Democracy Is Stupid

There’s this grotesque assertion that democracy is some kind of shining accomplishment of humanity. Like it’s the top of the ladder to civilization or the requisite for a free society. This is only a short list of why democracy is actually terrible and barbaric:

Tyranny By Majority

By definition, if 51% of the population votes to enslave 49% of the population, then that is functionally democracy. I know it’s not the ‘spirit’ of democracy and that supposedly a bill of rights that limits the power of the government from drafting and signing laws should also be in place, but that too has many of its own problems. Especially since there is no meaningful respect to a constitution shown by its policy makers. All it takes is for something to be popular for it to justify the initiation of violence/coercion against peaceful people. To seize property, imprison people, kill people, go to war, commit atrocities, torture, enslave, etc. This is not hyperbole. This is historical fact.

The Majority Is Of Average Intelligence

It is my contention that the vast majority of people are incapable of thinking critically and rationally about most issues. Not only are they uninformed, they are often starting from a philosophically hollow foundation. Of people who vote, most of their voting decisions are based upon emotional interpretations of character informed by the advertisements, their personal preferences which may or may not be based on self-interest or the interest of some greater good, are single-issue voters, or are just totally misinformed about what the candidate they support even stands for. If you ask people what they believe and why they believe it you quickly see how shallow the reasoning behind their voting decisions really are. Simplistic platitudes and talking points parroted from cable news or the blatant bias of journalists. People vote based on the most superficial criteria like race, gender, religion, or personality. They can’t really even articulate why they believe what they believe in, they are just casting a ballot more out of a team/tribe sentiment. Perhaps some people reading this might have a deep and intricate moral and economic philosophy that is the basis of their voting decisions, but they are almost certainly all fallacious or at best internally inconsistent, at worst they are based on purely subjective personal preference.

Apathy Reigns

The plurality of eligible voters vote for nobody, and yet somebody ends up seizing office. This is not the true ‘spirit’ of democracy in my view. If the majority of voters wanted neither, then neither should be in office. It should be settled then and there but somehow a minority of people get their way. 

Politicians Are Professional Deceivers

Politicians employ a wide variety of cognitive, linguistic, visual, gestural, and rhetorical devices to contort a dialog about how to best extort people’s money and what to squander it on. They call it “taxation”, but make no mistake, it’s flat out extortion. They use focus groups, marketing, memetic engineering, data mining, astro turf/bot nets, and just plain old bribery (welfare) to gear ads and speeches that will garner votes.

The Popular Vote Isn’t Even Relevant

The popular vote counts within a county/zone/prefect, but above that it’s only counties/zones/prefects that are being counted. Some counties/zone/prefects are weighted differently in what is known in the US as The Electoral College. It means there can be circumstances where despite the fact that a candidate loses the popular vote they can still win the Electoral College, which has happened several times now.

Culture And Commerce Improves Life, Government Retards or Destroys Life

Of the phenomenon that influences your day to day life, nothing is more significant than Culture and Commerce. Two things that the government cannot take credit for. If Donald Drumpf or Barry Obama claims that their policies helped the economy, it’s a lie. At best, a politician can only say they interfered the least and thus fostered the prosperity in a market by not meddling in it.

I do understand that progressives and marxists will assert that prosperity should be redistributed through government programs/welfare but my point is that the government itself does not create wealth, at best is can only redistribute it. And wealth is not merely the currency that is exchanged, but the products and services created by the market. Wealth is also represented by things like cars, refrigerators, telecommunications/smartphones, entertainment, electronics, shoes, vacations, fine dining, sports, games, washing machines, etc. It is through culture and commerce that the reduction in cost and increasing availability of these products/services has everything to do with market innovation and technological advancements and nothing to do with decrees from government.

The generosity of America isn’t a result of welfare, it’s despite welfare. There is a constant outpouring of voluntary charity given by Americans to a thousand different causes. Be it shelter, food, clothing, bicycles, medical care, end of life/hospice care, prescriptions, corrective lenses, books, shoes, or even cash money. Americans do a lot to help improve things locally and globally. The increased popularity of farmer’s markets, non-gmos, cruelty-free foods, fair trade/fair labor goods, and genre-based media/art/games is all to do with cultural shifts and nothing to do with decrees from on high.

The government on the other hand extorts money and uses a significant portion of it to kill people for no rational justification.

The most important vote you can make is with how you spend your money. But the beautiful thing about commerce and culture is regardless of how unpopular something is you still get to enjoy it on your own without having to inflict it upon other people.

“It’s A Bad System, But It’s The Best We’ve Got. What’s The Alternative?”

This is the kind of thinking that needs to be dispelled. There is no answer to this question, because the question itself is wrong. There is this presumption that a system is somehow necessary. That the necessity of a ‘system’ is a given. It isn’t.

In game theory, biochemistry, economics, sociology, anthropology, it is recognized that systems of many independent agents with independent drives/incentives can self-organize and self-assemble into coherent super structures, organisms, crystals, polymers, corporations. We see it over and over again in nature, in society, in tribal culture, in animals, micro organisms, and even at the subatomic level. Atoms bond according to a supply and demand of electrons. They share, driven only by their affinities which are only defined by what we call the ‘laws’ of physics, not because they voted on it, not because there’s a police force that enforces a set of laws.

Voluntaryism is the key to civilization. We can have a maximal prosperity and opportunity of action for a maximal number of people if we just stop initiating violence against peaceful people. Abandon the arcane systems of violence and destruction. Compliance under threat of force is not voluntary. If you want to help people or protect people, stop relying on violent thugs in magical uniforms to extort the wealth of others.

When your plan is to resort to violence when you fail to persuade someone to follow your bidding, could it ever have really been called "civilization" to begin with?

“How is that Achievable?”

There are many independent strategies proposed. Agorism is seen as the most peaceful though tricky to implement. It subverts the scheme of taxation through legal loopholes. It also sidesteps any of the occupational licencing or certification requirements by simply not dealing in money and instead bartering with exchanges of services facilitated by social media or other apps.

There’s The Free State Project that is attempting to concentrate the electoral power into the hands of libertarian-minded voters with the intent of shrinking the government to something like a Night Watchman government (and perhaps down the line transitioning to a stateless society that might spread virally to other territories, like a CRISPR gene-editing virus that cures cancer).

There’s also a strategy to privatize public services without government contracts to the point where the state becomes irrelevant. Cities like Gurgaon (Gurugram) India or Taiwan has totally transformed a region that was once baron into sparkling metropolises with high standard of living and high median income because of private local and foreign investment in business. They operate almost like a Zomia except they have high-tech infrastructure and services. While these kinds of businesses might not necessarily operate strictly legally, they can afford to finance courtroom battles through crowd-sourced private arbitration.

The Bounty Economy or what is more popularly known as “The Sharing Economy” and “Crowd Sourcing” has disrupted much of the low-level cronyism in things like taxis through ride-sharing apps. The unions and lobbyists fight vigorously and dirty to block the Bounty Economy from doing business, often times by bribing police to harass people.

Memetic Engineering is an over-looked and underrated method for achieving a change in culture. By simply reblogging or retweeting an idea, you are potentially inoculating people’s consciousness against bad ideas. They can be debated, but in a free market of ideas, so long as you avoid using dehumanizing language, the better ideas always win. Logic and evidence is on the side of peace.