I was standing in the line for our socialized cafeteria here at Hillsdale College, when it struck me.
1. Governance, we define as the way in which Government, through culture, affects how we live our lives.
Like how you /would/ take a disliking to Jews if you were even vaguely normal under the Nazi Government in Germany at the right time. It's just how propaganda works. It gets under your skin to your bloodstream and brain.
2. The Great American Freedom that the American Government has granted its citizens is this: Freedom from Governance.
Our Government, because it thinks it is a Democracy, has agreed not to deliberately propagandize its citizens(which leaves the media open to do it, but that is another story and will be told at another time, to quote Lord Dunsany). The propaganda we get comes of the people, by the people, for the people.
3. The only responsible way to accept this Freedom from Governance is this: to decline to vote.
If I have agreed that I shall not let what politicians in their leather armchairs decide affect how I live my life, then the Democratic game of participation-in and effect-on the circumstances surrounding others(microcosms) through the political macrocosm is disingenuous and wrong by virtue of my having already mentally exempted myself from letting any such circumstances affect me. To put it another way - it is wrong to deliberately say that a culture( which arises from its constituent individuals) ought to be this way or ought to be that way when you have already said to yourself that you will not allow how culture is to affect what culture you exude. Sure, they can put me in jail. Sure, they can tax my income. But how I live my life has so little to do with where I am and how much money I have that it changes neither who I am nor how I am.
Participation in Democratic Government via voting is, effectively, an exercise in propaganda, however blatant that propaganda might be. A vote is a statement to the rest of the United States of America - "you should believe in these things."
Our range of options(i.e. what we are even able to vote on) is (in all but the most miraculous and wonderful cases) provided from the top down(regardless of whether or not the motive for the people in Government's providing it to us comes from their seeing it rising from the ground up). Voting is not even a distant cousin of self-expression.
America has granted us, as its citizens, this - that America doesn't believe and doesn't act as though it believes that we, its citizens, ought to believe in these things rather than those things. The police may imprison us, but they will still stand up for our right to break the law( and to bear the consequences ).
The only politics that can conscionably be left after this most profound of all Liberties is that which is sure of one thing: that all of our political endeavors and beliefs rise from the ground upwards every step of the way. We cannot accept the compromise of Voting, in which the Government meets us halfway by letting us choose between things, when it has said that we have the Freedom to choose the issues themselves.
It's either all or nothing. Either govern yourself and nobody else, or engage only in purely organic politics(if there even can be a politics arising from such small, small factions as they would have to be if they were truly composed of people who all believed in the same cause in the same way).
2. The Great American Freedom that the American Government has granted its citizens is this: Freedom from Governance.
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