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David McElroy

An Alien Sent to Observe the Human Race

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If voting really changed anything, governments would make it illegal

By David McElroy · June 11, 2012

Ronald Reagan supposedly gave some advice to George Bush in 1988 when Bush was gearing up to run for the presidency. I can’t find the exact quote, but it was something like this: “Unless you’re the incumbent, always run on change. People always want change.”

Politicians can promise change every single election and never have to modify their basic message. Why? Because nothing substantially changes. Especially in the U.S. system, positive change is very difficult, because the system is designed to slow change down.

Even when there is change, you’ll always find it tending — over the long term — to be in the direction of government taking more and more power. For those who would like to roll back the power of government — libertarians and some conservatives — that’s a problem. (It’s actually a problem for left liberals at times, too, at least the ones who want more individual rights in some social areas.)

The weight of the evidence suggests that voting doesn’t produce change very often — and it never seems to produce change that actually reduces the size of government. Yet for some reason, some libertarians and all conservatives seem bound and determined that if they will just find a way to win this election — for whatever pathetic statist the Republicans have nominated — things are going to be different this time.

I posted the cartoon above on my Facebook page Sunday and it provoked a discussion that threatened to get heated at times. Most of those commenting agreed with the sentiment and understood the view that voting — for anyone — is the wrong approach. Several people, though, were clinging strongly to the notion that voting was the only way to change anything.

I’m not going to rehash the entire discussion here, but I do want to briefly lay out the reason that many of us have consciously chosen not to vote anymore.

First, we believe the entire statist system is immoral, and we refuse to give legitimacy to the system by participating in it. If you believe you are held captive by an immoral system, why would you give your stamp of approval to one or the other of the candidates to be your overseer? They might use slightly different rhetoric, but they’re both in complete agreement on this point. Both sides believe that government has the legitimate authority to give you orders and demand that you obey them.

If I favor one candidate over the other, I am saying that I want that candidate to rule me — and that I believe it’s morally acceptable for my chosen candidate to rule others. Since I find that morally repugnant, I can’t choose any candidate. By the very fact that they’re running for office, they’re asserting the willingness to control others and they’re admitting that they believe whoever is elected does have that right. To me, that disqualifies any candidate on that ground alone.

Second, there’s absolutely no reason to believe there is any chance of reducing government through the electoral process. The thing that many of my Republican friends like to point to as their great success was electing Ronald Reagan in 1980. I was an enthusiastic Reagan supporter back then, too. I assumed he was serious about abolishing the parts of government he promised to abolish. Somehow, he never got around to doing those things.

The federal government grew tremendously during Reagan’s eight years as president. My conservative friends have an excuse for that, too. They tell me Reagan would have cut the size of government, but Democrats in Congress wouldn’t let him. If you look at actual spending — and if you look at how little he even attempted to cut — you’ll find that that’s a flimsy argument. Reagan could have unilaterally dismantled departments such as energy and education — which Carter had just created — but he never even tried.

So Reagan didn’t perform as the myth suggests he did — and he’s been out of office for 24 years. What about all these other elections when we’ve been told that if we’d just vote for Bush I or Bush II or Dole or McCain or whoever, everything would get better?

If you believe that voting is going to make us free, you’re simply repeating the mantra you’ve been given by our civic religion. There’s no evidence of this. The evidence is that voting rarely changes anything, but on the rare occasions when it does, it only works to increase the size of government.

If you want to keep voting, that’s your business. I think it’s immoral and counterproductive, but that’s your decision. If you do choose to keep voting, though, please don’t tell those of us who don’t vote for principled reasons that we’re just apathetic or that we’re responsible for your favored candidate not winning. We aren’t apathetic and we don’t have any interest in electing the benevolent overload you happen to favor.

If you want to vote, think long and hard about why you’re doing it and then do whatever you want. But please don’t criticize those of us who choose not to. We’re making what we see as the moral and pragmatic choice — even if you don’t yet understand why.

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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