Governance and security should just be a solved problem, like running water, or supermarkets, something you can take for granted.
This year, the weather here decided it was satisfied with summer and bit-flipped to fall. This fact should be far more relevant to my life, my experiences, and my future decisions than the beliefs of some asshole in a fancy building.
When I was a kid, fall meant something. Even still I feel a few echoes - fall feels more serious than summer. Like nontrivial events can't occur during summer, like nobody looks too deeply into things during summer, and like a project started in summer can't be undertaken with a deep commitment to finish it. Though, these are all events, by which I can only vaguely point at the feeling with.
Not only should the events of summer changing to fall be far more important, even exploring that feeling should be far more important than politics. I should be able to rationally put all thought of politics from my mind and simply wonder what causes fall to feel like fall, and if that feeling in turn means anything about fall.
Instead, I get to explore what it feels like to have some apathetic narcissist living hundreds of miles away try to take all my responsibility away, 'for my own good,' they say. And succeed, of course, giving it all to themselves, naturally. To reverse this is to explore what it feels like to try to change the mind of that apathetic narcissist. As a bonus, while they've taken moral and physical responsibility they refuse to be held responsible (again, successfully) for their predictable and repeated failures and abuses.
No. That is Wrong, with a Capital Fuck. Off.
Of course this is but an ideal. Theft won't ever be completely eliminated either. However, today Anglophone society deliberately promotes politics. Just as you won't ever eliminate theft by a combination of actions that all cause more of it, promoting politics doesn't end well.
But what bothers me the most isn't the asshole. Of course assholes are going to make life hard for everyone else, and are no more eradicable than thieves. What bothers me the most is that...doesn't everyone else have feelings too? Maybe I'm just immature...but I have to ask, why? Why isn't it obvious that a conversation about how fall feels is vastly more satisfying and potentially useful than a conversation about whether Libya is worse or better off, or what the exact optimum value of minimum wage is?
Obviously, we talk about minimum wage because it makes certain voters money. Vested interest and incentives and all that.
But why is that respectable? Only a few blatantly selfish idiots feel the cash incentive. Minding your own business is actually a majority philosophy, and yet the minimum wage is considered important and suggesting that politicians are busybodies is gauche.
Why do so many side with the asshole?
Not that I want to impose essentially poetic conversations as high fashion. You should get to decide for yourself what you find important, if you want to. Pick whatever you...feel like.
But politics? Really?
Who do you think actually feels the happiest, the most satisfied with their life, as they grow old?
This guy?
How about this guy?
Maybe guys like this?
Freedom from politics is my goal as well.
ReplyDeletePolitics is an attempt (an inevitably failed one) at "getting along with" people you don't like by gaining power over them so that they won't have power over you.
The only power you should have is the power to defend yourself from aggression and theft/fraud. Politics goes way beyond that into the zone of justifying your aggression and theft against others. It is wrong.
I haven't actually debated a statist or other authoritarian in a while, but I expect I'll start doing it on purpose at some point here.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to start by asking if they accept the existence of morals.
If they don't, I will suggest that I shoot them because I don't like that idea - it's not like they can object.
If they do...
If they have the right to have power over me, I must have the right to have power over them, by sheer symmetry.
For example, if they have the right to order me around if they're elected, without me first explicitly agreeing to an election, I must have the right to hold them to the results of my own personal election, without asking them first.
I therefore rig an election and elect myself. I order them to stop holding elections.
Coercion is always logically contradictory.
Of course in reality democracies work by right of conquest, they've just stopped talking about it. I can't go against an election or hold my own because the army has it in its head to stop me, and as a matter of pure physical superiority, they win.
But they've stopped talking about it precisely because 'might makes right' is no longer considered legitimate by anyone...even that army.
Politics is rubbish. It is dishonesty exemplified. It's a system that promotes and serves itself while leaving those that participate in the dust.
ReplyDeleteWhile I do believe politics is pointless, political science most certainly isn't. The problem seems to be that few (competent) political scientists become politicians.
Ah, quite so.
ReplyDeleteI just realized I was using the conflation definition of politics. The one that's used in 'political rights' which means governance among other things.
I'm saying it would be better if I had no political rights whatsoever. Well...except exit, if that counts. But having exit just means I'm not a prisoner.