Politics Is a Ticket to Misery

Stop fighting un-winnable fights (DN 4.6)

Chapter 4.6
The Traits of a Free People:
The Pursuit of Happiness

Sometime last fall, I was sitting on the couch with my wife after a long day. She was watching videos about decoupaging seashells. I was most likely staring off into space, thinking deep (or shallow) thoughts about something. Or maybe I was just staring at her pretty face. I don’t recall.

Referring to the video she was watching, she said, “Wow, this woman has 165,000 followers.” Her point was that that is a lot of followers for someone talking about something as abstruse as decoupaging seashells. At this point, a series of thoughts popped into my head (which I proceeded to write down, for later use).

Those thoughts speak to one of our most important pursuits: the pursuit of happiness.

The lament of the politico

People who work in politics often complain that they struggle to get followers and attention. A political book—even a profound, well-written one—is considered a success if it sells five thousand copies. Meanwhile, books on so-called “pointless subjects” sell millions. Sometimes even poorly written books. (I have heard, for example, that the prose of 50 Shades of Gray is appallingly bad, and look what came of that!)

A think tank gets a $50,000 grant to do a video series and it gets only a few thousand views. Meanwhile, a 15-second clip of a cat kissing a dolphin has been seen twice by everyone on the planet. The same goes for political articles, treatises, and monographs.

Politicos will frequently charge this lack of popularity to the shallowness of the general populace. These things we are talking about are important. Why aren’t more people listening? And often they are right—these things are frequently quite important.

Yet this is also a conceit of the politically engaged. Are people shallow and interested in dumb things? Yeah, a lot are. But does this mean that what we need is a more engaged, “civically minded” population? Maybe not…

The democratic hellscape

I’ve heard the arguments a thousand times before. I used to make them myself:

• If you don’t vote for the lesser of two evils, the greater of two evils will win…

• You may not be interested in politics, but politics is still interested in you…

• This is the most important election in our lifetime…

Okay. There is a sense in which all of these things are true. Democratic systems (any system that uses voting for policies or representatives) is a high-stakes system. Whether you vote or not, things will be done to you that you might not like. So, the argument goes, you might as well participate and be informed.

But for how long? How many generations must we continue languishing under a system that is categorically nonconsensual?

The phrase “the consent of the governed” began as a philosophical cheat-code—the American Founders’ workaround for the fact that the system they were creating violated the very principles that animated them. And now…well, now it has just become unquestioned propaganda.

Don’t believe the hype. Democracy isn’t consensual. Democracy isn’t even good.

As Lysander Spooner made so clear 150 years ago, democracy is a battle that no one chose. It is a battle wherein you must find a way to use the ballot to impose your will on the other guy before he does the same to you. It is not ‘compromise.’ It is violence.

Some—especially those who have not yet fully accepted this realization—will object that the system is all we have now, and that we have to make things better now. What choice do we have?

I understand this objection. There is no doubt that things can be better or worse under any government. Who gets elected, and the policies they impose, does have an impact.

Right now, there are engaged, effective people working in politics and public policy to make the system better (or at least to keep it from getting worse). Even if the changes they make are only temporary…even if government is morally flawed and democracy is on an unavoidable one-way slide…the actions of these highly effective people do make a difference. Like ancient soldiers forming a shield wall, these people are holding the line. But we must ask ourselves…

How long do we make them stay there?

How long must humanity scramble to defend an indefensible system? How long do they stand, their feet trying to gain purchase in the mud, trying to prevent things from going from bad to worse? Their whole lives?

And when their shield-arm finally fails from age and abuse, do they hand off their burden to their children, and they to theirs? When do they get to do something productive, rather than simply engaging in this endless war? When do they get to be happy? When do they get to feel safe?

How long are we going to go on like this? What are they holding the line FOR?

The answer cannot be that they are just holding the line until they can hand off the same task to the next generation, and so on down into the future, forever. There has to be something better.

Ronald Reagan wasn’t quite right when he said that “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” That only remains true so long as we allow it to be so—so long as we continue to fight the current fight as if it is the only possible way to live.

It isn’t.

We will always have to protect our rights, but at least we can end the practice of empowering a system that violates rights by its very existence, and that automatically places your personal freedom into the hands of others.

The argument that we must be heavily politically engaged is predicated on the belief that we have no choice—that this system is the only possible system,

That is not the belief of a free people. And it is not the belief of those of us who will comprise our new, panarchic nation. We have to believe we can do better. We have to believe that there is a way to end this madness.

Otherwise, why bother to struggle at all?

The Pursuit of Happiness

About a decade ago, on a drive back from Florida, I was listening to an audiobook version of Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Churchill was describing the partisan machinations of parliament in the 17th and 18th centuries, and it suddenly dawned on me…

Nothing ever changes.

Politics is always the same. Yes, big things sometimes happen, but most of the day-to-day activity is just a bunch of scheming and jockeying for power. It never looks substantially different from one day, or one century, to the next. And it never ends.

In that moment, something snapped, and I moved even further away from the news-cycle-based squabbles of the day. And I am all the happier for it.

I am not arguing for ignorance, apathy, or lack of involvement. But what are we involving ourselves in? The partisan wrangling of democracy is a war without end, and it is not a happy place to be. Why would you allow yourself to be drafted into such a war? Why would you ever choose to volunteer?

Maybe people are more into sports and bird watching and decoupaging seashells not because they’re shallow or “bad citizens,” but because they know what is good for them…and democracy isn’t. Maybe they just want to be happy.

Don’t you?

You’ve heard the phrase “happy warrior.” If, like me, you feel called to fight, so be it. We should definitely try to be happy warriors while we do it.

But if we are going to fight, we might as well pick a fight that we can win. And nobody wins in a democracy. Nobody wins, and there is never any end to the fighting.

We can do better. And in the process, we can make ourselves happier.

And we deserve to be.

Cover page | Preface | Introduction 1 | Introduction 2 | Introduction 3 |

(Part I) Why: 1.0 | 1.1 | 1.2 | 1.3 | 1.4 | 1.5 | 1.6 | 1.7 | 1.8 | 1.9 | 1.10 | 1.11 | 1.12 | 1.13 | 1.14 | 1.15 | 1.16 | 1.17 | 1.18 | 1.19 | 1.20 | 1.21 |1.22

(Part II) What: 2.0 | 2.1 | 2.2 | 2.3 | 2.4 | 2.5 | 2.6 | 2.7 | 2.8 | 2.9 | 2.10 I 2.11 | 2.12 | 2.13 | 2.14 | 2.15 | 2.16 | 2.17 | 2.XX | 2.18 | 2.19 | 2.20 | 2.21 | | Where: 3.0 | 3.1 | 3.2 | 3.3 | 3.4 | 3.5 | 3.6 | 3.7 | 3.8 | 3.9 | 3.10 | 3.11 | 3.12 | 3.13 || Who: 4.0 | 4.1 | 4.2 | 4.3 | 4.4 | 4.5 | 4.XX | 4.XY | 4.6