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288 sats \ 10 replies \ @Undisciplined 8 Nov 2023 \ parent \ on: The 10 Phases of Voting meta
I started not voting when I realized that never once in American history has any election been decided by a single vote. On top of that, I realized that even if my vote swung an election, that probably wouldn't change anything important either.
It's the epitome of "not worth the effort".
For several of the elections in the last twenty years, the outcome was decided by a very small number of votes in key places. It's not hard to conclude that a relatively small number of Undisciplined-type people, following the same logic as you, could have changed the results.
In addition to that, voting isn't a one-move game. The consequences of having informed and thoughtful people secede from the process is an informative signal to those who remain -- a kind of evaporate cooling, or iterated prisoner's dilemma.
This logic is extra puzzling to me, coming from you. You said in another comment that you're a vegan because
I believe plausibly sentient beings deserve the benefit of the doubt when it comes to moral consideration.
I'm guessing that, before you were a vegan, you weren't restricting your carnivorous activities to the animals you killed yourself; which means that the animals you were eating then, and that you could be eating now, were dead, whether you ate them or not. There was no grocery store tracking Undisciplined's consumption of chicken fingers, and your contribution to the destruction of sentient life had an unfathomably small influence on industrial farming writ large. The machine would grind forward, regardless of whether or not you ordered a hamburger.
And yet you don't eat meat.
My guess is that you recognize that your tiny moral act means more than the literal act itself, and that it echoes throughout the culture in innumerable ways, a kind of I, Pencil of conscience. It has symbolic meaning, and it has informational power via the signals that propagate to others.
Am I close? I'm interested in how you'd compare your attitude in regard to the two domains.
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I certainly hadn't put these two things next to each other before. The following line of thinking that you introduced interests me:
In addition to that, voting isn't a one-move game. The consequences of having informed and thoughtful people secede from the process is an informative signal to those who remain -- a kind of evaporate cooling, or iterated prisoner's dilemma.
You're spot on with my reasoning about eating animals. In fact, I mentioned in that thread that I really don't care what happens to an already dead animal, including me eating it. What I'm trying to avoid is adding demand signals to the production of animal products, as well as wanting to add to the demand for alternatives.
On the voting front, my interpretation of the same factors is that the regime incessantly encourages voting and therefore prefers higher levels of engagement. Lew Rockwell makes the case that the regime is most concerned about low turnout because that is a direct implicit challenge to their perceived legitimacy as representatives.
How are you thinking about the iterative dynamics of abstaining from voting?
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How are you thinking about the iterative dynamics of abstaining from voting?
The principle thing that I think of is a kind of contagion and a norm creation cascade.
You may have heard about how suicide is contagious. (The finding is well established but I don't have a favorite reference to point you to.) But many acts are contagious, many beliefs. The more people who do the thing, or purport to believe in the thing, the more others get the sense that the thing is true, and adjust accordingly, kind of the intersection between a Keynesian beauty contest and broken windows theory. (This is why I talk about 'belief' and 'coordination' so much in those book club discussions.)
So not voting, or civic disengagement generally, leads to more civic disengagement, which exacerbates some of the things that lead people to disengage (this the evaporative cooling link, above.) Once enough people decide they don't need to follow the law, and get away with it, a lot of other people decide that the law is for suckers. And the truer it is the truer it is. And suddenly you're in Greece, or Argentina, or any other low-trust state. It's a shit hole. Corruption is everywhere. You've helped create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Lew Rockwell makes the case that the regime is most concerned about low turnout because that is a direct implicit challenge to their perceived legitimacy as representatives.
Have you ever had to run something vaguely democratically? Like getting a bunch of stakeholders to agree on some giant strategy? The best possible outcome is when fewer people show up; you don't have to be interrogated, you don't have to negotiate with a bunch of randos, you can play a smaller Game of Thrones. You have a handful of people who know the score and you all have a better chance of getting what you want.
So the Rockwell claim doesn't hold water for me. I understand it logically, legitimacy is certainly important. But it would seem far down on the list of things to worry about if you're a would-be master of the universe.
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Revealed preference is the reason the Rockwell point is important. There is a huge investment in encouraging people to vote. My view is that they do that because the elections only serve the purpose of perceived legitimacy: Emma Goldman's line "If voting changed anything, they would make it illegal." comes to mind.
To your point about civic engagement, I believe voting crowds out real productive civic engagement. As the state has grown civil societies have become almost extinct. People feel like they've done their part by voting. That's socially damaging because they didn't actually do anything. It would be better for people to not vote and seek to do their part in some other way.
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Revealed preference is the reason the Rockwell point is important.
I could rebut that the same reason that prices in a free market approach the true aggregate value of their inputs, participation in a democracy asymptotes toward what people want and believe. Maybe the process is flawed in the same way that market action is flawed, subject to all the biases we know about, structural issues, etc. But most people don't want to shit-can the ability to transact, especially not around here.
More briefly: if you think there is something to the value of diverse information, and that it aggregates toward a better idea of truth, then you don't need to assume anything sinister about a democracy encouraging citizens to be involved in their own governance.
That's socially damaging because they didn't actually do anything. It would be better for people to not vote and seek to do their part in some other way.
I don't know any reason to believe that this dichotomy actually exists. I mean, it's a story. But is it a defensible story? In the threads today I keep reading the equivalent of "I didn't vote so instead I could start a business in Africa and invent a more efficient rotary engine" but am not compelled that this is anything but rationalization.
Kind of like your stoner friend used to go on ad nauseum about all the amazing industrial uses for hemp. It's like: Ryan, you like weed. It's fine, but you're not fooling anyone.
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It's like: Ryan, you like weed. It's fine, but you're not fooling anyone.
I'm going to disagree with a lot of what you said, but we agree on that. I am also very skeptical of anyone who claims they did something dramatically humanitarian just because they didn't vote.
At the core of our disagreement is that I do not believe we live under a democratic government (meant in the looser philosophical sense, not the "actually it's a republic" sense). I have often said that all "Democracy" means in American discourse is "rule by Democrats". There are entrenched interests and what they want they generally get.
In every presidential election of my lifetime, the perceived peace candidate has won, and yet America has been at war every single day of my life. Congress has an 11% approval rating. I just don't see a ton of evidence that what voters want matters very much, at least nationally.
Also, conflating voting with being involved in governance is another instance of people feeling like they've done something meaningful by voting. I'm all for people being involved in their own governance, by actually seeking office or directly petitioning an office holder. Since I don't think voting does anything, I don't think doing it is a form of involvement.
It's fine if you don't believe the crowding out story. I certainly don't have conclusive evidence for it. What I have are a lot of first hand experiences of people who tell me that voting is "doing their part" who do absolutely nothing else for anyone. I also know that what I would consider meaningful civic engagement has declined dramatically. I'm connecting those dots, but you don't have to.