The Rada-31 affair is yet another sad reminder that politics, in its visible form, is nothing more than a spectacle concealing some other dealings. Because if it were otherwise, no one would be making such a fuss about deputies voting “for that bloke.” If it were really about rationally assessed measures capable of solving a problem, the first thing deputies should have said would be: “Hold on, how did we end up with majoritarian deputies and party-list deputies in the same chamber? Let’s fix this urgently.” Because the entire problem lies in the fact that different electoral procedures presuppose different organizational structures for the process that follows. If the subject of an election is a party, then a list deputy has the right to transfer his vote to a nearby colleague, but if the subject is a standalone deputy, he is obligated to always vote in person. This is a very simple and rational rule: “the person the voter voted for is the one who votes in parliament.” And therefore your “problem” can only be solved if deputies in one chamber are elected in the same way, and the solutions are either creating a second chamber or amending the electoral law.
But in reality, as we can see, no one wants to solve the problem. What they want is an endless show: “they won’t let us pass laws!” And it’s clear that once they resolve the Rada-3 affair, something else will come along. By the way, I should remind you that the participants in this show periodically switch places. After some time, the “regions” will be in opposition, and today’s opposition will be in power. But who will remember what happened yesterday? The comedy goes on regardless.
I raise this example to say that the entire system is a pure fairy tale. A fairy tale specifically, and not a myth, say, because myths are something rooted, they need to be pried out of consciousness separately, whereas a fairy tale crumbles the moment you compare it to reality. And yet it lives and flourishes.
A fairy tale, for instance, is all those supposedly verified and almost-scientific opinions on which “law” and “legislation” are based. Why, in our case, the whole situation rests on the public’s firm conviction that laws are necessary. Deputies stage the show about an ostensibly serious voting problem because the public is convinced of the need for laws. “We would gladly try, but those scoundrels won’t let us” is the message that progressive opinion consumes with great pleasure, and the fact that events are unfolding in a fairy tale is confirmed precisely by the public’s reaction. If we were dealing with a real existing problem, we would immediately hear: “You there, change the electoral law, and quickly, because time is passing.” But no such thing! Everyone is enjoying the gripping drama.
So, about laws. If it were possible to show our system (in this case, all “democracies”) to people whose names are associated with the beginning of the “era of progress and democracy,” most of them, after examining it, would say: “You’re not serious about this, are you? Oh, come on.” Yes, the adoption of certain laws by gatherings of people or specially elected greybeards has occurred in our history long before the appearance of any states and during their existence. But those people, even if they didn’t know each other personally (and, as a rule, they did), had a perfect understanding of what was being discussed. Their way of life was, let us say, unpretentious, and all these legislators were not professional politicians but earned their living by honest labor. And therefore their attempts to create certain rules were, at least, appropriate to the environment in which they were carried out and, most importantly, applied to themselves to the same extent as to everyone else. In this case, I am talking about positive legislation. Because everything else doesn’t need gatherings and greybeards at all (if they aren’t performing the role of a court, of course). This “everything else” has been well known since time immemorial, is exactly the same among all peoples, and reduces to the words “thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal.”
With the deepening division of labor and the increasing complexity of life, the creation of law increasingly passed to those who needed it in their activities. Our commercial law was created by merchants. Maritime law was created by sailors. Well, and gatherings of citizens can quite well occupy themselves with resolving issues arising in their locality under such conditions. To explain why the same sort of gathering, only “at the state level,” should resolve issues of sailors’ activities, merchants’ activities, and indeed of everyone who hasn’t hidden away, is impossible.
And just consider it—among the people there seriously circulates a legend that following elections your opinions are “summed up” or (in a more sophisticated version) “taken into account.” That is, in the case of adopting a law for professors, the opinions of three professors and five cooks are added together. And the same thing happens when decisions are made for cooks. And do you know what those decisions are? They are decisions that suit neither professors nor cooks. But everyone believes this is really needed by someone. What can you do—fairy tales.
The discussion concerns manipulations with the voting system ↩︎