Quickly: Another Election Season Local Edition

 Pop-culture aka US television tells me that for at least a while US citizens and perhaps even illegal immigrants without the right to vote, declared boldly who they would ostensibly vote for by putting a sign on their lawn.

This has now become a thing in Australia, a pronounced thing at that. I don't know when it started having been in absentia and residing in a country where people barely vote. But last election the federal election, citizens attaching corflute signs to their front fences or displaying posters in the window of the candidate they would nominally vote for was taken up by maybe some 40% of people in my neighborhood.

At some point, vandalism of such signs became an issue.

This post asks 'Why?' as in, 'why is this even a fucking thing?'

My best guess is that its a thing because of what Rory Sutherland refers to as 'sensitivity' which is to say, one of the two best predictors of human behaviour, the other being habit. Sensitivity can be plainly worded as 'humans do what everyone else is doing' and corresponds on Maslow's heirarchy of needs to both the esteem needs and belonging needs that we can summarise as 'fitting in'.

Now what I am going to assert, is that if you can stick a big sign declaring "I am voting for these cunts" on your property, owned, mortgaged or leased, then I can ask "why?" why are we allowed to do this? And if I cannot ask why, I would feel obliged to then say 'well why do I have an anonymous ballot? and a voting booth that allows me to fill out my ballot discreetly, fold it, and deposit it'

Now there's a fairly simple answer, that does not address the conundrum of how both things could be a good idea. 

Having armed guards stand at my shoulder and watch me sign my name to my vote for Vladimir Putin is coercive, it is the state leaning on my vote. But if I want to go into the polling station with a big hat that says 'these cunts' and a placard saying 'today I vote for these cunts' on the front and 'good people vote for these cunts' with a megaphone through which I declare 'I vote for these cunts!' only pausing to post a video of my voting card to my instagram reels or stories or whatever, then that's my perogative, my right as a citizen.

So that I feel is an important difference, and yet, eroding a norm of voting discretely and annonymously is still a dumb thing to do. Like, distributing corflute signs isn't free, that comes out of a campaign budget and I can only assume it is partaken in for a reason.

People are not making compelling arguments with these fucking signs, and hence, I feel the posting of the signs in the first place is far more offensive than any chode drawn on them ejaculating onto the candidates face.

Many bars in Australia, for example, do not allow you to wear pro-sporting merchandise, as I assume it has a strong correlation with fights kicking off. My gym does not permit school uniforms. 

Now it can be hard to draw a definitive line between party candidates and more general political stances - such as displaying a rainbow flag to normalise queerness through visibility. Hard but not impossible, queerness (in the case of the marriage equality plebiscite) and indigenous status (in the case of the "Voice" referendum) are intrinsic characteristics held by some members of the human race and thus are simply asserting an equal human dignity. 

Furthermore, the effect sizes of the respective campaigns seems to work out to be quite small - with the plebiscite replicating pretty much the polling data showing same-sex marriage equality had been more popular than not since like 1976, and the referendum being defeated within something like 40 minutes of East coast ballots being reported, before West coast polling stations had even closed, again consisted with the pre-referendum polling, and my district that voted some 60-40 in favour of the referendum, I can report had pretty much no "No" campaign, beyond a few wandering quacks pushing outright racist misinformation, and by 'a few' I mean literally 5 compared to hundreds of door knocking "Yes" campaigners and Yes23 advertising everywhere. 

Nationally, the Yes campaign outspent the No campaign something like 10 to 1.

Please understand though, I viscerally feel that the candidate signage is becoming an election by proxy. I cannot find, but can remember an old TVC commercial, likely run by the Australian Electoral Commission, that explicitly advised against talking to people about how you were going to vote, or asking them who they were voting for. This could have been a partisan ad run by the expected loser, sure however I feel it a good social norm, and not just norm, but manners.

There's a popular myth that the 'monomyth' is 'the hero's journey' based on the work of amatuer Jung fan Alistair Campbell, and whose best examplars like 'Star Wars' and 'Watership Down' were directly influenced by Campbell's story formula. 

It is not so egregious a myth that it has no basis, for example, in many Greek myths a hero journey's to the underworld, often referred to explicitly as a "Chthonic hero" and includes Odysseus, Heracles, Persephone and Orpheus, but not Psyche or Rama, maybe Ameterasu who does hide in a cave.

Anyway, both Campbell and his fans primarily suffer from confirmation bias in their analyses, but if you are earnestly pursuing the monomyth, what one can just calculate mathematically, is that Campbell simply doesn't go far enough in terms of identifying the lowest common denominators of story.

Someone who did go far enough hypothesises that the monomyth has basically two features - almost all stories are about trouble of some kind, and generally that trouble is agentic - the trouble is caused by something, usually a someone, even if it's the largely passive 'eye of sauron'.

If true, then it suggests to me a massive blindspot in our collective storytelling culture - we associate power with an individual, not a group. To be sure, Aliens and its Gamesworkshop and Blizzard studios derivatives the Tyrranids and Zerg, Jurassic Park, Day of the Triffids, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and most recently the virus from Pluribus give us antagonistics that are non-individual, swarms, hive-minds, collectives.

Displaying a candidate sign on your property, is an act of intimidation, social pressure, it is not a simple prideful statement of free self-expression. It is there to prey upon fears of alienation, isolation, of non-belonging. 

Just think, if you take a stroll down your street, round your block, through your neighbourhood and you are driven to feel you are a 1-in-10 minority. Some people, naturally, will be used to this, vegans, left-handers, libertarians, georgists, people who have belonged to fringe marginal movements their whole lives, they are unpopular everywhere.

But, as I've been increasingly using lately, these are the 20% of the 20% (4%) in a Pareto distribution, displaying signs is about trying to muscle out the 16% of the minority who don't center politics in their identity and find themselves, suddenly, in election season, a stranger in a strange land.

Now, it is important to point out how in an increasingly polarised world, how ineffective this development is. Much like debate, I don't think this shit actually changes minds. I was in a closely contested electoral seat last time between independents and our wheezing, dying, Neo-liberal conservative party that was evicted from just about every metropolitan governmental seat nation wide, but it took a few days for our Monique to be declared a victor, and the signage kind of agreed with this, where it was hard to intuit which of the two frontrunners had the most signs.

But where it was effective, was in how it made me feel. On my own biases, which I've already revealed, it is hard to countenance that someone can vote for the Australian Liberal Party in 2026 without at best, being an amoral person who simply doesn't believe in community in any respect. "Fuck you I've got mine" people, beyond that, they have to be an ideologue. The Liberal party doesn't really stand for anything that at this point, has not been empirically debunked, and I feel this is the best explanation for their near extinction.

However, even if I was going to journey to my electorates ideological antithesis, the same behaviour, even with opposite candidates from the Greens Party or the Sex Party or whatever, is still an ugly human behaviour of circling the wagons and forming a mob.

It is also likely, that we have just become hypersensitive to hearing and inferring 'dogwhistles' of people's political stance. The classic example being that if you know where someone stands on gun ownership you know where they stand on abortion. 

I have experienced dinner parties, I mean let me give you a concrete example, an anecdote where someone's parent bought their grandchildren a lego pirateship and a I don't know something friendship gift, the point being coded boy and girl, and that person asked the grandparent to swap the gifts, who thought about it and then acquiesced. An anecdote that was greeted as the orthodoxy.

I occupy a privileged position where I do not feel a need to belong, such an orthodoxy is a curiosity to me, and for the record, which I didn't share at the time, was that this anecdote would fail a return-on-investment analysis, something not-worth-doing is not worth-doing-well. 

To push back on a strong interpretation of media-effects theory though, as a concrete example can be used to infer non-belonging, outsider status, heracy. It was my estimation, that to make any comment at all, was to invite some kind of partisan divide into the evening. I can also imagine a future, where sensitivities rise to the point that a failure to say something that affirms an orthodoxy, will be inferred to be heresy, however, the political cul-de-sac that is really into strong media-effects theory I think has had its opportunity to go mainstream and has failed.

What I feel would be good, as in a thing we lost that made being human more humane, is to return to a less sensitive manner that better tolerates contradiction without inferring an existential threat and I feel a first step would be to get rid of this fucking USism of displaying your candidate on your property. The desocialisation (as in, being social) of democracy.