There’s a therapeutic technique called reframing, which is a fancy name for changing your behavior by finding a new way to look at an old situation. Often, it consists of simply replacing a habitual question with a more insightful one.
When we think about majorities, we tend to ask questions like, How many people should have to agree on something before they can get their way?
Usually, that’s anything over one-half. But for some more ‘serious’ questions (usually involving taxes or constitutional amendments), it may be higher: three-fifths, two-thirds, three-fourths.
(To amend the federal constitution, you need two-thirds in both houses of Congress and three-fourths of the state legislatures. I don’t know of any situations that require more than a three-fourths majority.)
But if we look — as we frequently should — at the Declaration of Independence, it says that government gets its just power to act from the consent of the governed.
Now, you may be thinking something like: It’s through voting that the people express their consent.
But the thing is, in your heart, you know that isn’t true. And you can prove it to yourself by pondering a simple question:
Assuming you want to keep both your kidneys, how many people in your town (or county, or state, or country) would have to vote to take one of them before you would consider that expressing your consent? What kind of majority would suffice? Three-fourths? Nine-tenths? Ninety-nine percent? Everyone but you?
The people who wrote our founding documents also knew that a majority vote can’t express consent. If you have doubts, look at Article V of the federal constitution, which says that no state can be deprived of equal suffrage in the Senate without its consent. If forty-nine other states wanted New Hampshire to give up one of its senators, it wouldn’t be enough.
That’s what consent means.
To put that another way, if you have consent, you don’t need to vote. If you’re voting, it’s because you want to deprive some person or group of consent.
I think one way that we can move back towards government by consent would be to change the question that has so insidiously led us away from it.
That is, instead of always asking
How many people should we need, to get what we want?
we should instead get into the habit of asking
How many people are we willing to screw over, to get what we want?
The answer to the first question tends to be some arbitrary percentage. But the answer to the second question — at least, in a civilized society — is zero.
This isn’t a new idea. It’s been around forever.
Remember Hippocrates? First do no harm.
Remember the Golden Rule? What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow man.
Remember the adage that we’ve told to countless generations of kids? The ends don’t justify the means.
If the number of people we’re willing to screw over to get what we want is not zero, then we’re basically saying that our theory of government is might makes right.
And if that’s the case, then we should be completely open about it… and be ready to accept the consequences (in any caliber) without complaining.
