I'm not voting. I could care less who wins or what they do after they win. I engage in politics strictly as an intellectual affair...assuming you can call politics intellectual. Maybe I'm just drawn to bickering.

I feel the need to clarify. Apathy isn't truly my justification for not voting. It sort of is.

I feel completely unaffected by anything either of them can possibly do. I believe that happiness and fulfillment are internal not external. My well being isn't dependent on my taxes, or my health care, or who can get married, or the price of oil, or the stockmarket, or my wages increasing relative to inflation, or any of that. I feel that if my happiness depended on such constantly changing, ephemeral and shallow things then I would be a flake, or shell of a person, or just lacking something personally.

I live for no reason other than because I want to. If this becomes the communist states of america it means nothing to me comrade, if world war 3 is started I will relax in the scorched grasses of what used to be my town. Neither candidate is able to offer or deny me anything so why should I vote for them? On behalf of others that could be helped or harmed? Which others? Why should I take a side arbitrarily?

nah, on Nov 4 I'll be playing Resistance 2 and thats about the only thing that I will be doing differently than today.

Your avatar suits you well.

I completely agree with you that your happiness should mostly be based on how much you value yourself and your own development as a person.

But I think there is more to life than your own happiness, and I don't just mean that you should want everyone else to be happy.  There are reasons why intelligent and already self-actualized people are so committed to politics in whatever capacity, because the society you allow yourself to be a part of says something about you. 

To give the extremest of extreme examples, I will mention the Germans who lived in Germany during Hitler's ascent to power and subsequent tyranny.  Many Germans were not exactly comfortable with the Holocaust, but they sat by idly and let it happen.  They aren't as guilty as the people who caused the Holocaust, but even a lot of German people who did nothing wrong still felt incredibly guilty about the fact that they didn't do anything or remained in a country that would allow such an atrocity to happen.  Its kind of like the realization at the end of Schindler's List that Oscar Schindler has that he could have helped a few more people by just doing a little bit more.

I am as big of an individualist as anyone, but I am extremely conscious of the faults of the society I live in and am sometimes ashamed of those faults.  Voting is obviously only one element of changing things around you, but it is an important part.  If you don't agree with either candidate then you don't necessarily have a conflict, but I for one have not abandoned the notion that my actions as a whole are meaningless in relation to society.

Fry: "Now here's a party I can get excited about. Sign me up!"

Apathy Party Guy: "Sorry, not with that attitude."

Fry: "Ok, then screw it."

Apathy Party Guy: "Welcome aboard, brother!"

Fry: "Alright!"

Apathy Party Guy: "You're out."

There is no such thing as a self actualized person.

Minor psychological nitpick there... but as someone who has a degree in the field I can state anyone who has read Maslow and has the capacity to understand it realizes this is not an actual concept.  (One of my teachers was actually chosen by Maslow to be one of his students directly by the man.)

Kaz is the king of the nitpickers.

It's just that a "Self Actualzied" person gives the impression that people are walking around all the time as self actualized.

When in reality this happens fairly rarely... even among people who others would now label as "self actualized" people.

Also it implies permanence and also any one need can be taken a way and such people could never self actualize again.

This is stuff that's often misswritten in textbooks all the time and leads to a lot of errors on what people said. 

Textbooks are useless when you could just as eaisly read their writings first hand.

It's been co-opted by so many people and scam artists that Maslows actual work in the subject hardly seems to matter anymore or is ever taught correctly.

Your right, I agree that few if any people ever actually reach a state of self-actualization.

But you are still the king of nitpickers ;)

My response to that is simply that except for in extreme examples such as the holocaust, peoples happiness or unhappiness is through their own faultiness (and I'm not entirely certain about blaming even extreme situations). It sounds harsh and callous, but I believe it's largely true. Making the country more socialistic or more free market isn't going to make people happy, because as the it's something that has to be achieved internally. If they are unhappy with their current tax rate, odds are they will still be unfulfilled with the new tax rate.

Progress, technology, medicine, societies and their values at large aren't the source of people's happiness or fulfillment. Vikings had a terrible health plan and spent much of their time raping and stealing, but I'm willing to bet that many of them died far more fulfilled and happy than today's super billionare CEOs that live to 98 years old. Even mortality (both your own and others) is something that one has to come to terms with rather than fought against, because nothing prevents death so much as delays it.

I don't think curing the social ills of today is going to make people feel better, and the ones that it does would probably find a way to be happy regardless. And then of course their is the matter of perspective, if I cure what one person considers a social ill, I create a new social ill for someone else. And that person is either now miserable, or finds a way to be happy anyway. And the first person may be just as miserable as they were before, which had nothing to do with the social ill that I helped cure. Even some jews managed to keep a good attitude in the concentration camps.

Societies problems are intellectual puzzles, rubix cubes with little tangible pay off. I don't mind talking about it for the hell of it, but I don't think it's going to help people in a way that they actually need help.