Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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More Reasons to Say No to Voting

  • Democracy is a destructive political selection method that places the property and lives of the better part of the civilization at the disposal of the worst instincts of the majority.
  • It’s for this reason that the Founding Fathers opposed Democracy as stridently as they did. It took more than 150 years for the American Republic to institute Universal Suffrage, and almost 200 years to go all the way into the pit.
  • It’s not so much about the time you spend voting at the polls, but also the time that you spend informing yourself about different candidates for election.
  • You could be spending this time & money on improving:
    • Your life
    • Your children’s lives

Its the time and energy that people spend on making these electoral decisions that fuels so much of the media.

What James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 10 is just as true today as it was when he wrote it:

From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assembleand administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.

A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking. Let us examine the points in which it varies from pure democracy, and we shall comprehend both the nature of the cure and the efficacy which it must derive from the Union.

The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended.

Was James too wordy for you?

Maybe so. That’d be one of the good reasons why universal suffrage is a bad idea.

Returning politics to the hands of the capable and removing it from the hands of the incompetent is a good long-term goal. Preventing as much of the inevitable destruction and civil war that tends to be comorbid with outbreaks of democracy is a high-minded goal, and one worth striving for. Madison won the debate in the short term, but Democracy won in the long run.

More reasons you shouldn’t vote:

 

  • Not voting and arguing against voting is less about the direct impact on the election, and more about depleting the legitimacy of the democratic process.
  • Depleting the legitimacy of the democratic process is less about persuading commoners against it (who will lose political power, but gain in other areas), but about converting the leaders who can be converted, and demoralizing or otherwise neutralizing those that can’t be.
  • Voting feeds the business model of electioneering. Not voting puts electioneers out of work.
  • An increasingly anti-democratic public mindset is one that is more expensive to persuade to remain democratic or to return to belief in democracy.
  • While voting in slightly less destructive representatives might have a minor (and questionable at that) impact on policy, any short term gains will be overwhelmed by long term destruction.

Go to work or stay at home, but don’t vote.

Become more engaged in civil society instead. Voting has no chance of resolving the difficult collective problems facing Americans and people in similar political situations. The only vote that you might want to consider is one to secede from the union. Anything else is a major drain on your attention and time.

[NOTE: Thanks to reader Thorgeir Lawspeaker for correcting the embarrassing mis-attribution of Federalist No. 10.]

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Why Promote Gay Marriage?

It symbolizes equality, undermining the target society’s ability to maintain property rights.

Gay marriage isn’t about marriage contracts between homosexuals.

We know this because homosexual marriage is unpopular among homosexuals. Pew Research states that, in all the states surveyed since 2004, only 71,165 gay marriages have been performed. Census data shows that even in California, where 1.3 million estimated homosexuals live, a scant 18,000 gay marriages have occurred.

Yet some of the most expensive advertising time in the country — during the 2014 Grammy awards, which sold for $1m per 30 second spot — spent an entire segment on promoting gay marriage. The entire segment ran for roughly 7 minutes and 30 seconds. Although not exact, we can say that it’s equivalent to over $15 million in prime ad spending, endorsed by multiple celebrities, packaged with official approval on a broadcast network granted many Federal privileges and censored by the Federal Communications Commission.

This provocation comes a year after the FCC relaxed its obscenity policies after the Supreme Court overturned some indecency cases.

In this, ironically, we see the results of years of misguided libertarian activism that would have been predicted by a classically educated elite but would only be poorly understood by today’s à la carte university graduates.

While state censorship is a brittle method of managing public mores, the law also mandates that television manufacturers receive broadcast TV signals. Cable and Satellite TV operators are similarly obligated to carry those signals by the law. In this way, state censorship is the only means available (besides abstaining from using television) for the general population to regulate the limits of what media can be sent to their homes.

equality
Human Rights Campaign – ‘Equals’ floating in a pool of blood

The patriarchal family is properly understood as a unit supportive of the private property political order, headed by a single executive. Aristotle defined this explicitly in contrast to the society formed around Plato’s ideals of love, especially homosexual love, as exemplified by Achilles’ passion for Patroclus.

Homosexual love is a symbol of equality in that, in the act, it connects two entities that are closer to being the same. Sex between men and women is a conjugation of two inherently unequal beings. Attempting to portray men and women as ‘equals’ requires a lot of continual rhetorical bluster to obscure the obvious reality. Holding up homosexual love as moral paragon comes naturally to egalitarians, because it matches with their political conceptions (which prizes the mental unreality of ideal forms over nature).

Since the convulsions of 1968, the West has flung itself into a Platonist concept of love (in a vulgar form), which is seen as the highest value, even among heterosexuals.

The Aristotelian view is that patriarchy leads to the private property hierarchical social order. There are thousands of years of evidence behind the proposition that patriarchy is the critical cultural bulwark that promotes a politics of private property. Plato agreed on this point. The Communists agree on this point, and as such, advance social orders that undermine patriarchy, because it’s known that it’s the atom of the private property social order.

Merely because an atom can be split doesn’t mean that it ought to be, because doing so eliminates its essential characteristics.

It’s because of this that the left is so aggressively attacking the remnants of patriarchal social order that remains within the Western world. Each destroyed family is a victory for the parasitical forces that make up the left. The distributed hierarchical structure is what makes complex political and economic forms possible. Enabling laws like divorce make that structure legally insecure, and simple to predate upon.

It’s at split purposes to say that a private property legal order is ideal while simultaneously agitating against the distributed hierarchy of secure social order known as the patriarchal family.

For the left, it’s more fruitful to attack ‘the economy’ (which etymologically derives from ‘the household’) than it is to attack larger social units. An egalitarian family structure leads to an egalitarian political structure, which is what the West has been hurtling towards since the mid 18th century, to our detriment.

All the left needs is love, love, love, unrestricted erotic love free of obligations, to achieve its ends in the destruction of civilization. The essential practice of the left is to apply a deadly herbicide to the complicated, evolved balance between flora and fauna that make up human civilization. Then, planners attempt to erect wobbly structures over the salted flats in accordance to their visions of how the world ought to be.

For a deeper contemporary perspective on this issue, Quick Reactions recommends the writings of Dalrock on love.

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Be Wary of Crowds

Delacroix - Liberty Leading the People
Delacroix – Liberty Leading the People

The default mode of political organization within democracy is the ‘movement.’ Movements exist to either form political parties or to influence them to develop certain policies.

Movements form when superior men conspire to create them. They require minimal leadership talent to start (because most democratic people will follow a socially dominant man who takes initiative without reservation). The goal of a movement is to create a bureaucracy, which will then reward the leadership with power, money, and sinecures to reward to their cronies.

Even anti-democratic ‘movements,’ like fascism, fall into this social organization out of habit and by following the examples conditioned into them by early education. As children, citizens (even those who attend private school) are first socialized into the adult world by listening to lectures among their ‘equals.’ Disorganization and informal social groupings are standard in the academy.

It doesn’t need to be outside of schools, but habits require strength to break. By default, we’re conditioned to form crowds.

It’s in social organizations that need to actually achieve goals (like corporations and the military) that the law permits us form hierarchy with defined social roles. Without this measure of laissez-faire authoritarianism, we’d all be forced to return to the trees within months.

On the internet, groups tend to fall prey to the ‘eternal September‘ effect. Open entry into a group leads to a decline in value, as the leadership loses the ability to maintain a coherent society as numbers increase without regulation.

This is because open entry is a moronic principle by which to run any organization. No corporation on Earth — even staffed by the most incompetent idiots — operates on an open entry policy for hiring. To state that all that’s needed to join an organization is to bleat an intention to join, and perhaps to fill out a perfunctory form, is to say that the organization’s values are worthless.

It’s because of this that it’s wise to be skeptical of any banner that anyone can hoist. Exclusivity marks value worth defending.

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