Today, the prince visited the youth centre where I volunteer. I wasn’t there; he visited a few hours before I arrived. I felt like it was a little exciting – it certainly helped to validate the sense I have that we’re being useful as volunteers. That’s a bit of a non-sequitir, but it did.

On the way home, a fellow volunteer found a notice which had been left on the subway. It raged against the visit of a monarch, the concept of a monarch, the unjust nature of our society, and the foolishness of honouring our ‘imperialist heritage’, or even seeing it through rose-coloured glasses. Everything that I read on the page made sense, and it wasn’t really very sensationalistic. It was just stating the absurdity of the situation. Yet I could not move past apathy about it.

I commented on my feelings to my friend, and a nearby stranger contributed their insight: I don’t have to picket, but I do have to vote. It seemed like a rather courageous thing to do at the time, but they were on their way out of the train, so now I wonder if they’d have been so bold having to continue to sit beside me for a few more minutes. I hope so. Anyway, their words got me on the topic of voting, which I have a similar mixed set of emotions about.

See, I’m pretty stupid and uninformed. Incoming list: I don’t know much about economics, about history, about the culture of the french, the eastern-canadians, the northern-canadians, the prairie-canadians, the western-canadians, or even many of the southern canadians (of whom I take membership) — or those who don’t fit in the categories I’ve foolishly devised. I don’t know very much science, very much about theft, or strategy, or budgeting, or military culture or needs, or policy, or our identity, or education, or anything about ‘what’s best for everyone’.

I don’t even know very much of what I don’t know.

Yet, in our society, I seem expected to feel entitled to a loud, strong opinion about all of those things. I am entitled to participate in deciding who will decide about them, and occasionally, I’m entitled to directly participate in deciding about them. Why should I feel that I have the right to choose a person who will run a city, who will choose a person who will run a police force? Or to choose a person that will decide health-care policy?

Usually, there are attempts to inform us, the stupid public, by telling us ‘what they plan to do’ in the form of “campaign promises”. The people running often seem more interested in winning than in doing the best job or the best things for the most people. They are selling the cheapest, best-looking thing they could come up with that roughly aligns with their ideals, and they’re doing their damndest to package it up so we’ll be convinced.

I don’t want that. It’s feels cheap and sleazy, and it’s not about anything that matters. It’s just a giant, stupid game where we feel entitled and empowered but don’t make many decisions that have real impacts on lives. Well, at least I don’t think we should even have that power! I absolutely don’t believe that there is any real way to make more people “care” about voting, or to make us “well informed”. We’re going to continue to be idiots, and we’re going to continue to be apathetic, unless someone stupidly tries to take power via an obvious show of force.

What else

Meritocracy sounds pretty great. Let qualified people run the show. Standardized tests likely aren’t the way to figure out merit, and I won’t claim to know what is, but I strongly think that the people who run countries should be elected for their ability to do their jobs rather than their ideologies. If they are clearly failing us, we as the public should still have the ability to oust them, but there appears to be very little other control we need.

We shouldn’t need to fire everyone every 2-5 years and retrain them on new jobs in new fields. We shouldn’t need to divide along falsely drawn lines of opinion. We shouldn’t be electing people who we pay attention to for less time than the average person pays to coffee. We should be free from restraint and tyranny. We should be free from oppression. We should have the ability to speak our mind and travel where we like, and as I said above, we should have the freedom to reject a government that clearly does not serve our needs.

All other aspects of military, fiscal, health, education, maintenance, and other policies are not things we need to worry about. Perhaps, if we demanded control, we could hold a referendum every X years to vote on some goals. Maybe we’d like to focus on improving health care. Maybe we’d like to focus on improving our collective wealth. Those kinds of decisions may not be beyond you and I, but percentage points and graphs and numbers of billions of dollars provisioned for X are meaningless to us. We could still have people whose job is to oppose the prevailing opinion — dissent and sober second thought are useful to us. But disagreements shouldn’t be motivated by politics.

Also, as a note, I’m not suggesting that a closed meritocracy is the answer — decisions should be transparently part of public record, but they should come as a product of discussion between experts, not politicians. I’d love to see qualified experts run our world as true civil servants, without the asinine circus of politics.

Is that really a ridiculous thought?