When it comes to voting, one needs to keep in mind that it's not simply an act of being "correct" about the political opinion one holds. When you cast your vote and agreement that your beliefs should be the formative ideas that influence every person in your village/town/city/state/country, then you have brought part of the responsibility for the wellbeing of those that are influenced by your decision onto yourself.
A government that you as a voter have helped to bring into being is not the one solely responsible for the decisions that are taken, as it required and continues to require your agreement, and the agreement of most of the fellow voters in a functioning democracy. Therefore the supporters of the government need to scrutinize the policies enacted, and criticize it as objectively as possible, and should never allow themselves to become complacent with unethical or unlawful conduct by(members of) their government, just because those represent the political principles they hold. This means that should a decision be taken that purposefully affects fellow citizens negatively, and brings about a benefit only to a select group, then the government’s supporter needs to object to the policy and prevent it from being implemented.
Because a democratic political system represents the software to the hardware of the nation in which it operates, you, as the user/voter, need to be “loyal” not to the government but to your nation. You can change software, but you cannot change the hardware – in a democracy you can change your government but you cannot change your nation. You want to have the best possible software that fits the best to your hardware. Just because you like certain aspects of a software does not mean that it will work with your hardware, and therefore you need to change it to make it work as best as possible.
Now, the question of the nation, what it is and if it should be, is something that I have my issues with. The feeling of belonging to a nation is for many people a sense of pride, of meaning and it feels natural. It allows for a level of organization between peoples that has brought human civilization and technological, industrial, scientific, etc. capability to unprecedented heights, and should therefore be seen as one of the greatest inventions in human history. With being a citizen of a nation, you can identify yourself as someone more than just “you” in whatever metrics you can think of for yourself as a singular unit. Henceforth a nation shouldn’t be identified by it’s leaders and governments, but by it’s history, culture, traditions, art and peoples in this sense and to a certain degree even the geographic boundaries.
The nation as a concept however makes me uncomfortable. It is not a desire of mine to see myself having to obey a government which I did not vote for, that resides in a place that I rarely ever venture towards, which gives the power over a nation’s economic and social spheres to itself and it’s electorate, and which is accountable, rarely at that, to a judicial system that I do not consider to be just nor ethical. That the leader of a nation has the best interests of his/her people as a goal is for one rarely the case, not because they wouldn’t intend to do so, but because they’re not humanly capable of performing the workload a position like this requires and for the other are they simply lusting for the power that can it brings with it.
This goes not only for the nation that administers millions or even billions of people, but for vastly smaller circles. If there is a group of people, hierarchies will form spontaneously and with every action taken by members of that group. Having myself experienced nepotism and plutocratic rule in a small environment that operated under the pretense of being meritocratic, I hold an opposition to such a system, one that I will likely never overcome. So in this instance, I associate a negative experience most strongly with hierarchical order, one that I gained from a small circle, and one which I have seen repeat themselves in ever larger groupings of people, until we reach the stratosphere of statehood.
The state is then a product of the people, by the people, for the people, as Lincoln said. It exists solely by the virtue of and for the benefit of it’s people. But how to define benefit for everyone? What is an applicable definition of “benefit” for all the people, is it success and recognition, wealth and status, health and education, or interpersonal relationships of fulfillment? Is it all of those things or an unknown variable…?
But back to democracy, and whether or not it was a successful system. How many times has it failed and how many times has it succeeded? What kind of democracy has been truly representative of everyone?
It certainly has seen some spectacular successes throughout history, the first big one being the Roman Republic. A state that managed to become the first truly dominant european power, but how democratic was it? Most of it’s citizens couldn’t vote, it had millions of slaves, the peoples subjugated by military might were kept poor and given no power – yet it was democratic. Another one was Britain, which while having a supreme ruler, had it mostly for appearances sake and not because it needed one. Britain managed to establish the worlds largest empire, it became more successful than Rome and managed to directly subjugate a quarter of the world’s population with it’s military might. Yet it’s treatment of the people was anything but in their best interest, especially you as an indian should know that, it’s empire existed to make (firstly) themselves and (secondly) Britain wealthy, and their democratic government didn’t care if it starved it’s subjects in Ireland or robbed India to fuel it’s industrial revolution. Yet it was ruled by a democratic system. The third one and most applicable to our times is of course the USA, a nation that claimed to be democratic from the onset, yet only white landowners could vote, it’s founders held contempt for the common people, they held millions of slaves for the economic benefit of the few, drove the natives into extinction and treated it’s immigrants as the scum of the earth… yet it was democratic. So, in this sense, democracy was successful, but it didn’t stick to the values and principles that should make it a viable political system.
If a citizenry isn’t able to educate itself about the workings of a democratic system, either because it is plagued by poverty and lack of educational availability or because it is too undisciplined and lazy, then it’ll fail and be abused by those hungry for power.
I realize that this is rather incoherent and doesn’t come close to a full picture, but it’s a very extensive topic and the post too long as it is. Maybe I’ll continue on with it tomorrow, I’ve got to order my thoughts some more. Any feedback is welcome!
