Every four years there is a tremendous pressure to fall in line and support a candidate for Presidency of the United States. Some years, these candidates deserve it. Some years, they do not. I do not support anyone vying to become the next President. My understanding of history, my understanding of America, and my personal ethics prevent it. This is not an exhaustive exploration of how I engage with history, family, government, and virtue, but I hope to put to words the reasoning for why I am choosing to walk away from the ‘Man in the Arena’.

Description: Betsy Ross showing Major Ross and Robert Morris how she cut the stars for the American flag; George Washington sits in a chair on the left. 1 photomechanical print : halftone, color (postcard made from painting). Postcard published by The Foundation Press, Inc., 1932. Reproduction of oil painting from series: The Pageant of a Nation.

I.

Theodore Roosevelt, a great man by many standards, gave a speech that is widely used against cynics who criticize the lack of virtue, the failings, and the hypocrisies of politicians.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” (Man in the Arena — Citizenship in a Republic)

I don’t debate that this is a useful perspective in many ways — it is certainly easier to criticize than it is to act.

However, as a man in the arena stands, I didn’t ask for these politicians to fight. I don’t choose to cheer for one of them over the other when none are worthy.

And so, I choose to walk away.

II.

What is the base unit of historical continuity? What actual social and physical structure connects me, in the simplest sense, with the past?

It is certainly not the individual. The individual dies. Despite my best efforts, I will almost certainly die some day, and while my genetic and memetic material may pass on, they are not me.

It is not the state. If we look at a list of sovereign states by date of formation, more countries than not have only had their current state for the last hundred years — it is quite feasible a single lifetime would allow one person to have seen the formation of 75% or so of modern states.

If we extend that to states in general, ignoring transitional forms of government, the picture doesn’t get significantly better.

We can very easily establish that states are not the thing that brings continuity to our history, any more than the individual does.

Is it the nation, or tribe? As a ‘nation’ is the thing that nominally underlies most states, I think that we begin to grasp closer to the question, but this is perhaps too vague. We can say that history is not made up of specific nations or tribes, because those also dissolve and change — though more violently (such as via cultural conquests, ethnic cleansing, etc.) than the state necessarily does.

Nations and tribes, and the individuals they’re comprised of, are perpetuated in the same way. They’re perpetuated by a social structure that has a built in sense of time, of succession, of links reaching back into the yawning chasms of history.

The family.

We each have a lineage that goes back to the beginning of humanity. Civilization is made of families, successions of individuals in generations. These families strand together to form tribes by cultural and genetic links, and temporarily come together to form Lockean commonwealths (which will often align with tribes but not necessarily). Families have ideas and worldviews, subcultures and professions, passed down — whether genetically or memetically — that shape their environments repeatedly, ignoring political lines like state borders. The stories of our ancestors inspire us, either to pursue a mythical valor or to attempt to purge their sins from our conscience.

On one side, my ancestors were Scottish nobility and British mutts. The Scottish nobility descended from ancient Gaels who, going back even further, were one of many branches of the Indo Europeans. On the other side, my ancestors were Jewish — and, without belaboring all the different genetic influences and diasporas there, my specific lineage may potentially tie back to ancient Sumerians who converted to Judaism.

Whatever is going on at the physical level in my mind, merely typing out those words makes me want to understand more about where I came from, and where I’m going. I am attached to those ancestors struggling and surviving and leading to my creation in many ways just as much as I am to the culture that I live in.

And when I consider politics, I consider the future of making sure that my family thrives. Because the state I live in will be broken, the people I am part of will dissolve and change, but my descendants will be my descendants. Because a family speaks across time. My ancestors made a space for me. I will pass on that gift to my own children, and my grandchildren, and my great grandchildren. Whether or not I fail in all my other attempts at immortality — personal or memetic — I will perpetuate myself and my ancestors through me in the way that has been done since the beginning of time.

III.

Why do individuals, and families, form governments?

To brusquely summarize Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil Government, a people come together as a commonwealth when they decide that their happiness and property will be better safeguarded when power and the controls over it follow a shared set of rules, rather than depending on the capabilities of the individual to defend his happiness and property.

This mindset is generally followed in the Federalist papers and the mindset of the Framers of our constitution, as well. It is made explicit that the purpose of the confederation, and then of the union, was to ensure the happiness and the safety of the people (Federalist 2, Federalist 45). The federalist papers are not an absolute moral good to me — I don’t believe they properly safeguarded liberty, and that their oppositional ‘Antifederalist Papers’ were necessary (and perhaps in some ways insufficiently influential), but I agree with this broad sense of purpose.

America is a nation of contrasts and arguments, and it always has been. We have never been just one people — we were settled by successive waves of dissidents, profiteers, and radicals. That lineage, those families, the understanding that we would have to balance competing interests and organizations gave rise to some of the greatest pieces of human social technology the world has ever seen.

The tendencies of all nations to schism and fight for power are magnified in America, because our differences are so much more pronounced. It is much harder to get us to all go along with something because we are so likely to simply say ‘no, that isn’t me’.

The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States. A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source. A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire State. (Federalist #10)

I am concerned that we’re failing at this. I’m concerned that since the so-called Managerial Revolution, we’ve been granted tools that allow for an ever increasing span of control. And when a span of control increases, then the ability to centralize power nearly necessarily increases as well. Sometimes the mere capability forces us to take advantage of it perhaps (such as in international politics), but in other cases it enables the fulfillment of a desire for more power to be achieved at the expense of the people and longevity of the state.

We look at endless failures of central power and say ‘Ah, if only we had more observational capability, more actuating capability, then that central control would have worked!’. Even if it is true in the immediate sense, and it very rarely is, it doesn’t address the fact that it is healthy to have oppositional factions! It is what our nation is built off of.

The distribution and decentralization of our nation is a feature, not a failure. It prevents monomaniacal failures of ideas from sweeping the nation — even in the last hundred years, we can think of dozens of things that while horrific locally, would have been significantly worse if imposed from the top down by the Federal Government.

Centralizing power will do just that, and moreover, it will increase the fractious tendency (rather than factional tendency) to fight over who gets control over the entire government. The more that your winning control removes my ability to make my own decisions, the harder — and perhaps less civilly — I will fight to prevent it. We are failing in this way. Not even necessarily consistently, as there has certainly been an improvement in some areas of constitutional law in the last decades, but the cultural tendency concerns me.

America will, eventually, fall. If it does not fall it will schism, or change, in some ways that creates a clean or messy break from what it is today. This shouldn’t be taken as a political statement for or against any particular policy in a political sense, but a mere fact of history. It is even arguable that this has happened already — the shift from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution, the Civil War, the passing of the Sixteenth Amendment.

My family wasn’t in the United States when these last shifts happened, although they were undergoing or surviving other shifts in Europe. But it is more than likely that I, or my family to come, will live through the next shifts.

Nations fall, and my family will with any luck live through it. The transition will, more likely than not, bring great death and suffering. It is a moral imperative to me that I both minimize my contribution to the violence, but also that I make the space for my descendants that my ancestors made for me.

I feel withdrawn from the transitory state, back to that base unit of history.

IV.

How do these views impact engagement with modern politics? Specifically, how do they impact the most contentious aspect of modern politics in the United States, the election of the President?

First past the post means that, in many fundamental ways, we are probably stuck with one of two parties. Even if there was a party shake-up, we would probably (though not necessarily) end up with two parties again, mostly because as a society we’re well aware of the spoiler candidate effect. In fact, that two candidate tendency is part of what has shifted my views on supporting a candidate.

I live in a solidly blue state, but that’s not why I can’t and won’t support any of the presidential candidates. I recognize that without being in a swing state the ethical and political issues are somewhat moot, but I believe that I would respond similarly if I did live in one of those states.

The fundamental problem is that I believe all candidates with a chance of winning are actively harmful to the United States of America. I believe that all of them will reduce the ‘remaining lifespan’ of the US by more than one year per year.

I absolutely recognize there are gradients of bad between the various presidential candidates, and the statement above is in no way an attempt to make a moral, political, economic, or even really functional equivocation across the candidates. What I am saying is that none of them reach a minimum bar.

If we could elect an empty room that remained shut for four years, and Congress was forced to take back its delegated power…I would support that. However, I didn’t ask for the candidates that we have available to be there, and as such I don’t need to support any of them.

V.

Instead of supporting a politician vying for control of America, what I will do is twofold: I will seek virtue, and I will plea for humanity and kindness.

What it means to be virtuous is, of course, one of the greatest questions in philosophy…but I seek it in my own way. My pleas, however, are simpler.

Recognize the people you are arguing against are human too.

Recognize that they have different formulations of facts, different understandings and associations of how priors lead to posteriors.

Recognize that being unkind, cutting them out of your life, and choosing to hate them leaves a scar both on you and on our society.

Recognize that just because it would take a certain amount of callous maliciousness for you to reach their views from where your views are now, doesn’t mean that’s how they reached them.

Recognize that forcing someone to accede to your rule makes them more likely to rebel. If small deviations from your views are treated the same as large, there is no reason for them to maintain civility. If the punishment for being late is death, and the punishment for rebellion is death, you get the Dazexiang uprising.

Even if more needs to be done, don’t cut down the laws and separations of power from shore to shore just to chase the devil.

Please, for those around you, try to maintain your sense of being American. If you want to be an American, enjoy your rights. The government doesn’t grant them to us, it is simply not permitted to trample them.

VI.

I choose to walk away from the arena, for now. I haven’t given up on America — as a people, or as a state. But when I consider beyond the social and cultural conflicts in the moment to the world I want my family to live in, I cannot in good faith lend my support to the man in the arena. I recognize that the winner will still impact me, and have tremendous control of an institution I still care about.

All the same, I do not want my voice heard in the din when he approvingly raises his arms at the crowd. I do not want to be counted among the masses that give mandate.

I won’t lend my voice to any of the individuals running for president in 2020. None of them deserve it. Many of them may be lovely people, but that doesn’t mean they deserve to be handed control over the greatest and most powerful nation on the planet.

Instead, I will focus on my family. I will live my life, practicing attributes, attitudes, and actions in a way that helps my community and contributes to the same practice in those around me.

Perhaps, if I focus on the people around me, and help them focus on the people around them, then someday I will be able to cheer for the man in the arena.

Other References

• http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
• https://ncase.me/ballot/