Living In Truth
Today is Super Tuesday, a fact which has stirred me to to put more thought into my stance on the election. Recently I have been stumbling to defend myself when people find out that I won’t be voting for a Democrat on November 4th. All I have been able to say is, I don’t actually want Hillary or Obama in office, and I refuse to vote for them simply because they are not as bad as the opposition. To me, the ‘lesser of two evils’ argument is veiled cowardice. But this explanation has been insufficient, and here I shall attempt to elaborate.
My thoughts have been dominated by the writing of Václav Havel, the Czech intellectual/playwright who helped lead the Velvet Revolution after which he was elected president. On New Year’s Day, 1990 Havel gave his inaugural address in which he called for Czechoslovakians to accept responsibility for abiding the totalitarian regime which had just fallen. In so doing, Havel said a new age of morality could be ushered.
“When I talk about the contaminated moral atmosphere … I am talking about all of us. We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all – though naturally to differing extents – responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery. None of us is just its victim. We are all also its co-creators.”
This speech draws on themes from an earlier essay entitled Power of the Powerless, wherein Havel discusses the preeminent role of ideology in the functioning of post-totalitarian systems. When someone refuses a symbolic bow to ideology, Havel says he or she, “has not committed a simple, individual offense, isolated in its own uniqueness, but something incomparably more serious.” Havel continues:
“By breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as a mere game. He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. He has broken through the exalted facade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of power. He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can co-exist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety.”
Voting is an act which is more significant for its symbolic affirmation of democratic ideology than for its function as a tool of democracy. Every time we cast a ballot for a Democrat who we have chosen as the lesser of two evils, we tell a lie. And so long as we continue this en masse, our lies constitute the system. To live within the truth is to vote only for candidates whom we truly support.
14 February 2008 at 1:57 pm
[...] with McKinney, check out the film American Blackout (torrent). If you read this blog, you know my thoughts on the election. McKinney is worth voting for, not because she’ll win the office, but because [...]