Voting and Magical Thinking

                  I study fascism, so I often find myself grappling with extremists’ magical thinking, but the left has its own magical thinking. Not all leftist minds are so enchanted, though. I know leftists who recognize that all capitalist and liberal institutions are tainted. These institutions help to uphold capitalism and liberalism. What’s an “institution,” you ask? It comes from the Latin institutionem. Historically, it’s meant things like foundation, thing established, disposition, arrangement, law, practice, or anything that’s been around for a long time. Basically, an institution is any social thing that’s recognized because it repeats itself; it’s any social pattern.

Many of my leftist friends are very smart. They learned these difficult lessons about institutions in school, in the family, in church, from the television, from communist books that they bought on Amazon, from talks that they went to, and so on. They know that if they escape all these institutions, then they’ll no longer be supporting capitalism. Like all people (or so Hegel tells us), all of their thinking is a function of the institutions that make up their lives. My friends have found themselves among the kinds of very good liberal institutions that have led them to rightly believe that all institutions are necessarily oppressive. These liberal institutions oppress the liberal institution that is the autonomous individual. My friends know that they have to put an end to language, to folk dances, to living in houses, to brushing their teeth in the morning, to the sign of the cross, to flirtatious winks, and to all other institutions. No more patterns. No more recognizable communication. No more representation. They know this because they learned it from their interactions with these institutions. They read the right words. The words informed them that the logical conclusion of one’s leftist practice implicates the end of the very words that they read! These institutions taught them that these institutions are bad and that lives without institutions would be good. They’re good students. They deserve gold stars. They’ll dutifully end all patterned human behavior (even if all the physicists and systems theorists tell us that all phenomena necessarily fall into patterns; what do these scientists know with their liberal science institutions?).

                  These good students have learned that “There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism.” We all know that this is true, so these students don’t eat. They don’t pay rent, don’t clothe themselves, don’t ride in cars. They don’t want to contribute to the maintenance of any system that helps any capitalist to do capitalist things. “You want to drive your hybrid to the protest? You’re either a traitor or a fool!” There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, so they consume nothing.

                  They know that freedom from all patterns is an end and not a means. People used to want freedom from particular forms of oppression or perhaps they even wanted eudaimonia—the “good life”—but why struggle for those sorts of things when you can have the individualist freedom of autonomous, non-patterned behavior? Ah, can’t you just feel it? Wow! Liberation from all possible institutions—from all patterns of human life—is certainly the highest possible good. All those people who want to have their needs met aren’t just foolish; in fact, they’re unethical. This is because the mere idea that they’d have a need entails reification—it entails the formation of a pattern, an institution. I need to eat three meals a day? What’s a day? What’s a meal? What’s a need? What’s an I? No, of course not. I need to move in unpredictable ways over ground untouched, never moving my knee joint in the same way twice, but I also need to do so without involving intentional linguistic thinking. That’s freedom. That’s the good.

                  For all these reasons, these clever leftist friends of mine assure me that we ought not vote. True, if you vote for a non-fascist, then you keep a fascist from helping to make the policy that funds police brutality, that makes abortion punishable by death, that supports the genocide of trans people, etc., but electoral politics is nothing more or less than a liberal, capitalist institution. It may appear to you that funding children’s school lunches helps children, but do those children really want to have a meal if that meal is capitalist? After all, there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism. You might think that we should ask those children what they want, but they haven’t been educated well enough (we know this because, in general, it’s only the poor kids who get free meals, so they’re surely not well-enough educated by the education institution that informs us that institutions are bad) to know about the beautiful liberal institution of freedom ensured by freedom from all institutions. They haven’t read enough Heidegger to know how amazing is the non-patterned, authentic being—i.e., liberal, autonomous individuality taken to its logical end.

                  You could vote for one party in order to try and feed some children if you think that, despite the understanding that their meals are capitalist, feeding them is worth it, but have you considered that voting means that you’ll be supporting war abroad? Have you realized that both political parties support war? Okay, not equally, but members of both parties sometimes support war. Okay, one party supports war much more than the other party does, but they both do it, so it makes no difference. At least, it doesn’t make a very big difference. Okay, it’s true that you could vote for the lesser evil while you try to build the political force that would end all war, but that would require that you create another institution, and we know that’s bad! Sure, you might imagine a world in which your collectivity intentionally listens to people in order to find out what they need, and you might in that world carefully make sure to fulfill everyone’s needs, but to do so, you would need to organize institutions, so you shouldn’t do that.

                  I now see that my friends are right. We obviously shouldn’t vote.