Why I don't vote

People are usually aghast when they discover that I don't vote. It doesn't come up in conversation much as people rarely ask directly, but I'm not ashamed so am not hiding it on purpose and do occasionally mention it.

I get three very common responses to my not voting. The main one is 'people died for you right to vote'. Good for them, I respect people who get stuff done and stand up for what they believe in. I do no, however, believe that they would expect me to vote when I do not wish to. I expect they would be much more passionate that I stand up for things that *I* believe in, which I try to do.

I also get people saying it’s my age. While I am young to some (I’m 37), I’m certainly not a fresh faced 18 year old, that was half my life ago. In the main my peers are really quite passionate about politics, so I do not approve of people throwing the age card, when I am really an exception. It is not because I am an idiot either though, with a university Masters degree behind me.

The other common response I get is 'well don't complain about policies then' – I absolutely won’t, as the policies hold the same interest for me as voting, in fact it’s those that don’t interest me, which is why I don’t vote, rather than vice versa. I’ve only ever voted once, when a respected friend told me to and said friend never tells me to do anything, but at the time the BNP was popular in my local area and she was worried by this. Instead of just marking a random party I looked into it properly, doing questionnaires online on who to vote for based on which policies I agreed with. Nearly every question that popped up I answered “this is not important to me”. This should now all become clear below.

I've never been able say very clearly why I don’t vote (even to myself), there is a reason but the reason is due to how I differ from other people, so I've had to figure out how I differ before I can explain why, and that is a mammoth task (as this who know me may agree!!! :-)). I am becoming a little clearer on it though, enough to be able to write this to point people at next time they look at me in shock because of it.

It comes down to two things, 1) subjectivity and 2) insignificance…

1) I have an analytical type personality, people throughout the years have told me I think too much, but I don’t, to me it’s not too much and I don’t even do it consciously, it just happens and it works for me. I have an engineering degree and I’ve always enjoyed puzzles or maths, as it’s interesting to work problems through to a definite answer. Subjective topics are interesting too, but just from a point of curiosity, they don’t have answers, so have no interesting in finding answers, and politics is inherently subjective.

The black and white aspect of mathematics couldn’t be more hidden in matters of opinion – even if a decision was made conclusively, as an outsider we can never fully know the thoughts and discussions that led up to it being made so I would never judge a anything subjective in objective terms as it would be impossible to have all the facts.

In terms of life experience, I’ve tried a lot of things from clubbing to mountaineering, from knitting to motorbike riding, been in a lot of situations, met a lot of people and had a lot of conversations. It is integral to the way I view stuff to always mind that: there are at least two sides to everything (and one is nearly always unknown, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there); there aren’t any rights or wrongs; and one situation, ‘good’ or ‘bad’, is a result of many that went before it which could individually have been ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Likewise any voting decision is not right or wrong, and the results cannot be conclusively predicted and may not go where we expect. Which means to me it just doesn’t matter who is chosen. Say a party has a policy that 49% of people are against, and 51% of people vote them in, the offensive policy could (and quite likely would) prompt the 49% into action and changes could happen anyway. It’s the same principle as ‘any publicity is bad publicity’, and the unknowns like this would have AT LEAST as big an impact as the knowns, as far as I’m concerned. In the same way, if someone starts a war, which is generally a ‘bad’ thing, it’s going to reduce population density which is its own problem, which will be beneficial for humans (as a whole, obviously not those who perished) as well as the planet, so was the decision that bad after all? There is just never a definitive answer.

Further to my lack of an opinion or judgement on subjective matters, I’m also quite happy for decisions to be made for me for the same reasons – people in charge of things like education are (in theory) going to be chosen because they are interested or skilled, which is more than I can say for me, so let them do it, what does my opinion matter when I don’t have all the facts or haven’t seen how hard changes are to effect. People are unlikely to end up in that role just because they want to sabotage it, they’re at least going to try their best, and that’s good enough for me. If it all goes ‘wrong’, so be it, then the outfall gets dealt with instead, I wouldn’t hold it against anyone, as (coming back to this) nothing is ever black and white. Because of all this I have never even paid attention to politics, the news, and current affairs. I don’t mind what happens, because it just does, so I just am simply not interested in the majority of it, and my knowledge as a result declines which further leaves me out of the loop. I know the terms right wing and left wing, but not which political party falls into each. I’m not sure I even know who is in power in my area. What I do know is just because I listen to the radio for music and the news pops up, or from social media, rather than because I’ve sought it out.

There is a slight potential exception to whether I care or not about what the politicians are saying, which is if humanity started to be questioned. Most policies don’t challenge our humanity, just our money and education etc. If they did start to question our humanity, like some of Trumps statements in the US election campaign (albeit still taken semi-seriously by me because I don’t know both sides) I might at least stand up for those beliefs.

I must say I find one of the outstanding traits of humans is selfishness, and the balance of negative and positive swings somewhere around the middle. This *is* human nature and won’t change, let’s call that one a definite objective fact, so there’s no point getting upset about it, it’s better just to carry on my own life and do the best I can.

To me it is really very strange that nearly everyone else is so interested in voting, and how so many are so definite about their answer. I can easily speak to one kind, intelligent friend who supports one party for reasons which are perfectly sensible and valid, and the next kind, intelligent friend I speak to supports another for equally sensible, valid reasons. So it boggles my mind a little who so many people are so interested in voting at all, when this alone is reason enough to not be bothered about it.

I don’t see my lack of ability to judge on subjective matters as a negative trait. I have had friends approach me to tell them a secret about themselves that they have no told others, even if the first friends doesn’t know me so well, as they know I won’t judge them. This is a positive result of the very same trait. I’m happy with this part of me.

So that’s reason #1, but this characteristic is of mine is more of a reason why I wouldn’t reach a voting conclusion, and less about why I don’t vote at all. The other issue concretes why I don’t vote at all.

2) My brain seems to work from a more distant viewpoint. If you look at the lifetime of our planet, of which we are just one species: “Science tells us the earth is over 4.7 billion years old, with all of modern history and human civilization only occurring within the last 5,000 to 10,000 years. Said differently, if all of time were compared to a 12 month calendar, all of mankind’s recorded history would have occurred on the last second, of the last minute, of the last day of that year.” (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/al-petrone/one-second-before-midnigh_b_175989.html). Voting in the UK (and even then only for some) has been happening for less than 800 years, which is a tenth of that final second. So I just can’t get excited about it in the grand scheme of the universe. Ants form highly organised colonies, but if we look at them we just see a few insects milling around or walking in a line, we don’t get involved in the finer intricacies because to use they just don’t matter. This is kind of how I see humans – a small blip on the cosmic scale, insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and quite self-important that we think otherwise.

3) Even if I did have an interesting in voting, what little I do see of it by accident doesn’t remotely draw me in. The entire basis of it seems to be of one party trying to outdo another by promising what they thing people want to hear, which isn’t actually what they believe in themselves, which often results in making promises they can’t keep or have no intention of doing so. It’s also down to the person way more than the party, but we are voting for the party. Then once the election is done they all stand up and shout at each other in a big old fashioned hall far removed from our day to day lives. Why on earth would I want to get involved in this?

This is a moot point really due to 1 and 2 existing. I’m just adding it to show that if 1 and 2 didn’t exist, I may vote but I’d probably just go and spoil my ballot.

I hope that helps to explain how the world looks to me. There may be some things that appear as contradictions but that is probably because I haven’t not explained things clearly or not emphasised the important bits well. I tried to explain this all to someone as a precursor to writing it out, but before I'd got very far they got quite irate with me and call me plain selfish for not voting. Externally I laughed it off but actually I thought that was quite rude. If anything it's voting that's inherently selfish because it's judged on your personal standpoint. It's also quite disrespectful to not acknowledge that there is an alternative way of looking at it all which is perfectly valid.


Just as a little exercise, to further show how I view all this, I thought for a little while about what I would do if suddenly someone put me in power. My two main (equally important) policies would be: 1) Do what we can as a nation to prevent harm to the natural world. 2) Encourage a sense of community and pleasantness amongst everyone in our country. EVERYTHING else would take a back seat.

#1 would cover things like limiting human effects on climate change, preserving animal habitats, reducing use of non-biodegradable waste, seeing if we can make a positive effect to the planet rather than everything we do being a case of undoing damage we’ve already done etc.
#2 looks at the essence of what I think is wrong with this country, which is that on the whole people seem to have become quite selfish and disrespectful. If I visit other countries I see a greater sense of national identity (here we just seem to take pride in the pub and football), and a greater respect for the country’s heritage. In my experience in the UK people will barge past you in the supermarket or the street, drive like loons, and generally fit the world around them rather than fit themselves into the world. It’s a consequence of being able to do so much more than we used to (with the world having shrunk as a result of internet interactions) and being in a position of advantage (due to human rights), these are good things but I feel we’ve just taken it too far – I am guilty of this too.  This isn’t to say we should stop people being in a rush or not wanting to be sociable, just looking at encouraging them to be more considerate. So what to do to change this? I would dedicate a half day a week, perhaps Monday mornings, to community projects instead of work, compulsory for employees and employers alike, and everyone would still get paid. Everyone can apply for helpers, whether businesses or individuals, and people could sign up to those schemes, or just take the initiative to find some other way to be helpful. Businesses could take helpers if they don’t want to lose business for a day, the employers would still be contributing as they’d be sharing their skills and training people up, and the temporary labour would gain extra skills. Production would be slower but that would be the same for the whole country and would be offset by the direct skills benefits and the less tangible community benefits – Community-wise people would be getting stuff done around the house, raising money for local causes, setting up schemes for schools. People would be happier as life would be at a slower pace, with more focus on enjoyment and personal development, and the potential would be opened up of utilising the therapeutic benefits of nature, the outdoors, animals, exercise and companionship. Participation is compulsory and of course would have to be monitored, this could involve the homeless so they would learn data processing skills. I would also reassess prisons, anyone that could even potentially benefit from re-education would be put through an education scheme linked in with community Mondays, I’ve always felt that locking people up with only the company of others whose string of decision had also led them the wrong side of cultural acceptance isn’t going to help anyone. I’d also openly destroy all our nuclear weapons, and our military would be a peacekeeping force if used at all.

I just had to have a look at the policies of the main parties to see what their policies actually are: education; tax; the health service; carers; school meals: I would not change any of these at all for at least 2 years.  The theory being that if you put a sense of community, sharing and helpfulness back in place, even those that didn’t believe in those things before will see the advantages, and the issue with education, the health services and money will start to fall into place.

That was quite a long explanation, but there wasn't really anything to leave out. Welcome to my world, please keep an open mind 😊 I respect other people's views and the fact that they do vote, hopefully the same can be offered for the fact that I don't.