I began this over one year ago (July 28, 2010), but never finished. I’ve lost the creative tingle, here–but rather than trash the bit, I’ll post it. It’s raw, but there’s a rough in its diamond.

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It ought, but is rarely the case, that when a man gazes toward heaven and pulls the lever on the slot machine praying, “Let this vote solve my worries” we give pause to consider the sanity of the individual. For as the same motion born of the same sentiment occurs in this country and others with more or less the same frequency over the years for elections with no more chance of positive progress than the vote cast a few years prior, few if any have paused to question the rationality of the fundamental assumption underpinning the system itself.

If we presume that once a body grows to such a size that all voices cannot be heard equally thus necessitating a surrogate body of size small enough to occupy a room who will speak for the body large on all matters, and if we presume the election of this body to be so fraught with peril that it need occur with frequency on the assumption that those elected would inevitably deviate from the intentions of the electorate, then if these assumptions be sound and well reasoned, why would the body large delegate both the accountability for the role occupied and the election of person to role at the same moment in the same ballot? In consumer terms, this is obviously and immediately irrational. When a woman buys a car and that car fails to perform against the standards advertised by the manufacturer, the salesperson and the dealership, she returns the car and demands a refund of her money or a replacement of equal or greater value. She does not wait for the next year’s model to arrive, only to purchase the same model with the same expectations for success again.

Yet in the case of governments, the body large has self-relegated themselves into this very position.

What might steer a body politic into the back alleys of chance and gambling? It is, of itself, an inherently rational evolutionary progression. Perhaps those less disciplined, organized, and collected tend to fall more rapidly to those more governed: the individual falls prey to the group. Or, perhaps the very nature of growth demands that those collected and organized seek out additional resources to sustain the growth of the body: the group begins to prey upon the weak. In and of itself, the choice is simple, short and plain: join the group, suffer rule and live or reject rule and possibly die. The empirical results suggest that most of the human species have chosen the former; but it is this notion of choice I wish to challenge.

The centuries predicting and then lamenting the so-called “American Revolution” are littered with pamphlets of philosophical propaganda espousing a kind of Social Contract, the notion being that individual society is so inherently destined to fail that no other choice but collective and deferred, surrogate rule exists. Given this assumption, society must then choose between a mixture of good and evils for the rule of law which greatest protects their critical values and preserves their critical rights. Of the relevant works available, few attempt to accomodate more than one viewpoint. The collective may have safety but not freedom; the group may