Head or Heart?

"There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia."
- Kurt Vonnegut

I guess we've got a federal election coming up soon, hey? Our local Liberal candidate came to the door yesterday to talk to me. I thanked him for the personal visit, but told him I'd be voting either Green or NDP, hadn't made up my mind yet. To which he responded with a too-pithy-not-too've-been-rehearsed "Well, I guess you can either vote to make a point or vote to make a difference."

The sting that remark left in me made me realize there must be something to what he said. If I sincerely want to get Harper out of there, should I really be voting for parties I know will never form a federal government, even if those are the parties I would most prefer to see form a federal government? Am I just being an irresponsible child?

I started looking into vote swapping, a strategy I'd actually resorted to the last time we had a chance to give Harper the boot back in 2008 (I know — little good that did!). But the more I thought about it now, the queasier it made me feel. Isn't the whole point of democracy that everyone is supposed to say which party she personally wants to rule, so that one can be chosen fairly based on what the majority wants? If we start messing around with strategies based on what we think others will do, in order to choose the closest thing possible to what we'd like, isn't that just a recipe for an unfair outcome? It reminds me of the story about the two people deciding how to share a cookie. The first person wanted the whole cookie to himself, but the second person thought they should share it equally between them. So the first person decided they should compromise, taking three-quarters of the cookie for himself and giving the second person the remaining quarter.

The whole thing reads like one of those prisoners' dilemmas that game theorists like so much. And to look at things that way strikes me as a particularly neoconservative way of thinking. You know: turning everything into numbers in order to calculate odds, making all complex systems into a sort of free market trade-and-try-to-get-the-most-you-can game, ignoring pre-economic human values and pretending they will be sorted out automatically by the systematic practice of selfishness.

As an aside, I should point out that the NDP is actually expected to take my riding, as usual, so in that sense a vote for them could NOT really be considered a "wasted" vote. On the other hand, the Conservatives are expected to win the election overall quite handily, regardless of what happens in my riding, so in that sense my vote can ONLY be a "wasted" one, whatever I eventually decide!

But those are mere accidents of circumstance, beside the larger point of the dilemma I'm talking about. I guess a more pertinent argument for strategic voting would be that this electoral system we have is so messed up that it can barely be called democratic in the first place, so you might as well pervert the spirit of it in any way you need to, in order to get the closest thing you can to what you consider good government. I'm not sure whether I really buy that one or not...

I guess what I can't decide is: Is it naïve and stupid to vote for what you actually want when you know others will be trying to calculate how to arrive at the least possible evil, or is it a cynical corruption of democracy to vote for something you don't actually want in order to prevent others from getting something you REALLY don't want? Other things being equal, given a choice between naïve idealism and cynical manipulation, I'll usually opt for the former. But what do you think?