Voting For The "Lesser" Evil Always Breeds More Evil

Full disclaimer: I don't vote, I don't condone voting, and I encourage others not to vote. And so should you.

Jared Howe has written about voting before, and he's right; voting isn't the end-all, be-all of immoral acts in support of the state. At its core, it's an amoral act whose morality is determined by the context in which it occurs. Voting on issues in a board meeting for a company isn't immoral; voting as a virtue signal of what flavor tyrant you want to rule over you and others is. So all that being said, if you don't vote and you don't do the mental gymnastics to rationalize voting for the lesser evil, this post isn't for you. Kudos for figuring out the game is designed to make people accept increasingly severe tyranny.

If, on the other hand, you're going to vote in this or any other election season, and your reason for voting is "keep candidate A out of office," you are the problem.

Actually, let me backtrack that. You're not the problem, per se. You are, however, dramatically contributing to the problem with your virtue signalling and your horizontal enforcement of a system that enables and rewards sociopaths. For all the complaints I've heard from all the people that have ever walked through the front door of my store and all the people I've talked to online about how the Republic is in tatters, you'd think there would be a little more critical thought involved in the election process. Invariably, though, it boils down to "vote for me because the other guy is way worse."

It's never "vote for me because I'm good." Sure, they dress it up that way sometimes, about bringing jobs back or making sure kids are educated, but let's face it; every single political debate boils down to each candidate saying how the other candidate is going to be much worse than he or she is. The overriding message is that you need to vote for the guy who will do the least amount of harm. In that is the implicit acknowledgement that voting for either candidate will cause harm, and people still eat it up like they're making a difference.

Here's the problem with that: invariably it allows tyranny and evil to grow incrementally each time. Sure, it's not the gigantic leap that the really horrific other candidate would impose on people, but it's still a net loss. If you only lose a little freedom as opposed to a lot of freedom, you've still lost your freedom. By the time you end up in a situation where the candidates you can choose from are pitiful caricatures of human beings, your society is too far gone to achieve whatever it was trying to via politics. You've reached the ultimate end of "pragmatic voting:" a choice between Hitler or Stalin. If that sounds extreme, it's because it is, and the process that brings society to that point will invariably bring it there. Every. Single. Time.

Sound like hyperbole? Does that seem extreme to you? Keep in mind that there is no causative relationship between what voters vote for and what politicians actually do. Not only are voters signalling their acceptance of the least bad tyrant on the field, there's also no guarantee that the person they vote for won't just turn around and be as bad or worse than who they were trying to defeat. So even if you vote for the lesser evil, there's no guarantee you'll actually get the lesser evil.

Seems to me that people should stop accepting evil. But that's none of my business.