I read an interesting poem today by Kyle Tran Myhre:
Voting as Fire Extinguisher
When the haunted house catches fire:
A moment of indecision.
The house was, after all, built on bones,
and blood, and bad intentions.
Everyone who enters the house can feel
that overwhelming dread, the evil that
perhaps only fire can purge.
It’s tempting to just let it burn.
But then I remember:
There are children inside.
I take moral issue with the philosophy of political nihilism. I find it cowardly, but I also suspect that it travels together with other bad ideas (as ideas always do) such as personal and religious nihilism that are utterly destructive.
There is a”pox on both your houses” approach that is based in simple realism, of course—and there are some people who need a good dose of cynicism to temper their idealism.
I’m people. It’s me. I’m the problem.
If I have to choose, however, blind idealism is still better than blind nihilism. I’m happier, for one. Hope seems like a healthier drug than despair. It also leads me to try to do good and right things rather than insufferably dull things. How edgy the nihilists always come off, posting their identical edgy-memes in their identical social media groups filled with identical nihilists—the intellectual bro, the troll bro, the I’ve-reached-nirvana bro.
“There are children inside.”
The problem is that this is the drug of choice of some of the most rational. So they stop voting. Worse, they stop saying useful things. Why would they? Who would listen?
And so, the conspiracy of enemies wins the fight by lobbing off the very best and brightest before they can even raise their swords to fight. They never reached the battle, because the enemy was fighting on a different front: morale.
The close cousin of nihilism is principled abstinence. I have several friends in this category. (I have few in the nihilistic category in part because it is hard to be very friendly when you succumb to the ghosts.) I trust these more—there is purpose behind their decision. I would say, however, that they ought to demand of themselves that they go to the voting booth, wait in the long lines, suffer through getting the sticker (and now, the well-intended woman shouting “Benjamin Pacini has voted!”) and then submit a blank ballot.
Otherwise, how do you know that your abstinence is truly principled? How do you know it’s not a screen for wanting to avoid the inanity of mundane bureaucracy.
Ultimately, however, the nihilists are right. Voting doesn’t matter. You have the same chance of moving the needle affecting an election outcome as a butterfly’s wings do of altering the future path of humanity. Do the math.
You’re useless.
I still think it’s worth getting involved, of course. I still vote. I still educate myself somewhat. I aim to be the kind of voter that makes politicians fear saying insane things.
But there is a real and very serious problem with voting: the more people there are, the less you matter. In every other realm of the free economy, the more people the better. Time-price (how much time it takes to earn, for instance, light) is infinitely cheaper now that there are billions of us. It used to take hours to earn minutes of light in the form of candles. Now it takes seconds of labor to earn hours of light. (Thank you to a dear friend for mentioning the book “Superabundance” such that I feel no need to read it.)
As there are more people, things become better; but not voting and democracy.
We need a competitive system of democracies—something that allows for success of the best. Something that allows for better things when there are more of us trying to find better ways. A polity of states.