THE IDEAL COUNTRY IS WHERE POLITICS DIES IN THE SHADOWS AND EVERYONE ELSE LIVES
- Jan Writer
- Oct 31, 2024
- 5 min read
"A convivial society should be designed to allow all its members the most autonomous action by means of tools least controlled by others." — Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality, 1973
In 1952, John Cage composed his 4’33”—a composition famously known for the fact that there is no music in it. Silence, he declared. Nothing to hear, only a blank canvas of undisturbed noise, waiting for the cough, the shuffle, the quiet hum of life in the background. A symphony of silence, of nothingness, that shocks you because, well, it leaves you completely alone. No grand orchestra to help you make sense of yourself, no lyrics to cling to, just the raw reverberations of a quiet that exists by nature, unbothered, oblivious.
Is this the kind of society we’ve collectively lost the capacity to envision—a silent, functional symphony, where the machinery runs smoothly enough that nobody needs to talk about how it runs, why it stutters, or when it might explode?
You probably haven’t read this before. This isn’t some nostalgia trip for a utopian democracy we once had or any longing for some fictionalized golden age. This is a manifesto for a future that doesn’t need manifestos.
We’re talking about a civilization where people don’t obsess over who represents them, which power structure is “right,” or whether some suit in an ivory tower is holding a pocketful of everyone else’s dreams like empty promises.
A society like Cage’s 4’33”, harmonized by silence, where the sounds of policy-making are quiet, stable, nearly invisible. And why? Because the system, that heavy, suffocating, exhaustively complex web of institutions and decisions, is simply doing its damn job. Everyone gets a piece of peace.
There’s no shortage of talking heads who make careers out of spinning the wheels of democracy like some joyless carnival game. Politics has become the pop culture of intellectual masturbation. Talking about it makes us feel important, as though by discussing “policy reform” over brunch, we’re somehow part of the change, the big damn heroes saving humanity from itself.
But why? Why, for the love of humanity, do we need this ceaseless chitter-chatter? Does it nourish us, heal us, inspire us? Or has it become another addiction, a line of cheap, rabid energy fed to the masses who believe that by making noise, they’ll find clarity?
For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains" (The Social Contract, 1762). He wasn’t talking about physical shackles but about the suffocating layers of control and regulation we impose on ourselves. Yet, if Rousseau could see today’s world, he’d likely balk—not at the chains, but at the fact we’ve come to celebrate these chains. We wear them proudly, flaunting them like status symbols, these political labels, these inane debates, this never-ending rush to fix a system that, ironically, isn’t designed to work in the first place.
Because what if, instead of talking, marching, protesting, and voting in the million futile ways we do, we simply didn’t have to? Imagine the quiet. A realm where politics is so irrelevant that people only read about policy changes on the occasional bulletin, like checking the weather report.
When you don’t need to scream about justice because it already exists, you can finally focus on living, thriving, building, creating—breathing without restraint.
Of course, our detractors—those self-proclaimed “guardians of democracy”—would balk. They would say, “A silent politics is a dead politics.” They believe vigilance requires visibility, transparency, ceaseless scrutiny.
But I’d argue the opposite: vigilance does not require attention. It requires automation.
A society designed so flawlessly, so carefully, that vigilance is built in—embedded into the system itself like a symbiotic organism working to maintain equilibrium. Hell, even Thomas Hobbes, who argued for a leviathan of authority, hinted at this when he described the social contract as a machine:
'For by art is created that great Leviathan called a Commonwealth, or State, in Latin Civitas, which is but an Artificial Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Natural, for whose protection and defense it was intended; and in which, the Sovereignty is an Artificial Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body' (Leviathan, 1651).
For Hobbes, the state is like a constructed being—an "Artificial Man" whose seamless functioning relies on a sovereign authority to keep order and cohesion."
Don’t fool yourself into thinking democracy’s a paradise just because we vote. Or because you have the “freedom” to scream on the internet about what’s wrong with the world. This isn’t empowerment. It’s the psychological illusion of participation—a perpetual “press X to change the world” button that’s ultimately useless.
And let’s be real for a minute, democracy’s gone from being the noble experiment it once was to an endless circus where we’ve lost the capacity for peace in the first place.
Why?
Because modern politics survives on perpetual outrage. It thrives on making us believe that we need it, that without constant vigilance, the world will collapse under the weight of some all-consuming malevolence.
And what’s left is a population so riddled with anxiety, bitterness, and cynicism, they’d sooner argue than breathe. A cacophony, instead of a community.
A society where people don’t need to talk about politics because everything works begins with an unshakeable trust in institutions. It requires something humanity has yet to pull off: a system that just works.
Imagine a government that isn’t up for sale every election cycle. A system where the bureaucratic machine doesn’t just grind along, held together by red tape and rusty nails but glides, sleek and efficient, like a well-oiled Ferrari of public policy. An economy where everyone—yes, everyone—has access to a comfortable life, not just survival.
You might find this a terrifying idea: a world where political discourse becomes as redundant as smallpox vaccines. What would we do with all that extra time? What would we be left with if we weren’t perpetually worried about who’s getting screwed by the system?
John Stuart Mill, in On Liberty, argued that progress hinges on the freedom to challenge the status quo, the endless tug-of-war of ideas. Yet, let me be heretical: What if true progress is the end of that struggle? What if real freedom is not the liberty to argue about government but the liberation from needing to do so?
Maybe Cage had it right, after all—let the noise die down, let silence prevail. Politics should be like the plumbing in your house: you shouldn’t have to think about it unless something’s terribly wrong. Let’s imagine a world where that silence is the norm, not the exception, a society so finely tuned it renders politics irrelevant.
Maybe then, in that hush, we’d finally hear the sound of what it’s like to truly live.
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