Yes, we're shocked by what we've been made privvy to so far – but not really. How many of us didn't already suspect this sort of thing was going on? More finely, how many of us believed the ruling class wasn't riddled with the most awful kinds of people? These people are, after all, politicians. And what is a politician but a gangster who is presented as legitimate? The gangster is a thug who is feared rather than loved because it is understood he has the power to make you suffer. He can have you beaten up or killed. He can just take your stuff.

How is a politician meaningfully different?

Oh, yes. We are allowed to vote for the politician. I reiterate my question.

As has been observed, if voting constituted a meaningful threat to politicians it would not be allowed. Stalin allowed people to vote. It was meaningless then. It is meaningless now – because your vote to be left alone is meaningless. It will only have meaning when your right to be left alone cannot be voted away. And that will only happen when people – most people, at least – decide they do not want to be gangsters themselves. This will take some soul searching. They will have to come face-to-face with the ugliness many – most of them – wish to pretend they're not part of. The ugliness of violence. Of taking what is not theirs – by voting to have someone else threaten other people with violence to get what isn't theirs.

It is very easy to cast a vote in favor of increasing your neighbor's taxes, in order to finance something you want financed. It is much more difficult – if you are not a psychopath – to personally walk over to your neighbor's house, bang the door heavily with your fist and demand money from him at gunpoint. Yet this is what voting is – once the curtain has been drawn back, exposing the reality.