Political Ecology

We misinterpret voting in the US. We behave as if we’re electing outcomes rather than individuals, and this could never be the case. The world is a complicated place, and the future is clouded by uncertainty.

We treat elections as if they’re a choice between prosperity and doom. That candidate A being elected will mean cheaper housing, global peace, and better education, whereas if candidate B is elected the world will make another irreversible step towards catastrophe. So we find it galling when others throw in their lot with doom rather than vote for prosperity.

We see the act of voting as adding some weight to one side or the other of a giant balance, with a bright future on one side and gloom on the other. But it’s really like putting a marble into one slot or another of an incomprehensible Rube Goldberg machine. For example, it’s possible that there would be fewer abortions under a pro-choice president than a pro-life one: maybe the pro-choice president introduced social programs that made having a baby seem like less of a death sentence to poor single mothers than it did before. Likewise it’s possible that we’d have less of a negative impact on the environment under a president who doesn’t care about the planet at all: maybe they do care a lot about innovation and new technology, and end up indirectly funding a startup that produces super efficient batteries, or cracks some big problem in fusion power generation. Same with issues related to immigration, foreign affairs, and anything else that matters.

We have a hard enough time reasoning about possible second-order effects of our actions, but these are just the tip of the iceberg. The world is an incredibly complex system, and anyone who claims otherwise is selling something.

Since we don’t know whether the world will be a better or worse place under candidate X or Y, we shouldn’t get too upset when someone else makes a different prediction. After all, that’s all it is: a prediction. Candidate X may have terrible intentions, speak badly about certain groups of people, ignore large swathes of the country, etc, and yet still inadvertently play a role in producing a better future for the people they care so little for.

So when Jones votes for the presidential equivalent of a cloud of mosquitoes, maybe he’s onto something. I don’t like mosquitoes, but maybe that’s what the system needs right now. Likewise for when Alice votes for the equivalent of a wolf or a chimpanzee.

It’s a system, and voting is an opportunity to tinker with a small but significant part of that system. It is not an opportunity to dictate how that system behaves.