Democracy Is Hell and We Are Sisyphus
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
We were all raised to believe that democracy (and most especially the constitutional republican kind here in the United States) is a supreme achievement in human political organization. We’ve been taught that being able to vote and run for office makes any such system “consensual.” We’ve been told that democracy means freedom and power to the people. Friends, colleagues, and long-time readers know that I stopped believing this mythology quite some time ago.
My realizations on this front were simmering on the back burner for years. Over the last year, they became a rolling boil. The mythology—the mystique with which democracy has been imbued—simply does not work on me anymore. The American Founders had the right principles, and they gave us the catalyst we needed to move away from the hereditary rule of the ancien régime that had dominated much of humanity’s history. Unfortunately, the system they gave us does not fully actuate those principles, and similar systems throughout the world are no better.
In a democracy, the fate of the individual human person is still a plaything in the hands of others. A system of voting simply substitutes majorities for monarchs. Democracy, like all forms of involuntary governance, directly violates human self-ownership. As such, it shares several primary characteristics in common with slavery.
Lysander Spooner identified one of its worst flaws back in 1867:
He sees, too, that other men practise this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave.
Is this what you want for your children, and their children, for all time? An endless battle to gain control of the system before the other guy does?
You will recall that in Greek mythology, Sisyphus was punished in Hades with the task of pushing a boulder to the top of a hill. The torture, of course, was that the boulder could never reach the top—it would roll back down every time, just as he neared the summit. Thus, he was cursed with never-ending failure and frustration—a pointless exercise for all eternity.
Did Sisyphus, in his hubris, believe that his task was achievable. If so, that makes it all the more horrid. This time, Sisyphus thought, I’m gonna get that boulder up there. Over and over, forever.
Listening to friends and colleagues talking about how we “fix” the terrible predicament in which we find ourselves (here in the U.S. and throughout Western civilization), it finally dawned on me: democracy is Hell, and we are Sisyphus.
Think about what are we actually doing.
We are gathering in groups and fighting to gain control of the government so that we can either
A) impose our agenda on others,
B) prevent others from imposing their agenda upon us, or
C) a combination of A and B.
Let us assume that those of us on the classical-liberal right are—especially in this era of soft-totalitarianism—mostly attempting to accomplish B. We just want to be left alone. We keep telling ourselves that if we can just elect the right people, and they can just pass the right laws, this goal is achievable. I even hear some people imagining that we can somehow “restore the Founders’ vision” of what they intended this nation to be, before it was corrupted.
Does any of this actually seem like it is even remotely possible?
Let us set aside all the other arguments that I (and numerous others) have made elsewhere, about the possibility that corruption is simply inherent in the system, and that we are on a one-way decline. Let us simply look at the way things actually work, and have worked, in our system:
We pick a team. We vote. We democracy really, really hard. If everything goes right—we elect the right people and the pass the right laws—the best we ever achieve is marginal improvement…
And then the rock rolls right back down the hill.
Two years…four years…ten years—eventually, that rock is coming right back down. Every time. Yet every election cycle, it’s the same thing: if we can just pick the right monkey to rule the monkey cage, we can fix everything.
This time, Sisyphus thought, I’m gonna get that boulder up there.
I see so much hope placed on the next election, the next leader, the next policy decision. So much effort put into rolling that rock up the hill. I even see people expressing a belief that we can somehow root out corruption in government and fix things permanently.
I am not playing along anymore. Will I vote? Maybe. But if I do, I am not going to pretend that this situation is anything other than a Sisyphian exercise in ultimate futility. The illusion has been shattered for me, forever.
I have been learning about, and have begun writing about, alternatives to this permanent hellscape. I intend to devote myself to this task in earnest henceforward.
The exit door is within view. But we cannot walk through it, or even see it, until we first recognize that we’re in hell…and that we have the power to leave.
"In truth, in the case of individuals, their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent, even for the time being. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having even been asked a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; a government that forces him to pay money, render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights under peril of weighty punishments. He sees, too, that other men practice this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further, that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no other alternative than these two. In self-defence, he attempts the former. His case is analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he must either kill others, or be killed himself. Because, to save his own life in battle, a man attempts to take the lives of his opponents, it is not to be inferred that the battle is one of his own choosing. Neither in contests with the ballot-- which is a mere substitute for a bullet--because, as his only chance of self-preservation, a man uses a ballot, is it to be inferred that the contest is one into which he voluntarily entered; that he voluntarily set up all his own natural rights, as a stake against those of others, to be lost or won by the mere power of numbers. On the contrary, it is to be considered that in an exigency into which he had been forced by others, and in which no other means of self-defence offered, he, as a matter of necessity, used the only one that was left to him.
—Lysander Spooner, “No Treason”