No, Don’t Ask Me to Vote

I don't want to involve myself in politics simply because I know nothing about it. I don't want to be involved in any important, society-altering decision-making process, for that matter, if I'm not extremely well-versed in the relevant fields. Does that make me strange? Does it make me strange for not wanting to make rash, biased, ill-informed, and emotionally-charged decisions for other people?

Political issues are incredibly complex, and often require a very profound understanding of history, geopolitics, psychology, sociology, science, moral philosophy, among many other things. I, and most certainly not most people, do not possess this level of comprehension in these topics to make any informed judgments whatsoever. And it's not just the average person; it's even those in the upper middle or upper class, those that have attended prestigious colleges and have had their path paved ahead of them. The problem isn't only that the people are retarded, it's that on top of that, they're also entitled—the type of thinking that voting or any form of political involvement can come for free, that it's a privilege, and that we can use it just because we can. To be honest, it's no surprise, considering the educational philosophy of public schools and most universities that value conformity and compliance over anything else, where from a young age we're constantly drilled into following directions to gain a reward. We're not taught to think, to know how to effectively communicate and create productive civil discourse, to be self-aware enough to proudly say that you don't know. But instead we're ridiculed and deemed a failure if we say we don't know. So, when none of us are being held to a standard, we hide behind a façade of knowledge and self-appointed moral superiority. And being conformists, we don't have a problem with this, since that's what everyone else is doing.

I don't have a problem with people having their opinion. It's when you decide that your mere opinion should decide how other people should have to live their lives and how society should be run, regardless of whether or not you've done the intellectual heavy lifting and spent the long hours of research, reading, and discussion. No—this is not a discussion regarding what political structure is optimal; I don't know the answer to that question and I'm in no position to answer it. What I'm contending with is that, regardless of the present political system we live in, why is no one being held to a standard of knowledge or comprehension? Why is it that so few people actually know how to create productive civil discourse? Why is it that we perpetuate and embrace a culture that values being "right" over being truthful, a culture that is characterized by polarization of beliefs instead of a communal pursuit of human welfare? Do we just not care anymore?

Following a barrage of news surrounding the Itaewon crowd crush back about two months ago, I've begun to visualize the crowd crush as a microcosm of our political climate, and thus as a stark warning for us all to realize the dangers of a mass of people. Just as panic sets a crowd into a frenzy, pushing one another more aggressively and trampling one another to the point of death, we can in the same way drive our nation into chaos, forcing each and every one of us against our will down a path fraught with immorality, corruption, and both the very real consequence of death and the figurative death of our nation and what we stand for. No one blames the individual for the casualties in a crowd crush. Why is that? After all, in a crowd, we're the ones doing the pushing. Because we do it for our survival. We do it because there's no other path but forward. We understand that the individual becomes powerless in such a situation; they unwillingly become part of a force that compounds to eventually suffocate someone down the line. The fact of the matter is, if you want to avoid death, you avoid crowds entirely, because you understand the inherent power a crowd has—it has become not the sum of its constituent elements of consciousness, but an entire beast in and of itself. Sure, you can put all your trust and faith in the government or the event organizers to be well-prepared for such an event, but the risk always remains; it is—at the point of no return, the point at which you become part of an uncontrollable tide—the risk of losing all individual freedom to decide your fate.

"[A] crowd in its very concept is the untruth, by reason of the fact that it renders the individual completely impenitent and irresponsible, or at least weakens his sense of responsibility by reducing it to a fraction.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

I find it particularly interesting that many of us like to speak about the horrors of the 20th century as if they were the dark ages of humanity, as if we're somehow past that harrowing chapter of human history, that we've learned from our mistakes and we're far more enlightened and intellectually informed now than we were then. But seven or eight decades ago, in the grand scope of human history, is very recent history, and I think we don't realize the weight of this notion fully. And it is the idea that fundamentally, as humans, we're not all that different from who we were when we wiped hundreds upon hundreds of millions of people off the face of this earth. Yet we don't act like we live with that kind of danger, yet we are the ones that are capable of carrying out the atrocity. We are the ones that are complicit if it happens.

Jordan Peterson, in one of his lectures recounting the origins of the nationalist socialist movement in Germany in the 1930s, remarked,

"It wasn’t only stupid people who got tangled up in this. It was pretty much everybody who got tangled in it. And one of the things you might think about is: if you were there, for any one of you, there is a 90% chance that you would have got tangled up in it. You wouldn’t have been a person who rescued the gypsies, forget that."

Look at how we talk to one another, the way we find joy in trampling our political "opponents," how little we think for ourselves and instead just take a side, and how low our standards are for not only the people that we elect to lead this nation, but more importantly, for each other as citizens.  There is the proof that we haven't come that far. When we normalize and perpetuate this behavior, we don't realize that this is the same exact behavior that precipitated the complete and utter catastrophes of the 20th century. Only now, we have more tools of destruction at our disposal.

So am I wrong for thinking that this intellectual negligence and dereliction of our duty as citizens is gravely immoral? That when we allow the brute force of a crowd, a panicked mob, to dictate the path of our nation, we ourselves become capable of unjust murder? When you consider the political blunders of the past, how corrupt or inept politicians have led us astray and squandered billions of dollars? When you consider the abysmal state of living that millions of Americans still endure to this day? When you consider the atrocities and the hundreds of millions of people killed in the last century because people had no courage to stand for what was right, or the intellectual capacity to even comprehend what was right? When we instead let our emotions drag us to blindly follow ideologues and tyrants, people, that above all other considerations, merely make us feel better? Have we learned absolutely nothing from history?

Don't encourage each other to vote. Encourage each other to think.