The problem with voting
Or, how to cede your power in one easy step
There is tremendous energy wasted on electoral politics. At best it is a distraction, at worst it serves to suffocate any alternative.
To clarify, this isn’t an attack on voting per se, it’s an attack on what large scale political elections in the United States have become.
We are beaten over the head our entire life with the notion that change begins at the ballot box. That’s false. The reality of change is that it’s uncomfortable. Voting will never yield substantive change because it is designed to prohibit the very discomfort which is a necessary prerequisite to substantive change.
In the civil rights movement blacks that sat at segregated lunch counters did not wait for an election to create change — and that’s exactly why they were successful. When we look back, we think of those sit-ins as righteous and assume they were popular. They weren’t. Forcing change never will be.
Lunch counter sit-ins were effective because they disrupted business as usual and forced people to look at what many would have preferred to avoid. Change happens when the discomfort of its success is less than the discomfort of the present. That means that the push to create a better future will almost always be unpopular in the present. The great tragedy of voting is that it tricks us into believing we can have progress and comfort.
‘Voting is the most important thing you can do,’ they say. Another lie.
That attitude encourages us to neglect our real power, which is our everyday life. When we are told that voting is most important, by default that means all else is less so. It sends an unconscious message that we can neglect other avenues of change and minimizes their appeal.
Voting takes away the burden of responsibility. You did your part, it tells you, you voted for someone to make decisions on your behalf. It allows us to see injustice in the world and think it’s not our role to change it; or worse it allows us to become blind to it completely.
We have arrived at the present because of voting. If we want to stay on this path, then voting will keep us here. If we want to make a substantive divergence, then voting will never take…