Oracle Online

These jingoist slogans on walls and sidewalks and pamphlets implied that if only we elect a certain candidate, suddenly the United States will stop invading other countries, my college education will be free, and I’ll have free health care as well.

Wow. Voting will change all that? It hasn’t yet, and how many years have people been voting? Why would voting suddenly change things now? Voting is a historic phenomenon with verifiable results.

This belief in voting as a means of change doesn’t reflect history, so it must show something else at work.

Perhaps a good place to start is to examine this faith and trust placed in candidates. Why do we pin our hopes for change on certain people? If we want health care, I suspect it would be better to try to figure out how to make it possible, and then work, ourselves, to change it, than to vote for someone, sit back and hope they do something about it. Past experience tells us this hope is almost certainly misplaced.

Maybe this makes sense if we consider it a form of hero worship. After all, we give children the idea that they should have heroes from an early age. I certainly remember elementary school assignments that asked who my heroes were. Everyone else seemed to have an answer.

Heroes are everywhere. We have sports heroes, superheroes, political heroes, heroes in cinema, celebrities, and we make heroes out of normal people doing normal jobs, such as firefighters. In every case it sends the same subtle message: passive obedience.

There are leaders and there are followers. Heroes lead, we follow. They rescue us, they make the laws that we obey, they inspire us, and they instill envy in us. When disaster strikes, Superman comes to swoop down on the helpless people to bring them to safety. We have only to sit still or get out of the way and let others do the important tasks.

An influential advocate of this idea (whose invisible presence is felt today in the way our schools are run, our workplaces are structured, and our political system is laid out) was JosÄ Ortega y Gasset. Ortega y Gasset, a Spaniard, discussed the threat of the public demanding democracy in Europe in his book The Revolt of the Masses.

“There is one fact which, whether for good or ill, is of utmost importance in the public life of Europe at its present moment. The fact is the accession of the masses to complete social power. As the masses, by definition, neither should nor can direct their own personal existence, and still less rule society in general, this fact means that actually Europe is suffering from the greatest general crisis that can afflict peoples, nations and civilization.”

We are those masses Ortega y Gasset was so terrified of. And we have become afraid of ourselves. We project our hopes on people in higher positions in society than we have, and then identify with them, so that if they win office our identity is validated.

But nowhere does the idea of removing the politicians and heroes enter in; no one advocates giving us, “the masses,” direct control over the policies and decisions that affect our lives.

Well, forget that. I have no heroes, and I want no heroes. If I want things to change, I’ll try to figure out what I can do to change it, and then work toward that end. An example: I don’t want the United States to overthrow governments, then install brutal but “stable” regimes favorable to American business interests.

The United States has been invading sovereign nations on behalf of business interests for 100 years. The only reason it started that recently was because previously it had not finished massacring all the indigenous peoples within its own borders in order to steal their land and resources. This policy is as American as Tupperware; there are no politicians I can elect to office who will change it.

Instead I try to curb my consumption. Without domestic consumption, domestic businesses have no incentive to use the government to force open labor and resource markets abroad. If we don’t drive SUVs, there is no more incentive to control Mideast oil.

Putting some guy in office in Washington, D.C. won’t stop war or make any other meaningful change. Taking direct action through building community, refusing to participate in a consumer economy, bringing decision-making down to a local level, or any number of other democratic actions, will. We don’t need to get out the vote in the hope that others might take action from an office whose existence relies on inaction; we just need to get out and take action ourselves.