SCOTT ADAMS: Are we really trying to make the voting good in this country or are we just watching two different entities — Democrats and Republicans– using different gaming techniques to make the system favor their side? Because that’s all it looks like. One side is gaming the system and when the other side is in control they are gaming the system too. They gerrymander, they change what kind of voting you can do, mail-in, etc.
None of this has anything to do with democracy or a democratic republic or any of that.
We’re watching a system that is so far divorced from the peoples’ will being expressed in the vote. Nothing like that is happening.
The things that determine the vote are fake news and how effectively they present their fake news, game-playing about rules changes, money — how much people put into it — and campaign strategy. So all of these things pick our leaders, but none of them are even vaguely like democracy or a democratic republic.
Our system just drifted into this two organized criminal organizations competing to see who can be the better weasel in any given year. That’s kind of all it is. Now, Trump broke the mold because he was such a strong character that all of the game-playing just didn’t matter for one election. But I have a feeling they’re going to adjust after the second election.
[Someone] on Twitter asks why bother changing anything in the election process, because he says he is slowly realizing and accepting that we don’t live in a democracy or a democratic republic in any meaningful sense. What do you think of that? That we shouldn’t try, there’s just no point, because we live in a fixed system where the outcomes are things that have nothing to do with voting and democracy.
Well, I get the point. Here’s the counterpoint: Our system, as Frankenstein’s monster-ish as it is, meaning it doesn’t operate as a system the way it was designed. It has evolved into some weird creature of a system that does what it wants to do independent of what we want it to do.
As long as it is this big creature of a Frankenstein’s monster system that decides somehow who our leaders are and doesn’t have anything to do with us, do you ignore it? Do you get rid of it?
Here’s the problem: You still need the citizens to believe they live in a system that works. The whole thing will fall apart. Even the Frankstein’s monster part, because the whole thing will fall apart. You’ll just have chaos.
So, weirdly, we need to trust our system to make it work, but only working as two competing criminal organizations to see who is the best weasel this year. And that’s the best we got!
If we didn’t at least pretend we believe there is some kind of democracy here and people didn’t go and actually vote, we would lose this illusion that the people have some influence. And you don’t want to lose the illusion because the whole system depends on that illusion. So, don’t lose your illusions if they’re good ones.
