“The Most Important Election In Our Lifetime”

     The title phrase has been applied to every election for the past three decades. Biennial or quadrennial, incumbents in or out, each election has been billed that way. If the attribution is true, then each election was / is more important than the previous one. Apply your skills at mathematical induction, if you retain any; I’ll wait here.

     That’s right, Gentle Reader: The series does not converge. It zooms off to infinity. Politics is taking over everything.

     One Web colleague is sick to death of it:

     We just got our mid-terms over with which means we’ll catch about a 2 month break before we start seeing ads for the 2020 elections.
     Fuck that.

     Please read it all. I’d say his expectation of a two-month grace period is a little optimistic, but otherwise he’s right on.

     It’s time we did something about it. But if the past is predictive, we won’t.

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     A long time ago, a serious young man who’d had an insight into the fundamental conditions required for human happiness wrote a book. The book became very popular. It was at one point the best selling nonfiction book in the English-speaking world. It catapulted its author to worldwide renown as the foremost social and political thinker of his day.

     The most significant thing about the young man’s insight was its simplicity. It became known as The Law of Equal Freedom:

Let each have freedom to do all that he wills,
Provided that he infringe not the equal freedom of any other man.

     From that premise the author deduced a series of propositions in political theory that no one has ever managed to refute. One of them, inarguably the most controversial, is that an individual who accepts The Law of Equal Freedom in both word and deed thereby acquires a right to ignore the State.

     Here’s his peroration on the subject:

     “No human laws are of any validity if contrary to the law of nature; and such of them as are valid derive all their force and all their authority, mediately or immediately, from this original.” Thus writes Blackstone, to whom let all honor be given for having so far outseen the ideas of his time and, indeed, we may say of our time. A good antidote, this, for those political superstitions which so widely prevail. A good check upon that sentiment of power worship which still misleads us by magnifying the prerogatives of constitutional governments as it once did of monarchs. Let men learn that a legislature is not “our God upon earth,” though, by the authority they ascribe to it and the things they expect from it, they would seem to think it is. Let them learn, rather, that it is an institution serving a purely temporary purpose, whose power, when not stolen, is at the best borrowed.
     Nay, indeed, have we not seen that government is essentially immoral? Is it not the offspring of evil, bearing about it all the marks of its parentage? Does it not exist because crime exists? Is it not strong—or as we say, despotic—when crime is great? Is there not more liberty—that is, less government—as crime diminishes? And must not government cease when crime ceases, for very lack of objects on which to perform its function? Not only does magisterial power exist because of evil, it exists by evil. Violence is employed to maintain it, and all violence involves criminality.

     The book is Social Statics, written in 1851 by the young Herbert Spencer. Note how Lysander Spooner echoed the sentiments above in 1867, writing of the State in No Treason as “a secret band of robbers and murderers.”

     In the Nineteenth Century, the general comprehension, among both Americans and Englishmen, of the dangerous nature of the State and the susceptibility to corruption of its officials was very great, certainly far greater than it is today. Today we allow the State to rule on everything: to tax, regulate, and control ever more aspects of human life and activity. Which by its very nature results in each election being more important than the ones that preceded it.

     Draw the moral.

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     The late Dr. Thomas Szasz once defined freedom as “That which you demand for yourself but would deny to others.” Szasz, a psychiatrist, was appalled at the ever-expanding, often pseudo-psychiatric rationales for State control of everything. In his book Psychiatric Slavery, a scathing treatment of the evils rampant in his own profession, he wrote:

     When man believed that happiness was dependent upon God, he killed for religious reasons. When man believed that happiness was dependent upon the form of government, he killed for political reasons. After dreams that were too long, true nightmares...we arrived at the present period of history. Man woke up, discovered that which he always knew, that happiness is dependent upon health, and began to kill for therapeutic reasons.

     Szasz was clear-eyed about the nature of the State. He, with Gandhi, knew it to be a “soulless machine:”

     The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from the violence to which it owes its very existence. [ Mohandas K. Gandhi ]

     But of course, machines do only what they’ve been designed to do. The State is designed to wield coercive force – violence or the threat of violence – against those who defy its decrees. As those decrees proliferate in number and scope, so also does the realm of coercive force...and the importance of elections, to ensure that your gang, and not the other guys’ mob, controls the State.

     Got the idea yet?

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     Rants give rise to other rants. The one you’ve just read was stimulated by this one, which I cited briefly in the first segment of this tirade. So feel free to blame Wirecutter for both of them.

     But for the love of God and whatever yearning for freedom you might still possess, think about what we’ve done to ourselves. Think about the rationales that politicians and do-gooders have used to fetter us and tighten our shackles year after year. Think about how those rationales have been broadened, and the immense mass of “law” under which we labor has expanded as well. Think of the State – federal, state, county, or municipal; it hardly matters which – not as an instrument for “getting things done” but rather as a weapon. The reason why each election is “the most important election in our lifetime” will at once become clear to you.

     Even if you choose to do nothing about it.