Voting as moooooooooo-d affiliation.

From the forum:

Emmy: These results are even more fascinating when they split them by married/unmarried. Curious where you land on the political spectrum, Pete? You’re one of the few people where I can’t tell lol.

Pete: Ha well I’m not American so it’s even more of an armchair sport for me to observe US politics… But I also don’t vote domestically at any level and haven’t for well over a decade, so placing myself on a “spectrum” is tricky to say the least. But I take this as a compliment! “Only a dead salmon swims with the stream” and all that. Also my politics is ever-evolving and I’d like to think that I still have a lot to learn. Not sure if you read my recent article The Second Law of Barbarian Dynamics? Because while I see some merit to positions on both sides of the political spectrum (though I certainly shy away from collectivist leanings, or else wtf would I be doing in crypto), I’m not sure that it ultimately matters what politicians (much less the electorate) think for as long as the Pentagon and DoD are politically independent. At this phase of the dynastic/empiric cycle, the debate seems to reduce to: since we all agree the patient (western-industrialism) is mortally wounded, do we apply novocaine to numb the pain (aka “conservatism”), or do we put a bullet in its headi (aka “progressivism”)? I currently think that all other “debates” about “issues” are either downstream of this, or an intentional diversion from this distinction. So while I enjoy the “sport” of US politics at least as much as the next guy, I also have a healthy detachment from its fundamental proposition as currently presented to its electorate.ii

Emmy: Amazing answer! Do you get shit when you say you don’t vote? What’s your answer to pushback? I mostly don’t bring it up unless someone else says they also don’t vote first.

Pete: Kinda like conversations about crypto: even above-average ppl are massively under-equipped for a deep conversation about these topics. So path of least resistance and optimal social smoothness is somewhere between vagueness and outright evasion. And if non-voting comes up and I’m really put on the spot, I find it massively effective to pull out the functional elitist card: like how dare any political system equate MY opinions and analysis with those of some mouth-breathing fast-food-eating Netflix-watching slob.iii Which is an observation so self-evidently truthful to anyone with a pulse that I always get quiet nods of approval in response, before we change the topic of conversation.

All of which actually ties in quite neatly to Paul Graham’s treatise Identity (2009):

I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people’s identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that’s part of their identity. By definition they’re partisan. […] Politics, like religion, is a topic where there’s no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion. All you need is strong convictions. […] More generally, you can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it doesn’t engage the identities of any of the participants. What makes politics and religion such minefields is that they engage so many people’s identities.

Or put a more Cow-en-esque way, voting is moooooooooo-d affiliation. And you don’t wanna just be another herd animal, do you? Small teams ftw!iv

  1. Pol Pot / Mao Zedong styles! ↩
  2. Mr. Sci has a related observation vis-a-vis political discourse in the West at present (emphasis added):

    All political discourse in a liberal democracy necessarily accepts certain premises, otherwise there’s no point in the discussion taking place. These premises amount to a denial of various asymmetries of power. Take power seriously and political discourse becomes futile.

    This explains some quirks of political discourse in the liberal world:

    1. Why, even when faced with overwhelming evidence of power at work, people will still claim an outcome was really the product of spontaneous order

    2. Why so many things get classed as ‘conspiracy theory’

    In a liberal democracy, political discourse is supposed to contribute to collective ‘problem solving’. If you admit that events are the product of elite machinations, you remove yourself from liberal political discourse. So people find excuses to ‘stay in the game’.

    If you admit too large a role for power, you place yourself outside polite political discourse, as it is imagined under liberal democracy. You either joint the large number of people who have ‘checked out’ of politics or, if vocal, you get classed as a ‘conspiracy theorist’.

    The result is a kind of ‘power blindness’. The elite can openly work against the interests of the people and the people will come up with elaborate theories about how they actually did it to themselves.

    The most common ‘political self-harm’ theory is, of course, partisanship. People keep voting the bad party in, rather than the good party. Think both parties are bad and you’re now ‘apathetic’, think this is by design and you’re a ‘conspiracy theorist’.

    Which is actually a good reminder (again!) that our society is far more Epicurean that we tend to realise or admit:

    ↩

  3. And that’s before we even scratch the surface of the out-and-out fraud and logically absurb pretense of the whole theatrical charade:

    ↩

  4. Samo gets it:

    ↩

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *