373
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
373 points (95.8% liked)
Asklemmy
43950 readers
995 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Given how little one vote matters, we have a much more serious problem here: why should any individual vote?
For any one person, the chance that even one election in their lifetime will have its outcome altered by their vote is vanishingly small.
Therefore, in terms of practical effect, each individual always faces this awareness: that whether and how they vote is purely symbolic in its effect
It's the nature of democracy that one vote equals 1/N of the population. That is not flaw with the individual. It just means that for his vote to actually means something, it has to be part of a social memetic arrangements and not cast in the abstract.
Of course with first past the post, the electoral colege, gerrymandering all conspiring to further devalue and skew the value of one vote, democratic voting becomes increasingly meaningless. This is not a flaw of the individual but of the system itself being corrupt.
And then we have yet another layer of disenfranchisement, which is republicanism, in which voters do not directly vote for their interest but vote for an agent which will have a long term in which to "interpret" whatever the electorate really meant by voting for him. He will do so in a space where the constantly fluctuating social memetic arrangements that got him elected are not really under his control and are only loosely, and shortly affected by his action.
This is because the control of the fluctuating social memetic arrangement is in the hand of the actual social elite, the people who own or have seized the megaphone of power and who grossly compete and collude. Largely to maintain the arrangement, usually in an uneasy peace with their immediate competitors. These people are not just politicials but media moguls, celebrities and other billionaires.
Any solution to this problem must look to the system as a whole and create incentives to the individual that will enable him to at least have his 1/N power over the state of things. Free of the influence of the actual social elite who fill his heads with ideas that benefit them rather than the individual. And in a way where individual can act collectively for their interests.