Why Voting Is Dumb
Voting is dumb and Aristotle said so. He said, “all the magistrates should be chosen out of all the people, and all to command each, and each in his turn all: that all the magistrates should be chosen by lot, except to those offices only which required some particular knowledge and skill.” His preferred method was sortition, something closer to jury duty than the periodic anointing of the rich we call elections.
Old Aris continued,
The Athenian ideal of democracy was that every citizen had power. They didn’t delegate it to rich dudes who put their faces on the most vases. The people went to ‘parliament’, they served as magistrates, they had direct power. That’s the idea of democracy. Power to the people.
The common retort when Aristotle is brought up is that ‘they had slaves back then’, as if we don’t. Greek democracy was at least openly awful. We’re just hypocrites. Citizenship is still violently exclusive, look at all the ‘illegal’ people in America that are simultaneously ‘essential’ workers. Millions of people live like this, as wage slaves. As Dimitry Kochenov says in his book Citizenship, “citizenship is a very effective…
