American Mass Democracy Is Really a Suicide Cult

Let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine you have a group of five hundred men, and they want to decide how to run their society. They vote on whether to enact Proposition A or Proposition B to solve Problem X. Suppose 249 men voted for B and 251 voted for A. Obviously, A won the vote.
Let’s say X is an issue slightly more complicated than what to do for dinner. Tempers are high, because tempers are always high when people deliberate how society should be organized. Now, does winning the vote give the 251 justification to ignore the views and wishes of the 249? No, of course not.
Why is that? The smaller number can always defect from the group and try to force the issue violently. Game theory — a model of strategic interactions — can describe this collapse of cooperation. When a smaller party defects from a larger group, it rejects cooperation and seeks to attain its goals at the larger group’s expense.
At their most basic level, all political discussions fall back on force — the primeval means of one person enacting their will, their rights, on other people. Voting is a proxy for force. When two groups vote, they are implicitly peacocking about what force they could use should they defect. Using our example, 251 is not that much greater a number than 249. Should the 249 defect, they might win a contest of brute force due to anything from combat skill to sheer luck. The game is unforecastable enough that it is in the larger group’s best interest to be conciliatory, work with the other party and perhaps tweak Proposition A’s terms to accommodate Proposition B’s proponents. If A doesn’t solve X, the 251 should be willing to try B. Both sides benefit from getting along.
Now, let’s be heretics. Imagine that instead of 500 men voting for A and B, you have a group of 1,000 people: 500 men and 500 women. Imagine 500 women and one man vote for A while 499 men vote for B. One person swayed the vote, but only one man voted for A. In this instance, the calculus of the game is monumentally different. That vote count of 501 may be bigger than 499, but the force that 500 women and one man can exert is lower than the force that 499 men can.
It is scarcely a secret that men are stronger than women on average, but most people don’t really understand how much stonger. The average woman is 67% as strong as a man. The male grip strength is nearly twice as strong as the female, and men retain their strength into much older age than women. Male athletes regularly outcompete female athletes of significantly greater experience. In a contest of bodily force, the 499 men could defect and trounce the 501, if they chose to do so.
You might object that, in the modern age, force has nothing to do with muscle mass since firearms exist. Guns are indeed instant force equalizers — even a legendary strongman like Hafþór Björnsson could be laid low by a bullet. But modern war hasn’t truly evolved past the need for physical strength. The average United States infantryman’s combat weight load is at least 120 lbs of gear, and the average carry load for a squad automatic gunner is an additional 80 lbs. There simply aren’t enough strong women to form all-female combat brigades. Further, mixed brigades underperform all-male brigades in every metric.
We can see how this is playing out in the Russia–Ukraine War. This isn’t a comic book movie — there are no Amazon brigades on either side, no Scarlett Johansson Black Widows kicking dozens of mens’ asses at once. Ukraine’s women have fled the country and its men have been fed into the meat grinder in a demographic collapse that may see the extinction of the Ukrainian people.
Despite our modern toys like planes, drones and missiles, the fundamental mechanics of warfare still have not changed. Physicality remains necessary on the battlefield. Until engineers invent futuristic power armor, war remains the province of men.
This reality offends too many Western liberal sensibilities. People misinterpret the statement that one group is physically weaker as saying that that group is morally inferior. But the former is a question of fact; the latter is a question of evaluation. This is politics, not morals. Politics is the art of the possible, the existential distinction between “friend” and “enemy.”
If you want to accomplish something possible, you want only strong friends; no weakness. You don’t merely want more votes, you want more potential force in your corner so that if someone decides to defect against an intolerable proposition, you have a decent shot of winning. So, for 499 men who oppose Proposition B, defection is not just easy — it’s incentivized by the stakes at play.
In US presidential politics, you play for all the marbles, and the outcome affects every living person on the planet. It’s the biggest, most dangerous and most important game around. And no game lasts very long when one side can defect easily and is incentivized to do so.
We see the problem that arises when significant force disparity exists on a scale of only a thousand people. American democracy involves hundreds of millions. Now, consider that American politics would have extremely different outcomes if only men voted. Americans are not divided into groups of roughly equal gender makeup; one political coalition consists of significantly more men than the other. So, one group has a much greater potential to force issues by defecting from the democratic process than the other does.
The force disparity in a contest between these two massive groups is not conducive to the system’s long-term stability. It can only last because one side is either unaware of its strength or unwilling to do what would be required to win kinetically.
Further consider that, In a contest between mere hundreds, the defecting side might be forced to kill friends, neighbors or kin to secure its political aims. In a contest between hundreds of millions across a sprawling continent, the people one would hypothetically need to eliminate would be nameless, faceless crowds hundreds of miles away. In any real conflict scenario, they’d be painted as political enemies or even dehumanized. Violence is easy if you genuinely believe you are pure and your enemy monstrous.
Mass democracy is a suicide cult. It binds ever-greater numbers of people into intractable disputes, where the losing side on each issue has only two options: defection or subjugation. An unshakeable belief that the vote is sacred and dissent sinful can induce the losing side to accept subjugation, but only for so long.
The winners never realize they may actually be weaker than the losers, and so they have no limiting principle — nothing to require them to be gracious, to compromise. The losers know that the only thing keeping them from defecting is the collateral damage. But I believe that, eventually, some major issue will make tempers flare uncontrollably, and someone will defect. In the midst of a major conflagration, things will “reset,” as blogger Curtis Yarvin (under his pseudonym Mencius Moldbug) uses the term: There will be a “non-incremental transition” from one form of government to another.
This fate is unavoidable. Water circling the drain can’t decide to reverse course. You can’t stop the flow; you must get out and wait for the tub to empty.
When the commune starts passing out the Flavor-Aid cups, you need to surreptitiously dump yours and disappear.
[Lee Thompson-Kolar and Anton Schauble edited this piece.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.