Why You Should Vote, Even if You Don't Believe in the System

Perhaps this is too little, too late with US 2018 mid-term elections less than a week away. Many people aren't registered to vote and that window is now closed. Except it isn't!!! Fifteen states, including my home state of California, offer some form of voter registration on election day (check here to see if you qualify). For those of you already registered you still have a couple of days to decide to vote or not.

There are reasons to not vote, sure. The system is controlled by a bunch of rich old white men, none of whom represent you or your ideas (it's completely possible that most of my readers are in fact rich old white men. I don't actually have demographic data to disprove this). The whole system is corrupted by money. There are only two viable political parties, evil and slightly little less evil. One vote doesn't matter. This definitely doesn't look like the representative democracy praised in history text books. You participation in a broken system makes you complicit in its existence. I get all those reasons. Well, maybe I don't get them, but I've at least heard them, and I think they're half-baked.

Did you?

But if these factors make you ponder, “OK, I could vote, but really, why should I?” then, lovely reader, do I have the perfect article in store for you. My reasons to vote, presented here and now, ad free, in the only format acceptable for conveying more than one piece of information on the internet, a list! Or a slideshow of one slide if you prefer to think about it that way.

How We're Dying: A Sign of Progress

It's easy to follow the news and feel like we're living in the most extreme times in history. Democracies are devolving into right wing authoritarian regimes. Another gang, drug cartel, or run-of-the-mill psychopath has just gone on a killing spree. There's ongoing violence and unrest in the Middle East. Still. Some militaristic dictator has just killed a bunch of dissenters. Three people were murdered in a neighborhood near you. Politicians can't agree on an issue and people are upset. The planet is melting. And the Muslims... well I'm sure they're up to no good. I don't wish to trivialize any of those stories (the ones based in reality, anyway) which are tragic and almost always feature grave injustice. Even in mock form those headlines give the impression that things are generally terrible and probably couldn't get worse

But I wanted to see if there was any data to support or refute that idea. So I decided to look up some data on how people are actually dying. So join me for a couple of minutes, take a break from the news, and let's look at the bigger picture for a couple of minutes. When we do, we will see that things can get worse for humanity, and in fact they used to be much worse. Which might, I mean it's possible, that it could maybe indicate, that things are getting... better?

This next statement might not appear like a positive piece of news, but it is: More and more people these days are dying of good old fashioned age-related illness¹. That's is good news because it means that they aren't dying from other more discouraging things like violence and war, easily preventable diseases, or malnutrition. People are still dying from those things, but as a percentage of the world's population it is much less than it used to be. Here is a breakdown of how we collectively died in 2016 as a percentage of the total 54.7 million global deaths:

Donald Sterling and Free Speech

Can we clear a few things up here? Great. The penalties handed out by NBA Commissioner Adam Silver to Clippers owner Donald Sterling for his unarguably racist comments which were recorded and then published was not a violation of Mr Sterling’s right to free speech.

The First Amendment says that “Congress shall make no law…” (my emphasis added, obviously). The NBA is private organization with its own constitution and governance. The punishment delivered was within the terms of that league constitution which all members, including players, owners, and employees of the organization must abide. There is not going to be an FBI investigation and a federal criminal trial over this issue, because the Department of Justice does not care.

There are anti-discrimination laws on the books, which do grant rights in certain activities of private organizations (e.g. employment law) and therefore come somewhere near this issue. However, the freedom to say racist things is not a protected trait, unlike ethnicity, age, sex, religion, etc. For those (Libertarians?) saying “I thought this was America?” and “What happened to free speech?” they are just conveying how little they know about the law and the US Constitution (or being a Libertarian for that matter).

Ultimately, Mr. Sterling’s comments were an expression of opinion, a form of protected speech, which on its own, I don’t believe teeters into the realm of hate speech. But while speech like Mr. Sterling’s is not illegal, it can certainly get you into trouble. It’s the same reason that a country club can kick you out if you don’t wear white clothes, or the Boy Scouts of American can kick you out if you’re gay. In the NBA, you can be kicked out for being racist, especially in 2014.

Regulatory Capture and Cognitive Capture

I was familiar with the concept of regulatory capture, the idea that an industry can persuade the government, or another entrusted regulator, to not do their job of regulating. This is usually done through the vast amounts of influence the business carries in the money it generates and it can be practically done through several means including lobbying, financial contributions (legal bribery), bribery (the illegal kind), insider appointment, blackmail, and situational/political leverage. This leads to a very favorable climate for the industry, allowing it to go on doing whatever it was planning on doing without interruption, and over time can even lead to opportunities to push the boundaries of its operations further since it can go on without any real consequences. This creates situations where lobbyists paid by the industry actually write legislation with built in loop holes so both the industry and the politician can come out winners. The industry gets the rules in place, or lack thereof, that it wants while the politician will boost their reputation claiming they are regulating or fixing something with their Swiss cheese legislation. This is the relationship we have in the United States between our corporate world and our politicians. It’s essentially the same relationship as bribery and corruption and it has existed for just about as long as both industry and regulation have. However, I was never acutely aware of the specific term regulatory capture, and I feel better now that I know it and can quickly refer to the concept by recalling this term.

There is a related term called cognitive capture, which I recently came across and it describes quite well what I’ve been feeling about US society on an even large scale, and really global society as well, for some time but didn’t quite have the vocabulary to say. The term is borrowed from the psychological condition where the mind cannot perceive even important things in its field of senses because it is too distracted with other things in that field. In its borrowed definition is means that nearly everyone who is connected to society is too mesmerized by the modern capitalist world, and in some sense bribed by it, that they can’t see the injustice and plutocracy of it. And even worse, the mind can’t realize the distractions are systematic, intentional, and yes, even logical.