Voting as an Act of Submission

A man is no less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years.

- Lysander Spooner

There are people in various stages of unmasking everywhere I look. Some are still fully masked, even double masked. However, most are now in some state of undress. There are those just barely poking their noses out above their masks, there are those walking with faces completely naked, and there's every imaginable state in between.

This reminds me of spring where some flowers come early, and others remain buds well into summer. People will eventually drop their masks, just like every bud becomes a flower at some point. That's how nature works, including human nature. The process cannot be stopped.

The diversity is striking, and it's heartening to see how everyone accepts and respects other people's choices, no matter how much they disagree with them. This is what civility looks like. We tolerate others, no matter how weird we find them to be. If their weirdness is perceived as threatening, we simply avoid them. There's no point in verbally attacking those that do things differently from ourselves.

These were my musings this Sunday, which happened to be election day here in Portugal. My wife is still a believer in democracy, so I followed her to her designated polling station to cast her vote. It was a fine winter day, with blue skies and a warm sun. Since I knew better than my wife where the polling station was located, it made sense to go along, and I made a curious observation that made the walk all the more worth while.

The closer we got to the polling station, the more people were wearing their masks diligently. It was as if we were approaching some shrine where the faithful wear their masks in deference to their deity. At the shrine itself, everyone but I were wearing their masks even when outside the area where this was mandated. It was positively weird to see, yet nobody but I seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary.

Later that day, I noticed that the talking heads on TV would wear masks whenever the subject of the vote came up, making it all the clearer that mask wearing and voting are related activities. I don't think this was planned in any way. Rather, I think this was a display of subconscious awareness. Everyone knows intuitively that voting is an act of submission, and so is mask wearing. Hence, people put on their masks as part of the overall ritual.

The basic idea of democracy is that we are free only in as far as we are willing to submit to the collective. Voting is an offering to Molech and his priesthood. We submit our prayer to the deity, and politicians grant these wishes in accordance to Molech's wishes.

Offering to Molech

By Charles Foster - Illustrators of the 1897 Bible Pictures and What They Teach Us http://associate.com/photos/Bible-Pictures--1897-W-A-Foster/page-0074-1.jpg, Public Domain, Link