The beauty of voting
with your feet is the advice applies to the full spectrum of
human experience. When faced with a
dysfunctional, destructive situation that cannot be reformed,
the only real solution is to exit
stage left or right.
Voting with your feet often feels like admitting
defeat or abandoning those trapped in a deteriorating situation. But
we can't help anyone if we are in danger of losing our life,
health, mind, livelihood or opportunity.
Unfortunately, dysfunctional, destructive
relationships and systems soon degrade to unhealthy states of
co-dependency and complicity. We can't
leave the alcoholic because they need us to survive (and to play
along while they "hide" the liquor bottles).
We can't leave the dysfunctional
workplace because we'll never earn the same money working
somewhere less toxic, doing work we actually care about.
We can't leave the dead-end
city/county because our family is rooted there.
And so on. So we waste
our time and energy trying to reform the alcoholic, make the
toxic workplace slightly less toxic and pound away at the bleak
prospects in the dead-end city/county, even though we know (and
so does everyone else) that our abilities and ambitions are
being squandered.
For many people, their nation of birth is a
dead-end. Never mind the countries
torn apart by civil strife and open warfare; there are plenty of
places where opportunity is reserved for the children of elites.
Many people feel America is
slipping into a dangerous state of totalitarianism masked by a
phony veneer of wealth
always wins democracy and various toxic flavors of
crony-state capitalism that protect the privileges of the few at
the expense of the many.
Sometimes the only way
to reform a
relationship, family, town, company or
political system is to vote with your
feet. When
everyone who values their autonomy,
freedom of movement and opportunity opts
out, a Darwinian selection process
leaves behind those who are acting out
of humanity's least productive
traits--guilt, complicity, fear of
change and love of comfort. The
resulting collapse clears away the
accumulated deadwood and enables real
reform.
There is often an
institutional lifecycle at work. When
the institution was founded, it was
staffed by idealistic go-getters who
believed in the mission and paid little
attention to pay, pensions and
perquisites.
But as the institution matured,
the majority of workers were no long idealists; they were people
seeking to minimize their workload and maximize their private
gains by whatever means were available.
The focus shifts from the mission
to maximizing one's share of the swag. Those with a higher
purpose either quit in disgust or are banished to bureaucratic
Siberia as threats to the free-loaders and stiffs.
Eventually, the friction, waste and sloth builds
up and the institution collapses under its own dysfunctional
weight. Here is a chart of the
process:
Another way of saying vote
with your feet is opt
out: opting out is an increasingly
attractive strategy as empires, nation-states and corrupt,
self-serving bureaucracies lose their grip and start sliding
toward dissolution and implosion.
In financial terms, admitting the
borrow-and-spend game is over is called bankruptcy. Sadly,
there is no institutional equivalent for the politically
bankrupt systems that dominate the major trading nations and
alliances.
It's not just empires that collapse:
relationships, neighborhoods, enterprises, towns, cities and
regions can collapse, too. The
dynamics of collapse are scale-invariant,
meaning that they work equally well in groups small, medium and
large.
Here are the nine dynamics of
decay that lead to collapse:
1. complacency and intellectual
laziness
2. profound political disunity
3. rise of unproductive complexity
4. those bearing the sacrifices
opt out/quit
5. decay of effective leadership
6. rise of bread
and circuses social welfare and entertainment to
distract/placate restive citizenry
7. decline of wealth-producing
capacity--status quo living off financial trickery
8. sclerosis--status quo
controlled by vested interests
9. resource
depletion/environmental damage
All of these dynamics are
currently in play around the globe.
Michael Grant touched on many of
these dynamics in his excellent account The
Fall of the Roman Empire, a short book I have been
recommending since 2009:
There was no room at all, in these
ways of thinking, for the novel, apocalyptic situation which had
now arisen, a situation which needed solutions as radical as
itself. (The Status Quo) attitude is a complacent acceptance of
things as they are, without a single new idea.
This acceptance was accompanied by greatly
excessive optimism about the present and future. Even
when the end was only sixty years away, and the Empire was
already crumbling fast, Rutilius continued to address the spirit
of Rome with the same supreme assurance.
This blind adherence to the ideas of the past
ranks high among the principal causes of the downfall of Rome. If
you were sufficiently lulled by these traditional fictions,
there was no call to take any practical first-aid measures at
all.
Rather than sacrifice ourselves to
prop up a system that protects the privileges of the few at the
expense of the many, we can choose to no longer grease the
machine with our sweat, blood, tears and toil.
When do we finally accept the
hopelessness of reforming a self-serving machine bent on
destruction? When
Belief in the System Fades (March 12, 2008).
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