Working for Living

Free elections of government officials have been glorified as a panacea for all of our social ills and difficulties. What bothers me most is not how the dictator, or the elected official acting as a dictator, comes to power. This is inessential to me in a situation where I have a gun pointed at my head. I am a dead man if I don’t submit in each instance, no matter which of them wields the gun. Thus it is the violence used to impose the will of others on me, and not the free elections that matters. I would rather live under a self-appointed dictator who lets me be, than under freely elected official forcing me at gunpoint to go to die or be maimed for some of his causes.   

It follows from the above argumentation that electoral democracy is meaningful only among those whose freedom was taken away from them in the first place, i.e. amongst the slaves. It sounds oxymoronic to give a free man any freedoms; therefore it obviously addresses the slaves. The magic number of majority is just another way of putting a different hat on the political system, constitution, a dictator, or a slave master, who then has the power to force everyone to do his bidding.

Thus a slave, freely electing a politician to represent him does not acquire the status of a free man by virtue of him having freely elected someone who will reaffirm his status as a slave. The stumbling roadblock here is the unexpressed violent mandate by a political system that in order to live every able-bodied person has to sell himself to an employer, the bill of sale representing a meal ticket, which gives him an extra lease on life. This stumbling block is not made less credible by possible statistical findings that 98 % of population does not harbor such feelings, that one has secure supply of food without having to rear a finger, and that one chose his place at his work station out of his own free will for the love of work and not of money.    

The need for election proves one thing: that there is no real democracy. The word ‘elections’ means ‘an act or process of electing a new government’ and ‘the right, power or privilege of making a choice.’ This definition exposes the problem which elections are supposed to remedy. It states that no government is able to perform to the satisfaction of the electorate and that every so many years it has to be replaced and given new mandate. What is new in this mandate? It must have been designed to create the appearance that the power to change government’s policy resided with people and that it was a privilege bestowed upon them by the government to make them feel that they really had such a power.

What is there in the human nature that changes every four years and requires an election of the new government to attend to it? Genetically the human species could not have been different from its inception millions of years ago than it is now. In this respect a human is not any different from other living creature, like plant, animal or bacteria. He thrives in the soil that provides the necessary nutrients, in suitable climate, with unimpeded freedom to grow and fulfill his life’s destiny. Surely with thousands elections in the past one of them must have hit it right!