21 October, 2008 | Leave a Comment

I recently stated that I am not voting in this presidential election, that I feel the choice between McCain and Obama is about as meaningful as choosing between Coke and Pepsi and I no longer want to be part of this ridiculous process, which only gives the illusion of democracy.  Well, I am reading J.M. Coetzee’s novel Diary of a Bad Year, which is a very strange novel given that a big part of it is actually a political treatise.  Today I stumbled upon two passages about the modern democratic process that really spoke to me and I thought I’d share them.

Excerpt One:

“In the days of the kings, the subject was told: You used to be the subject of King A, now King A is dead and behold, you are the subject of King B. Then democracy arrived, and the subject was for the first time presented with a choice: Do you (collectively) want to be ruled by Citizen A or Citizen B?

Always the subject is presented with the accomplished fact: in the first case with the fact of his subjecthood, in the second with the fact of the choice. The form of the choice is not open to discussion. The ballot paper does not say: Do you want A or B or neither? It certainly never says: Do you want A or B or no one at all? The citizen who expresses his unhappiness with the form of the choice on offer by the only means open to him – not voting, or else spoiling his ballot paper – is simply not counted, that is to say, is discounted, ignored.

Faced with a choice between A and B, given the kind of A and the kind of B who usually make it onto the ballot paper, most people, ordinary people, are in their hearts inclined to choose neither.”

**

Excerpt Two:

“As during the time of kings it would have been naive to think that the king’s firstborn son would be the fittest to rule, so in our time it is naive to think that the democratically elected ruler will be the fittest.  The rule of succession is not a fomrula for identifying the best ruler, it is a formula for conferring legitimacy on someone or other and thus forestalling civil conflict.  The electorate – the demos – believes that its task is to choose the best man, but in truth its task is much simpler: to anoint a man (vox populi vox dei), it does not matter whom. Counting ballots may seem to be a means of finding which is the true (that is, the loudest) vox populi; but the power of the ballot-count formula, like the power of the formula of the first-born male, lies in the fact that it is objective, unambiguous, outside the field of political contestation.  The toss of a coin would be equally objective, equally unambiguous, equally incontestable, and could therefore equally well be claimed (as it has been claimed) to represent vox dei.  We do not choose our rulers by the toss of a coin — tossing coins is associated with the low-status activity of gambling – but who would dare to claim that the world would be in a worse state than it is if rulers had from the beginning of time been chosen by the method of the coin?”

1. Comments RSS

1. Greig Says:

   October 28th, 2008 at 9:52 pm

   The ideas are obvious in themselves.

   I’ve used both erxamples myself (as Yvette Doll) and indeed here as the hapless Mick.

   The purpose of a King is to release his subjects from their oaths at the critical time, because in the euphoria of danger and freedom, they always come back to their honor, like the Boers.

   To make them stay, send them away.

   The King of the Serbs, as he retreated from the Austro-Hunagarians, released his entire army, but not his sons, from their oath to him, and the predictable result was a death march in defiance of their pursuers.

   Similarly as the Army of Northern Virginia careered from the Battle of Five Forks, the true surprise, the real mystery, that at in its hopelessness and abject defeat, it didn’t need to be advised at the end of the road,

   when all else was blocked, they’d be there together.