Abstaining

lostexpectation

Im abstaining anyone with me, i decided to abstain a few weeks ago, but the more i've heard the more 'sure' I am that its the right thing to _do_, i consider abstaining an active and concious decision and action,it not apathy its antipathy.

I don't want to help either side, even though im politically from the no side concerned about workers rights and privatisation etc, in the end it seems it won't matter how the result goes and there always another way to enact what ever the no side or yes side wants if they're capable of doing so.

ps rock the vote actually called people to spoil there vote if the weren't sure yesterday.

Scofflaw

lostexpectation wrote: »

Im abstaining anyone with me, i decided to abstain a few weeks ago, but the more i've heard the more 'sure' I am that its the right thing to _do_, i consider abstaining an active and concious decision and action,it not apathy its antipathy.

I don't want to help either side, even though im politically from the no side concerned about workers rights and privatisation etc, in the end it seems it won't matter how the result goes and there always another way to enact what ever the no side or yes side wants if they're capable of doing so.

ps rock the vote actually called people to spoil there vote if the weren't sure yesterday.

I can respect that. I would like there to be an option on the ballot paper marked "let's talk about it some more" or "both options equally unconvincing".

cordially,
Scofflaw

IRLConor

Scofflaw wrote: »

I can respect that. I would like there to be an option on the ballot paper marked "let's talk about it some more" or "both options equally unconvincing".

+1

I'd also like a "I don't trust any of these people" option in general elections.

ixtlan

+1 definitely spoil your vote if you are unconvinced. Otherwise you are sending the message that you don't care.

Ix

dresden8

Nobody cares about spoiled votes. Most people think spoiled votes happen because dumb-asses can't fill in the form properly.

Go to the pub instead.

redspider

lostexpectation wrote: »

Im abstaining anyone with me, i decided to abstain a few weeks ago, but the more i've heard the more 'sure' I am that its the right thing to _do_, i consider abstaining an active and concious decision and action,it not apathy its antipathy.

I don't want to help either side, even though im politically from the no side concerned about workers rights and privatisation etc, in the end it seems it won't matter how the result goes and there always another way to enact what ever the no side or yes side wants if they're capable of doing so.

ps rock the vote actually called people to spoil there vote if the weren't sure yesterday.

Its still not too late to make up your mind. Indeed, these 24 hrs of broadcasting limitations is the time set aside that's supposed to help people that are just in your position.

Have a think on the issues. But DO VOTE.

A spoilt vote is not a wise one in this instance as there is no 'movement' behind a spoilt vote and it cant be interpreted as anything. Abstaining also wont be recognised as a concious decision in the count. It will get lost in the many thousands that wont be ar.sed.

It is true that there will be a small number of people that cant make their mind up, that will have balanced the pro's and con's of the treaty as equally Yes and No, exactly 50.0% to 50.0%. Those, who should be few, and indeed maybe you are one of them, probably dont need to vote or could go in and tick Yes and No. But, if you are swayed one way or the other, 50.1% towards a Yes or 50.1% towards a No, then you should vote that way.

> it seems it won't matter how the result goes

That is apathy I'm afraid. But fear not, the result does matter. Your Vote does matter.

I encourage everyone to use their vote.

Redspider

FionnMatthew

I don't encourage everyone to use their vote. If you don't trust yourself to make an informed decision, you're doing the demos a better service by abstaining. Voting in those circumstances will only increase electoral noise, without any rational intent.

A 30% vote where everyone is well informed and rationally engaged is better than a 100% vote where most people haven't a clue, but are voting anyway because it's an arbitrary "good" that they do. In that case the rule element of the rule of the people is drowned out by background ignorance. We might as well toss a coin.

This is why campaigns like "Rock the Vote" represent the lowest ebb for democracy.

Aldebaran

lostexpectation wrote: »

Im abstaining anyone with me, i decided to abstain a few weeks ago, but the more i've heard the more 'sure' I am that its the right thing to _do_, i consider abstaining an active and concious decision and action,it not apathy its antipathy.

I don't want to help either side, even though im politically from the no side concerned about workers rights and privatisation etc, in the end it seems it won't matter how the result goes and there always another way to enact what ever the no side or yes side wants if they're capable of doing so.

ps rock the vote actually called people to spoil there vote if the weren't sure yesterday.

Im with you, decided last week that I was going to abstain.

seamus

dresden8 wrote: »

Nobody cares about spoiled votes. Most people think spoiled votes happen because dumb-asses can't fill in the form properly.

Indeed. Unless there is a significant number of spoiled votes (and I'm talking greater than 5%), then they'll be written off as mistakes.

Since it's too late in the day to start a "Spoil your vote" movement, I also recommend going to the pub.

lostexpectation

redspider wrote: »

Its still not too late to make up your mind. Indeed, these 24 hrs of broadcasting limitations is the time set aside that's supposed to help people that are just in your position.

Have a think on the issues. But DO VOTE.


> it seems it won't matter how the result goes

That is apathy I'm afraid. But fear not, the result does matter. Your Vote does matter.

I encourage everyone to use their vote.

Redspider

its not apathy, its antipathy to the political system.

i have informed myself and my informed choice is to abstain.

for example i partly convinced by labour and the some unions argument that you won't get a better treaty but then i don't believe when the claim voting yes to lisbon is the one key chance to eliminate world poverty, just cos it says they will in the text! though i don't want to rehash the arguments in this thread.

i don't see a huge difference in spoiling your vote and not voting.

have a look at the spolit vote for nice 1 and 2 , its about 1.5% in nice 1 with the highest of around 2%+ in the rural areas.
but this was only around 400 to 500 votes the total spoilt in nice 1 was ~14,000

http://www.electionsireland.org/results/referendum/refresult.cfm?ref=200124R

the spoilt vote in nice 2 was much lower.


the turnout for nice one was on average 34% so that 64% of the voting population who didn't vote was that all lazy people or a lot of antipathy, i think we can see again from this campaign its a lot of antipathy.

turgon

lostexpectation wrote: »

ps rock the vote actually called people to spoil there vote if the weren't sure yesterday.

If anything, rock the vote make voting look gay and not cool. Not that ive anything against gay people, but them prancing around the place makes you want to just hit them and/or do exactly what the want you not to do.

But if you dont want to vote in this manner all you are saying is that you as equally favour the No side as the Yes side, and that is fair enough.

cat&mouse

The easy way out by not voting is not a cool thing to do.
We have been given the right to vote so use it. Some countries do not have that right. By casting your valuable vote at least you can have some input in conversations thereafter regardless what side wins.
The last election it was mostly the elderly who casted the most votes I think. Can't remember what the results were exactly. It's our future....

turgon

Yeah, but the OP has read the stuff, and thinks either situation equally as likable. Why should he be forced to favour sides? Its different than these people who are too lazy to vote.

Scofflaw

cat&mouse wrote: »

The easy way out by not voting is not a cool thing to do.
We have been given the right to vote so use it. Some countries do not have that right. By casting your valuable vote at least you can have some input in conversations thereafter regardless what side wins.
The last election it was mostly the elderly who casted the most votes I think. Can't remember what the results were exactly. It's our future....

You have a right to a vote - but you also have a right not to vote. I'll cheerfully vouch for lostexpectation that he's thought it through, and is by no means simply not bothering. He is exercising his rights as he thinks is right.

cordially,
Scofflaw

cat&mouse

Ya, fair enough. I was only thinking in terms of not regretting afterwards, that's all.

Bob the Builder

In the general election last year, there was four or five fianna fail people in the leaving cert year who just told everyone to vote fianna fail. Most people(apart from the people who are fine gael or otherwise) all voted for Fianna Fail.

If people feel like they are been forced to vote, they will either resort to the polls in the newspaper and follow the crowd or they will follow their friends and just because someone says it's cool - it's cool. If this was the case, we might as well just accept the polls in the newspaper without actually having a referendum at all.

I'd rather waste a vote than vote for something I know absoloutley nothing at all. It's extremely hard for some people to inform themselves on 500pages of EU Lingo based on a previous Treaty of EU Lingo(ie. Nice).

ShooterSF

nevf wrote: »

It's extremely hard for some people to inform themselves on 500pages of EU Lingo based on a previous Treaty of EU Lingo(ie. Nice).

Or the rejected EU Constitution!

DadaKopf

Someone was talking about a spoiled vote and poorly-educated ballot creating 'noise', clouding how the result would be interpreted.

Seems to me that a referendum is not the best method to collectively decide on something so complex, so ambiguous. The Lisbon Treaty has good and bad elements, and is littered with so many one-ways-or-the-others. The Treaty itself creates so much noise that it clouds how voters interpret it.

This is a problem with using referenda like this.

I've been considering spoiling my vote because for this reason.

But the reality is that the politics is happening elsewhere. One things the Treaty does, through its constructive ambiguity, is forces the EU to become a battleground where, if people get mobilised on a pan-European level, the potential for bad can be stopped. And isn't this the case in every member-state?

FionnMatthew

DadaKopf wrote: »

Someone was talking about a spoiled vote and poorly-educated ballot creating 'noise', clouding how the result would be interpreted.

Seems to me that a referendum is not the best method to collectively decide on something so complex, so ambiguous. The Lisbon Treaty has good and bad elements, and is littered with so many one-ways-or-the-others. The Treaty itself creates so much noise that it clouds how voters interpret it.

This is a problem with using referenda like this.

I've been considering spoiling my vote because for this reason.

There is truth in what you say, but it also shows that what we have here isn't really democracy. If we were to take the "rule of the people" seriously, we would all hold ourselves to the standards we would (should) hold the leaders of our country to on matters of expertise, literacy, knowledge, honesty, impartiality and shrewdness. We would try to make sure we were a people capable of self-governance.

However, the controversy about this treaty stems mostly, I think, from a single phenomenon. In a populist democracy like our own, voting isn't really about governance at all. It's about engagement in a big game, in a big, national drama, that everyone has a stake in. We watch it on television, we read about it in the papers, we take bets on it, we talk of contests and arenas. It's not so much about civil engagement, although we retain enough banal sayings about how "everyone should use their vote" and suchlike to convince us that we're not just enjoying ourselves. Everyone enjoys it though - the pre-election grandstanding, the drama and tragedy, casting the vote, the suspense of the count, and the supercilious post hoc analysis.

In mind of this, people can be seen to align themselves in the run up to an election on the basis of psychological reaction to their environment rather than rational deliberation. We look for drama - we look for sympathetic characters, for villains, we look for sinister ulterior motives, and for dark horse heroes. For the most part, regional and general politics obliges. It's engineered that way. There is plenty of rhetoric, plenty of playing to the gallery. Drama is stage managed. Posters and PR campaigns cater to the weakest minds, and irritate everyone else.

There's plenty of material there for people to make up their minds, regardless of just HOW unsuitable such material is to any decision-making on the part of an individual of the electorate. We SHOULD be sticking to research, to close analysis of concrete, comprehensive manifestos (which don't really exist). Membership of the citizenry SHOULD be on par with membership of any academic discipline, and each member of the Irish electorate ought to consider it a field of expertise, alongside their other chosen field. Why should our country be run by anything less? Why should we give it anything less than our full, critical attention?

But this referendum. It's just not sexy. It's devoid of the usual stimulus. In many ways, it's democracy as it should be. No easy answers. No drama. It demands a lot of the electorate, and it transpires that the electorate has atrophied as a body capable of rational, informed, democratic choice. One doubts whether it ever was such a body, despite our long history of professed democracy.

So nobody reads it. Everyone blinks, confused that they are being asked to vote on a treaty that just doesn't dance for them! As it turns out, this round of the national game is just NO FUN. It's like an episode of Big Brother with no housemates. "WHAT ARE WE SUPPOSED TO DO?"

The NO side, therefore, for whatever reasons, does the best it can at creating drama out of the treaty, at creating the sort of stimulus that we expect from the national game. Conspiracy theories, brain stapling, Dustin the Turkey, Eurovision revenge tactics, nationalist crankism, men in gorilla suits, doom and gloom projections, the age-old, tired old abortion mini-game, all the homophobic slime that lurks in the mud, and glamour model tat on the cover of the Sun with an X'd box obscuring either breast (this morning) - all of these have been deployed, mostly erroneously, in favour of a NO vote.

Largely, these things have no bearing on the treaty. They are nothing to do with it. Most of the treaty-derivative reasons on the NO side are patently incorrect, and based on marginal or partial readings, misunderstandings and willful misreadings. There may actually BE, for all the electorate knows, available to the careful, accurate reader, very good, proper textual misgivings to be had about the Lisbon treaty, which have the benefit of being accurate to counterbalance their mundaneness. By and large, though, we're not interested. It's the drama we want. It may have nothing to do with the actual treaty (we don't even know!), but damn it! We don't care that it's nobody's birthday! We're going to have our fun anyway, and nobody's going to take that away from us! Party on.

So begins a burgeoning NO campaign, which is almost utterly fabricated in order to have a bit of a drama, but since that's what the people WANT, it's actually working. Finally, say the people, REASONS! I can USE these, even if they're entirely fictional. THIS is the stuff.

Observing this the YES side face the problem of not being able to sell the treaty on its merits, because its merits don't hold the attention of the electorate. The realization dawns that the electorate isn't really able for this treaty, and putting it to them is the equivalent of tossing a coin on it, for all the informed, rational deliberation that is going to go into it. If it's going to be won for either side, it won't be by appealing to the peoples' reason. A game of persuasion will have to be played, and the truth of what the treaty represents is useless in such a game. Fire will have to be fought with fire.

So after much procrastination, they resort to scaremongering, and threats, and match the NO side step for step in doing an injustice to the actual content of the treaty, by circumventing it in a ploy to influence the electorate outside of rational deliberation. So we hear that Europe will be offended, or look down on us, or worse, if we don't vote YES. We hear that it'll be worse for all of us if we vote NO. You hear that only a "Loo-Laa" votes NO. We are told not to embarrass our government, as if we were so many children making noise at mass. It may very well BE that these are all true. But they certainly are not reasons to vote YES, the which will only be found after careful, informed reading of the treaty, and assessment of its merits in themselves.

So we get an intellectually lazy electorate which doesn't want to think, and a pair of equally dishonest, incompetent campaigns on either side imploring it not to. The actual text of the treaty is buried under the fodder of successive batteries of misinformation. The Irish electorate does not vote on the ratification of the Lisbon treaty, but on an innumerable collection of far more exciting, fictional treaties that go by that name. Everyone, willingly, makes the jump into false, second reality, because it serves everyone's interests, and hey! it's more fun that way too.

Is this phenomenon observable because the treaty is unsuitable for this sort of collective decision making, or because this sort of collective is unsuitable for this sort of collective decision making?

My guess is both, but more of the second than the first.

FionnMatthew

I should mention that I've abstained too.

I'm not doing it to send a message.

I simply want no part in this.

I've read through the treaty, but I've not managed to read the antecedent treaties, and I'd want to read it again, besides doing some serious research into the structure of the EU before I make a call on it.

And I'm trying to write a paper for a conference at the moment. So I don't have the time to make a good choice on this, and I'm not going to squander my vote on hunches and gambles.

Besides this, I have reservations about proclaiming myself a member of so democratically bankrupt a group as the Irish electorate. If nothing else, the way many people conduct their civic duty in this country demeans everyone else, and devalues my own vote. A vote is cheap that is thrown away with such profligacy as the Irish demonstrate. In such a situation, I demean myself by placing my own efforts on a par with the most irrational of my peers'.

On rainy days, I consider asking to be taken off the register, which I never asked a part of to begin with.

homah_7ft

Jeez just make a decision. Have you never had to make a call based on your best judgement? You take a look as best you can, think about it and then decide. We do it everyday IRL.

FionnMatthew

homah_7ft wrote: »

Jeez just make a decision. Have you never had to make a call based on your best judgement? You take a look as best you can, think about it and then decide. We do it everyday IRL.

Sure I have. This isn't like that.

There are certain things you ought not to do unless you have a good faith belief that your best judgment in a given circumstance is of a minimum standard. Anything less than this, implies you ought to abstain.

It's like drink driving. Being a responsible driver means that you should not drive when you're too drunk to do so safely, and deciding to rely on your (impaired) best judgment is a mistake.

The same applies to exercising your civic duty. Being a responsible voter means that you should not vote when you're too ignorant to do so rationally, and deciding to rely on your (impaired) best judgment is a mistake.

Call Me Jimmy

Fionn I've been reading a lot of your posts but that one was just great, one of the best-written posts I've seen on here. Are you a writer? I wouldn't be surprised if I saw that in a newspaper!

Khannie

ixtlan wrote: »

+1 definitely spoil your vote if you are unconvinced. Otherwise you are sending the message that you don't care.

I agree. If the number of people spoiling their vote is large enough, the message becomes clear; It's not apathy. It's disillusionment.

edit: Absolutely _savage_ post there Fionn. Best thing I've read in ages.

lostexpectation

you can attempt to DIY in relation to elctions,locals, but eu referendums?

you have to give a bit more credit to the individuals on the no side if want to write about this thing FM

Cadet?

FionnMatthew wrote: »

There is truth in what you say, but it also shows that what we have here isn't really democracy. If we were to take the "rule of the people" seriously, we would all hold ourselves to the standards we would (should) hold the leaders of our country to on matters of expertise, literacy, knowledge, honesty, impartiality and shrewdness. We would try to make sure we were a people capable of self-governance.

However, the controversy about this treaty stems mostly, I think, from a single phenomenon. In a populist democracy like our own, voting isn't really about governance at all. It's about engagement in a big game, in a big, national drama, that everyone has a stake in. We watch it on television, we read about it in the papers, we take bets on it, we talk of contests and arenas. It's not so much about civil engagement, although we retain enough banal sayings about how "everyone should use their vote" and suchlike to convince us that we're not just enjoying ourselves. Everyone enjoys it though - the pre-election grandstanding, the drama and tragedy, casting the vote, the suspense of the count, and the supercilious post hoc analysis.

In mind of this, people can be seen to align themselves in the run up to an election on the basis of psychological reaction to their environment rather than rational deliberation. We look for drama - we look for sympathetic characters, for villains, we look for sinister ulterior motives, and for dark horse heroes. For the most part, regional and general politics obliges. It's engineered that way. There is plenty of rhetoric, plenty of playing to the gallery. Drama is stage managed. Posters and PR campaigns cater to the weakest minds, and irritate everyone else.

There's plenty of material there for people to make up their minds, regardless of just HOW unsuitable such material is to any decision-making on the part of an individual of the electorate. We SHOULD be sticking to research, to close analysis of concrete, comprehensive manifestos (which don't really exist). Membership of the citizenry SHOULD be on par with membership of any academic discipline, and each member of the Irish electorate ought to consider it a field of expertise, alongside their other chosen field. Why should our country be run by anything less? Why should we give it anything less than our full, critical attention?

But this referendum. It's just not sexy. It's devoid of the usual stimulus. In many ways, it's democracy as it should be. No easy answers. No drama. It demands a lot of the electorate, and it transpires that the electorate has atrophied as a body capable of rational, informed, democratic choice. One doubts whether it ever was such a body, despite our long history of professed democracy.

So nobody reads it. Everyone blinks, confused that they are being asked to vote on a treaty that just doesn't dance for them! As it turns out, this round of the national game is just NO FUN. It's like an episode of Big Brother with no housemates. "WHAT ARE WE SUPPOSED TO DO?"

The NO side, therefore, for whatever reasons, does the best it can at creating drama out of the treaty, at creating the sort of stimulus that we expect from the national game. Conspiracy theories, brain stapling, Dustin the Turkey, Eurovision revenge tactics, nationalist crankism, men in gorilla suits, doom and gloom projections, the age-old, tired old abortion mini-game, all the homophobic slime that lurks in the mud, and glamour model tat on the cover of the Sun with an X'd box obscuring either breast (this morning) - all of these have been deployed, mostly erroneously, in favour of a NO vote.

Largely, these things have no bearing on the treaty. They are nothing to do with it. Most of the treaty-derivative reasons on the NO side are patently incorrect, and based on marginal or partial readings, misunderstandings and willful misreadings. There may actually BE, for all the electorate knows, available to the careful, accurate reader, very good, proper textual misgivings to be had about the Lisbon treaty, which have the benefit of being accurate to counterbalance their mundaneness. By and large, though, we're not interested. It's the drama we want. It may have nothing to do with the actual treaty (we don't even know!), but damn it! We don't care that it's nobody's birthday! We're going to have our fun anyway, and nobody's going to take that away from us! Party on.

So begins a burgeoning NO campaign, which is almost utterly fabricated in order to have a bit of a drama, but since that's what the people WANT, it's actually working. Finally, say the people, REASONS! I can USE these, even if they're entirely fictional. THIS is the stuff.

Observing this the YES side face the problem of not being able to sell the treaty on its merits, because its merits don't hold the attention of the electorate. The realization dawns that the electorate isn't really able for this treaty, and putting it to them is the equivalent of tossing a coin on it, for all the informed, rational deliberation that is going to go into it. If it's going to be won for either side, it won't be by appealing to the peoples' reason. A game of persuasion will have to be played, and the truth of what the treaty represents is useless in such a game. Fire will have to be fought with fire.

So after much procrastination, they resort to scaremongering, and threats, and match the NO side step for step in doing an injustice to the actual content of the treaty, by circumventing it in a ploy to influence the electorate outside of rational deliberation. So we hear that Europe will be offended, or look down on us, or worse, if we don't vote YES. We hear that it'll be worse for all of us if we vote NO. You hear that only a "Loo-Laa" votes NO. We are told not to embarrass our government, as if we were so many children making noise at mass. It may very well BE that these are all true. But they certainly are not reasons to vote YES, the which will only be found after careful, informed reading of the treaty, and assessment of its merits in themselves.

So we get an intellectually lazy electorate which doesn't want to think, and a pair of equally dishonest, incompetent campaigns on either side imploring it not to. The actual text of the treaty is buried under the fodder of successive batteries of misinformation. The Irish electorate does not vote on the ratification of the Lisbon treaty, but on an innumerable collection of far more exciting, fictional treaties that go by that name. Everyone, willingly, makes the jump into false, second reality, because it serves everyone's interests, and hey! it's more fun that way too.

Is this phenomenon observable because the treaty is unsuitable for this sort of collective decision making, or because this sort of collective is unsuitable for this sort of collective decision making?

My guess is both, but more of the second than the first.

FionnMatthew,

I think I want your babies.

Time Magazine

Really: tl;dr.

Scofflaw

FionnMatthew wrote: »

I should mention that I've abstained too.

I'm not doing it to send a message.

I simply want no part in this.

I've read through the treaty, but I've not managed to read the antecedent treaties, and I'd want to read it again, besides doing some serious research into the structure of the EU before I make a call on it.

And I'm trying to write a paper for a conference at the moment. So I don't have the time to make a good choice on this, and I'm not going to squander my vote on hunches and gambles.

Besides this, I have reservations about proclaiming myself a member of so democratically bankrupt a group as the Irish electorate. If nothing else, the way many people conduct their civic duty in this country demeans everyone else, and devalues my own vote. A vote is cheap that is thrown away with such profligacy as the Irish demonstrate. In such a situation, I demean myself by placing my own efforts on a par with the most irrational of my peers'.

On rainy days, I consider asking to be taken off the register, which I never asked a part of to begin with.

One of the best comments I've seen (courtesy of Kate P on Machine Nation in respect of her two brothers abstaining):

"...the other said he didn't know enough about it and that people hadn't died to achieve democracy for him to screw it up with a vote made in ignorance."

People died to give you a vote: learn how to use it.

cordially,
Scofflaw

sink

FionnMatthew wrote: »

There is truth in what you say, but it also shows that what we have here isn't really democracy. If we were to take the "rule of the people" seriously, we would all hold ourselves to the standards we would (should) hold the leaders of our country to on matters of expertise, literacy, knowledge, honesty, impartiality and shrewdness. We would try to make sure we were a people capable of self-governance.

However, the controversy about this treaty stems mostly, I think, from a single phenomenon. In a populist democracy like our own, voting isn't really about governance at all. It's about engagement in a big game, in a big, national drama, that everyone has a stake in. We watch it on television, we read about it in the papers, we take bets on it, we talk of contests and arenas. It's not so much about civil engagement, although we retain enough banal sayings about how "everyone should use their vote" and suchlike to convince us that we're not just enjoying ourselves. Everyone enjoys it though - the pre-election grandstanding, the drama and tragedy, casting the vote, the suspense of the count, and the supercilious post hoc analysis.

In mind of this, people can be seen to align themselves in the run up to an election on the basis of psychological reaction to their environment rather than rational deliberation. We look for drama - we look for sympathetic characters, for villains, we look for sinister ulterior motives, and for dark horse heroes. For the most part, regional and general politics obliges. It's engineered that way. There is plenty of rhetoric, plenty of playing to the gallery. Drama is stage managed. Posters and PR campaigns cater to the weakest minds, and irritate everyone else.

There's plenty of material there for people to make up their minds, regardless of just HOW unsuitable such material is to any decision-making on the part of an individual of the electorate. We SHOULD be sticking to research, to close analysis of concrete, comprehensive manifestos (which don't really exist). Membership of the citizenry SHOULD be on par with membership of any academic discipline, and each member of the Irish electorate ought to consider it a field of expertise, alongside their other chosen field. Why should our country be run by anything less? Why should we give it anything less than our full, critical attention?

But this referendum. It's just not sexy. It's devoid of the usual stimulus. In many ways, it's democracy as it should be. No easy answers. No drama. It demands a lot of the electorate, and it transpires that the electorate has atrophied as a body capable of rational, informed, democratic choice. One doubts whether it ever was such a body, despite our long history of professed democracy.

So nobody reads it. Everyone blinks, confused that they are being asked to vote on a treaty that just doesn't dance for them! As it turns out, this round of the national game is just NO FUN. It's like an episode of Big Brother with no housemates. "WHAT ARE WE SUPPOSED TO DO?"

The NO side, therefore, for whatever reasons, does the best it can at creating drama out of the treaty, at creating the sort of stimulus that we expect from the national game. Conspiracy theories, brain stapling, Dustin the Turkey, Eurovision revenge tactics, nationalist crankism, men in gorilla suits, doom and gloom projections, the age-old, tired old abortion mini-game, all the homophobic slime that lurks in the mud, and glamour model tat on the cover of the Sun with an X'd box obscuring either breast (this morning) - all of these have been deployed, mostly erroneously, in favour of a NO vote.

Largely, these things have no bearing on the treaty. They are nothing to do with it. Most of the treaty-derivative reasons on the NO side are patently incorrect, and based on marginal or partial readings, misunderstandings and willful misreadings. There may actually BE, for all the electorate knows, available to the careful, accurate reader, very good, proper textual misgivings to be had about the Lisbon treaty, which have the benefit of being accurate to counterbalance their mundaneness. By and large, though, we're not interested. It's the drama we want. It may have nothing to do with the actual treaty (we don't even know!), but damn it! We don't care that it's nobody's birthday! We're going to have our fun anyway, and nobody's going to take that away from us! Party on.

So begins a burgeoning NO campaign, which is almost utterly fabricated in order to have a bit of a drama, but since that's what the people WANT, it's actually working. Finally, say the people, REASONS! I can USE these, even if they're entirely fictional. THIS is the stuff.

Observing this the YES side face the problem of not being able to sell the treaty on its merits, because its merits don't hold the attention of the electorate. The realization dawns that the electorate isn't really able for this treaty, and putting it to them is the equivalent of tossing a coin on it, for all the informed, rational deliberation that is going to go into it. If it's going to be won for either side, it won't be by appealing to the peoples' reason. A game of persuasion will have to be played, and the truth of what the treaty represents is useless in such a game. Fire will have to be fought with fire.

So after much procrastination, they resort to scaremongering, and threats, and match the NO side step for step in doing an injustice to the actual content of the treaty, by circumventing it in a ploy to influence the electorate outside of rational deliberation. So we hear that Europe will be offended, or look down on us, or worse, if we don't vote YES. We hear that it'll be worse for all of us if we vote NO. You hear that only a "Loo-Laa" votes NO. We are told not to embarrass our government, as if we were so many children making noise at mass. It may very well BE that these are all true. But they certainly are not reasons to vote YES, the which will only be found after careful, informed reading of the treaty, and assessment of its merits in themselves.

So we get an intellectually lazy electorate which doesn't want to think, and a pair of equally dishonest, incompetent campaigns on either side imploring it not to. The actual text of the treaty is buried under the fodder of successive batteries of misinformation. The Irish electorate does not vote on the ratification of the Lisbon treaty, but on an innumerable collection of far more exciting, fictional treaties that go by that name. Everyone, willingly, makes the jump into false, second reality, because it serves everyone's interests, and hey! it's more fun that way too.

Is this phenomenon observable because the treaty is unsuitable for this sort of collective decision making, or because this sort of collective is unsuitable for this sort of collective decision making?

My guess is both, but more of the second than the first.

Fionn please send that into the Irish Times. That basically mirrors my sentiment towards plebiscites, but in a way I could not express. Very good post.

redspider

Good post FionnMatthew ......

FionnMatthew

RE the kind compliments - thank you all. I wasn't expecting anyone to read it, actually.

Call Me Jimmy wrote: »

Are you a writer? I wouldn't be surprised if I saw that in a newspaper!

I'm not. Not a journalist, anyway. I'm a philosophy student.

sink wrote:

Fionn please send that into the Irish Times.

It'd smashing to get published. Do you think it'd be a bit out of date now that the whole thing's over, though?