My way...or else

     Courtesy Oleg Volk, A Human Right

I am growing to enjoy Rob Sandwell's contributions to The Libertarian Enterprise.  The one that really stuck out this week, is called "Because That's How They Roll", and it gets right to the meat of the matter.  The big matter.  In some ways, the only matter.

What matter?

That the political process is nothing less than legitimized mob rule, enforced by proxy with a hired armed gang.

In the end, while each of these people may not be willing to swing the headsman's axe themselves, they are more than willing to deputize a third party to kill on their behalf. And they comfort themselves in the knowledge that only those of true moral turpitude will face the inevitable conclusion of their position.

And quite frankly, those sons of bitches have it coming, don't they? Otherwise, they would have quit being gay, or refusing to pay taxes, or drinking or smoking pot, or selling sex long before we had to kill them to make them stop. Obviously, they are so vile, so incurably villainous that in the end, the only option left was violence.

The tough part is, this holds for any political process.  It's no less true of a constitutional republic than it is of an autocratic socialist dictatorship.  Voting, in the sense that it "legitimizes" any government with a monopoly on violence within its borders and the power to force "its" constituents to do what it decrees, is a difficult act to defend:  how is it ever--ever--legitimate to force peaceable others to do what they do not want to do?  How can individuals who have harmed no one be made to conform to someone else's standards under threat of imprisonment or worse?

It is almost invariably assumed of me, for example, that I will cast my vote in the political process, because I trouble myself to know what goes on in that sordid charade.  This assumption, itself, is part of the problem.  Why would increased knowledge about anything automatically imply an increased likelihood to participate?  I mean, I know I certainly have not spent all that time learning practical weaponcraft because I somehow want to get into fights--I want to know how to get out of them!  Cannot one approach the political process in just the same way?

The more I learn about the political process, the more truth I find in the words of Ivan Illich:

School is the advertising agency that makes you believe that you need the society as it is.

Government is about who gets to force whom to do what--mob rule, whether "legitimized" by a vote or by a dictator, with little difference to those ruled.  To upset that dynamic is to pull the rug out from under the state entirely.  Consequently, "elections" may achieve the status of highly elaborate personality spectacles, but if you look closely, what is never allowed is the idea that the whole idea is what is bankrupt.  Anyone who would abstain is clearly "apathetic", or just ig'nant--it couldn't be a rational, logical choice.  It's incontheivable.

And so the great wheel keeps on spinning, because as the saying goes, if voting could change anything, it would be illegal.  And hey, almost everyone can be talked into voting to stick it to someone else.  It's so much easier than learning to live with people who are, you know, different.