Democracy (rendered obsolete) … or what if that’s a good thing :)
Breaking the Illusion: Why the System Wins When We Fight Each Other
Every time a political party makes a move we don’t like—whether it’s Republicans voting to defund Medicaid or Democrats pushing a policy that conservatives despise—we get caught in the same, predictable cycle. Outrage erupts, ideological camps dig in, and people throw themselves into the fight, believing they’re standing up for what’s right. But how long are we going to keep playing this game?
The truth is, most of these political battles are distractions, keeping us locked in an illusion of choice, an illusion of conflict, and an illusion of control. We act as if our ideological opponents are the problem, as if defeating them will change the system. But the system doesn’t care who wins these petty battles. In fact, it benefits from the division, because as long as we’re fighting each other, we’re not questioning the real source of our problems: the corrupt, bureaucratic, oligarchic machine that rules over us all.
The System Isn’t Broken—It’s Designed to Work Against Us
The system is WWE. Roles are cast either stochastically or intentionally. Predetermined Hero vs predetermined heal. The system is the Good cop bad cop routine.
People often assume that the system is broken, that if only the “right” people were in charge, things would improve. But that’s the real trick. The system isn’t broken—it’s functioning exactly as designed. Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectaclelays out how modern politics has become a carefully constructed performance. We’re not meant to solve real problems; we’re meant to stay engaged in endless, emotionally charged debates that keep us distracted and divided.
Both Neil Postman and Noam Chomsky explain how it works so well with their ideas laid out in Amusing Ourselves to Death and Manufacturing Consent. The media doesn’t exist to inform us; it exists to program our minds and rile us up emotionally. It propagandizes, provoke and entertains. Outrage is profitable, and narratives are more effective when they oversimplify the world into good guys and bad guys. Every election, every policy debate, every manufactured controversy is designed to keep us emotionally invested in a game where the real winners are never us.
And here’s where The System’s Neatest Trick comes in: Even when we believe we’re resisting, the system has already accounted for that. Protests, elections, partisan outrage—all of these are pre-approved forms of resistance, designed to channel our frustration into safe, predictable avenues. It’s like a pressure valve, ensuring that people never get angry enough to challenge the underlying structure itself.
Why We Keep Falling for It
Part of the problem is psychological. James Hillman argues that politics is a projection of our inner world. We don’t just debate policies—we create enemies. The right believes the left is a bunch of blue haired non binary, weak, naive, free loading commies that want to be adult babies coddled in a nanny state forever. The left believes the right are all either dumb gun loving hicks or cruel, selfish, and fascist loner tech bros.
But neither side recognizes that these stereotypes are deliberately reinforced by the system itself, which benefits from this constant war of narratives.
We’re conditioned to believe we actually have real ideological opponents annoying our neighbors, friends and family. Our common fellow citizens, convinced that they are the obstacle to progress. But the real division isn’t left vs. right—it’s the ruling class vs. the people.
Most of us (the 95-99% of ordinary average people) want the same things, we just have grown up with different life experiences, believing in different things, with different values and priorities. Imagine if we could agree to disagree? Wow talk about diverse harmony. The truth is we kinda already do. We all go about our days interacting with people who have ideological differences, preferences, beliefs, values, and prioritize issues, according to their personal preferences in order of importance and significance in their lives without knowing it. But then we secretly hold stories, judgments, and resentment towards “those people” in our minds. Both sides holding themselves captive in victim stories.
While we’re busy blaming each other, the corporations, bureaucrats, and banks are consolidating power, passing policies that serve their interests, and burning the midnight oil to indoctrinate at lest half the country to believe what they’d really doing is for their best interest and that we they should hate the rest of us who want to stop what they’d are doing. keeping us too distracted to stop them.
The Rigged Game of Forced Cooperation
One of the biggest traps we fall into is the belief that we can force others to care about what we care about. When the government votes to defund programs like Medicaid, progressives feel like lives are being sacrificed for corporate greed. “These monsters have no heart”. conservatives feel like they’re being forced to pay for something they don’t want to pay for. Both sides feel like they’re under attack, fueling the never-ending cycle of resentment. This is where the hate comes in. Now both sides have a few hall pass to pass judgement on their fellow human. “These people are vile scum! “ “these people are the enemy” pretty soon, the word “people” goes away, exactly as intended for the systems benefit. And the dehumanization begins. The othering, the baking and the casting ourselves in perpetual disempowered victim narratives that yes you guessed it, benefits THE SYSTEM. And on and on it goes. With little crumbs of non foundation shaking little “victories” here and there to give people the illusion that progress is being made or if we keep fighting we can make changes from within. But let me tell you, here we are again. What’s changed ? Many things are different but what has really fundamentally changed. We’re still captured by a soul devouring machine of false dichotomies, ensnared in its grasp, our gaze fixated and engraved on the dangling shinny object (which is what it wants) as we stay stuck spinning our wheels, complaining, acting out sanctioned rebellions within the predetermined and accounted confines of allowable protest, and allowable dissent.
But what if we stopped trying to make a one-size-fits-all system work for everyone? What if, instead of coercion, we embraced voluntary cooperation? Imagine a world where people could fund what they care about, without being forced to support things they oppose. We already see glimpses of this in crowdfunding platforms like GoFundMe and Patreon, where people voluntarily support what they believe in.
Right now, our system forces everyone to pay into a collective pot, where bureaucrats decide how it gets spent. This breeds resentment on all sides. Why are we allowing ourselves to be forced in to playing the same boring and shitty lose lose gameyesr after year decade after decade?
If we want to break free, we need a model where people contribute to what they value, without demanding that others be forced to do the same. We need to agree to disagree and accept that, truly accept that what I value will be different than what you value, knowing full well we all have compatriots in our camps who share our values and views. Through all of human history before civilization turned us into mindless obedient slaves. This is the norm. Small bands of tribes no more than 150 or so people that share common interests and visions, common stories and myths and narratives about themselves and the world. A common cosmovision, mythology, cosmology living working, co-existing and sharing in the appreciation of this one life together For a brief period of time while we’re here on this planet.
But.. The system by way of the state wants you to believe that if the state didn’t exist, we would all devolve into animals, raping murdering and killing each each other and it would be widespread chaos They have even co-opted the term anarchy to use it as a pejorative, but widespread anarchy is what I am arguing for because widespread anarchy is the way to a peaceful and prosperous future of spontaneous, voluntary cooperation and collaboration with true diversity of accepting other people’s differences and not forcing other people to conform to the way that we see the world because we think our way is morally superior. This would allow for real progress, rather than perpetual stuckness in diseased conflict.
Breaking Free: The Need for a New System
So why do we keep playing this old game? Because it’s familiar. It’s easier to blame “the other side” than to confront the reality that the entire structure is working against us. We’ve been conditioned to believe that democracy equals freedom, but in reality, voting for different rulers every few years isn’t true sovereignty.
If we want real freedom, we need to decentralize power. We need to move away from top-down control and create self-sustaining, voluntary communities where people have real autonomy over their lives. The more we rely on centralized authority to solve our problems, the more we legitimize the very system that keeps us divided.
Even the word democracy has been programmed into our minds so that we believe that it’s some sacrosanct holier than thou apotheosis of all human thought and innovation, and we generated as such when in fact, democracy is not that democracy is majority rule and we keep pretending that we’re gonna move anywhere to where we wanna be if we keep invoking democracy people keep saying “this is how democracy dies““democracy under attack“ “they want to ruin democracy“ all of this is a bunch of bullshit we don’t need democracy.
What form of system would you prefer when you go out to dinner with 10 friends democracy?
“Ok Steve, Since this dinner is a democracy, we all took a vote and voted that you should pay the full check tonight”
That doesn’t seem so fair.
“ Well, if you choose not to we villainize you demonize you shame you ridicule you make you have to be a villain and a bad guy and maybe we’ll even threaten you with Physical force by holding you up at gunpoint and if you resist then will lock you in a cage, maybe even tour the you too. At lest, until you can give us enough money to get out“
Yeah, that’s evil.
Or
“ Hey everybody, just contribute for what you had at dinner tonight, sound good ? “
Or
“hey don’t worry everyone I got the check tonight”
Or
“ hey, is everyone down to just split the check 10 ways evenly?”
Or let’s say you show up at a dinner with nine of your friends, but you only had a beer. Everybody else had appetizers dinner, dessert and drinks and someone suggest to split the check evenly. You suggest since you only had one drink if you can contribute just for that then everyone gets angry at you and says “no this is a democracy. We all split evenly” is that fair or morally right?
Now, suppose they’re cool with that. Great and maybe one of your friends might even say “hey Steve, don’t worry about it. I got you tonight.”
The “ democratic“ ways in this scenario are not fair even or just their tyrannical oppressive their mob rule majority rule they’re violent. They’re hostile. They impose one ideological case value to a diverse group of people. The other examples put forward case by case independent voluntary cooperation and collaboration. Anarchy.
What I’m saying is, we need wise heart centered soul filled leaders to take action. Time for talking is over. The time for thought-provoking ideas that live solely in the realm of thought provoking ideas is at an end. We need action!
We need individual empowered embodied, sovereign autonomy that allows for free, anarchic cooperation, coordination and collaboration the acceptance of other people‘s differences, the ability to agree to disagree and the fundamental human principle of due onto others as you would have done onto yourself Treat everyone with respect and care and allow for the freedom and liberty to do what you wish with your life as long as you’re causing no harm to anyone else so that they may also do as they wish while causing no harm. but we can’t just a spouse these principles and values. We can’t just talk about how good these things sound. We can’t just make a law that requires everyone to behave this way we need wise leaders who can show the way in a true embodied, action oriented, local community, driven way people that actually walk the walk and set the tone for others to follow not to be forced to follow, but to be inspired to follow to allow for the human heart and the human soul and imagination to shine because when that happens, no one will wanna go back to the old way the old way will see machine like chaotic, diseased, toxic, and obsolete the new way we have a infinite array of diverse, appealing alternatives, where people will look at it and say “yeah, why would I ever go back to that way of being, that makes no sense and I felt like shit, I’m not gonna use a landline phone. I’ve got a iPhone“ make the system obsolete. Divert from the system. Get together with like-minded like hearted like sold individuals. Inspire each other. Make magic.
The solution isn’t to win the next election or defeat the other side—it’s to reject the false choice entirely. Let the old system die. Let’s stop fighting each other and start building something better.