is time for us to do the same thing to the divine right of the majority.

This year, vote laughing or stay home.

 1  |  2