Is voting useful?
I have never voted in my life. I’ve never taken part in the political game. The reasons are several, but here I want to touch upon the most important one: voting is not an effective tool to change our lives or impact our societies. Deciding what to buy is. Deciding what to eat, what to use, what to do with our time, who to work for, how to act. In comparison, voting is just an empty, formal exercise.
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate being given the right to vote. And I also appreciate that it is a right and not a duty. If I ever felt represented by someone, perhaps I would vote for them. Unfortunately, that has never happened. And it’s not surprising, because politicians don’t represent the people who vote for them. They represent the most powerful elites, because voting is easily controlled by the latter. In order to get the visibility and economic support needed to propose yourself to a nation, you need to be either a part or a tool of the elites. So, as an individual, if your point of view is not aligned with that of one of those groups, it’s hard to feel represented.
Representative democracy is intrinsically flawed, because of scale. If you have one person represent thousands, that person’s power will attract the attention of the market, and their salary has to be high enough to discourage corruption. However, by earning a lot more than the people they represent, politicians very quickly lose their ability to represent them, because their needs change. The key is in that ratio: represented to representative.
We live in a strange world, where private corporations and multinational banks blackmail elected governments. A world in which food, water and information have been commodified. Change is not going to come by voting this or that elite spokesman.
I believe the easiest, most direct and somewhat effective (more than voting!) way to have an impact on how society works, is by carefully deciding how to spend our money, our time, our energy. Food is a great example, and one that is obviously dear to me. The food we buy and eat has a huge impact on our surroundings. By choosing to support a specific producer, we decide to support their methods, their ways of interacting with the land, ecosystems and society. By deciding to eat this rather than that, we decide what goes into our body, what supplies us with energy. By buying an item, we implicitly put pressure on the market — to produce more of that thing.
Food choices are very complex, because they involve a very delicate balance between the ability to listen to our body and our ethical convictions. It’s way easier to let our ideas drive us into unhealthy food choices. For instance, there’s a lot of veganism nowadays, but not everybody is able to make a vegan diet be healthy for them. Similarly, desires, whims and addictions can drive us into cognitive dissonance — we eat things produced in ways that we don’t approve of, and that are unhealthy as well as unethical according to our own standards.
We get to vote only once in a while. In fact, we don’t really get to vote, we only get to decide which guy seems more reasonable, out of a list of candidates of dubious competence and ethos. On the other hand, we get to choose what to eat several times a day, for the entirety of our adult life. And we get to choose what to buy several times a week!
It could be argued that purchasing is not a democratic way to express choices, because it’s not an option for people who have no money and can’t work. True, for those people, voting is the best way to be heard. Not for the rest of us, because money has more power than political support. Have a look at how governments have to please and compromise with corporations and banks. Do you see politicians make the same efforts to fulfil electoral promises?
On top of purchasing, there is an even more powerful way to have an impact on society: we get to choose how to spend our time, where to put our efforts, who to support with our work.
For instance, I believe we should experiment with reverting urbanisation, creating small-scale communities with hyperlocal economies, questioning centralisation and efficiency-driven progress. I believe most of the problems we are facing can be addressed holistically by questioning and redesigning the scale at which people aggregate on the land and socially. It’s unlikely that I will ever see a political candidate push these instances. In fact, there are only a handful of academics and intellectuals in the world who strive to formalise and support these ideas with scholarship and convincing evidence. However, there are thousands if not millions of people actively creating living examples of this paradigm change. In an empiric, pragmatic, proactive way. My, our best bet is to try things out, by investing our time, energy, money, effort, passion in concrete, practical experiments.
We are faced with dozens of decisions every day. In principle, each one of those is an opportunity to do politics. Not only when it comes to purchasing, eating or working. Also when we are giving advice to a friend or a relative, when we are using the spoken word to express our ideas. For example: do you put more care in keeping your house clean or in keeping common spaces clean? When I moved to the UK I suddenly realised that people were way less obsessed with having shiny, scented houses, and way more focussed on keeping public places tidy and clean. With a result that is the opposite of what I was used to in Italy, where private houses are spotless and public spaces are as dirty as it gets. That betrays a very clear cultural attitude, which is turned completely upside down when it comes to dressing. Italians constantly dress up when they appear in public, they are tremendously mindful of how other people see them. English people do so only in formal environments, and revere individual freedom in matters of style, choice, taste, health. I’m not going to take sides, but I would like us to think about how we approach these things. Because chances are that conditioning drives our approach more than our vision of the world. That is a missed opportunity. To do politics. Every time you do things a certain way because everybody else would think it weird or wrong otherwise — that is a lost chance, and to me it is way more serious than not voting in an election. Every time you delegate your decisions to tradition, common sense, inertia, you are denying yourself the right to impact your life and that of others around you. You are missing out on a political opportunity. You are letting the “other people” decide.
Because I don’t vote, I don’t get to complain about whom “the other people choose”. And I am glad I don’t, because complaining about anything is moer of a waste of time than voting is. I am glad I am privileged enough to be able to impact my surroundings and community on a daily basis, rather than once every 5 years. For me, real politics is what happens at the table, in the field, in conversation with friends and family, and in shopping baskets. For me, true politics is what happens when we choose what job to do, and how to spend our time.
