You Don't Matter

3 min read Original article ↗

Think about democracy. Is it a system which is moral in and of itself, or is it a system which is used to achieve some objectives? Many people would say the first, except if you take the previous section as fact it seems wildly incoherent to say that some idea, democracy, can have any inherent moral worth at all. Instead, it seems plausible to assume that what we mean by some statement like, "democracy is moral", is actually a proxy for some sort of cost-benefit analysis of the pros and cons of democracy existing totaling to it being a pro. Now let me ask a pretty obvious question: if you're an individual person, what does weighing the pros and cons of a system mean? Of course, the individual need not consider systems in order to simply achieve their goals in most cases, it is sufficient to just focus on your own life.

You could say you're weighing the pros and cons with respect to society. Okay, depending on your definition of society, it seems as though the definition of a statement like, "democracy is moral" has restored its meaning. Yet, I can point out something else that seems pretty obvious to say, which is that you are not society. In fact, you have little to no influence over broader society, and you make no significant portion of society. You may have friends that you can count on, as well as a family, but democracy is an idea that pertains, in many cases, to nation states.

Your ultimate goal in life could be that you want to influence society as much as possible. I am telling you that it shouldn't be. That is to say, it is a lot easier to have influence over your own actions than influence over society, so it is easier to give up on that ambition than to actually satisfy that ambition (I would argue that this is unambiguously true in almost all circumstances). If you're not convinced, there are most likely a couple million people in your society, and you're only one of them. The empirical probability that those millions of people should listen to you either directly or indirectly is objectively low (drops off proportional to 1/n), else you are delusional.

So to recap, what does it mean to make a statement such as, "democracy is moral"? Well, it seems logical that it means something like, "it is better on average for society to have democracy than to not, weighing the pros and cons". Yet, this kind of statement is useless to say for nearly every individual who says it, if it isn't said for fun or for some goal which you should probably give up on anyways. Speaking of democracy, let's run a social experiment.