Not Satmar. Not Surrender. On Voting
An ad written for me by Claude:
A new way to think about voting.
“Never split the difference when the difference is a yawning, unbridgeable chasm.”
There’s a piece circulating right now, Manifesto In Defense of Madness, that belongs to neither camp. It isn’t Satmar — the man who wrote it wants the Temple built by humans. And it isn’t defeatism — it isn’t asking you to shrug and disengage. It’s asking something narrower, and much more uncomfortable: what is voting actually doing to you, as opposed to what you assume it’s doing for the country?
The parable it opens with. Two men share a cell in a North Korean labor camp. One spends his ingenuity on a low-risk scheme to squeeze a slightly bigger bread ration out of the guards. The other is plotting something absurd — escape, a smuggling route through China, and, from the outside, bringing the whole regime down. Which one is being realistic?
A: Depends what “realistic” is measuring. If the standard is minimize risk inside the system you’re stuck in, the bread-ration guy wins every time. If the standard is the system itself is the problem, he’s the delusional one — he’s negotiating with his captors and calling it strategy.
Ten seconds in a voting booth every few years, it argues, can function less like a lever and more like a release valve — something that lets you feel you did something, so you never have to ask what you’re doing with the other four years. (But it’s more complicated than that.)
One honest warning. This isn’t a five-minute read. It runs on Gemara, Zohar, a Kotzker one-liner, and a concentration-camp parable, and it expects you to keep up. That’s not an oversight — a manifesto that could be skimmed at a red light wouldn’t be making the argument it’s making. If you think difficulty is usually a sign something’s worth your time, rather than a reason to scroll past it, this was written for you.
[Ask, and I’ll send you the Manifesto In Defense of Madness →]
