Make it 12 🗳️

Enough of the childish ignorance!

I’m not going to beat about the proverbial, this is going to be an argument for making the voting age 12.

Best, if you already think this sounds like an idiotic idea, to just check out now and tune into some brown noise¹ or something because, if you’re the kind of person who believes there is some magical age where ‘Professor Adulthood’ sidles up (around your late-teenage/early-20s) to give you a tickle behind the ear and turn you into a “responsible human being”, nothing I say here will change your mind…

…Do scroll down and pop a wee ‘like’ on the post before you go, through! 😊

So, that out of the way, let’s talk about democracy.

You probably know the gist of it. Some old guys with extremely serious eyebrows and unreasonably curly beards did some thinking about representation, 700-odd years before the inspiration for Jesus Christ Superstar turned up, and concluded that citizens should have a hand in their own governing. Unsurprisingly, they allowed for some differences between what governing ‘rights’ different classes might have access to, but some core contribution to the affairs and laws of their city was generally afforded to all… provided you were not enslaved and you were a man.

So, let’s just call it “a reasonable start”.

Solon. One of the lads credited with kicking off democracy (c. 638 – c. 558 BCE)

Anyway, there were some ups and downs on the democracy train for a few thousand years but, eventually, we arrived at the conceptual thing we mostly regard as democracy now:

The idea that people should collectively rule, typically by way of picking representatives and voting practices to signal a preferred direction of progress.

Given most of us have lived inside a democracy for all our lives, in some ways, it’s probably easier to define it by what it isn’t, than by what it is—like trying to explain water to a fish. So, the opposite of democracy is where one or a small handful of people make all the decisions about stuff like the law, economics, society, and sovereignty. And, if you’re unlucky enough to have not come out of an appropriate ruler-hole, you simply have to accept them.

That’s the end of the simple civics lesson. But I want you to understand two additional things about democracy in order to understand why I have a more extreme viewpoint on lowering the voting age than most.

1. Democracy is hard. Most of us spend a lifetime building and honing our understanding of just a few subjects and yet, even after years of 8-hour work days, late nights, early mornings, or weekends, few of us are ever considered “experts” in any of our chosen subject matters:

   You might have a kid and learn parenting on the fly, only to find you know nothing about parenting when kid #2 turns up; You could study marketing or accounting or management or SEO, then go to a conference, years into our career, and learn a way of thinking that completely upends everything you thought you knew; You can spend hours refining your artistic style, then wander into an out-of-the-way gallery to kill some time while travelling and see insightful art that you instinctively know you’ll never be capable of producing…

   The point is, anyone who thinks they can decipher policies and their macro-implications in enough objective detail, at any point in their life, to make an ‘educated’ democratic decision is fooling themselves; it’s just outside human capability. That’s why ideology exists—a handy shortcut to help you conclude some person or party is broadly on the ‘same page’ as you, without you needing to really understand the entire public service. But, let’s not pretend that “I’m a Blue party voter for life!” is a more mature democratic attitude than even the most mocking young teenager might muster.

2. Democracy is not for you. (Well, certainly not for today-you; maybe a little bit for tomorrow-you.)

   We don’t talk about this enough. I think it’s because most technology humans come up with serves a purpose in the ‘now’: Money, language, air-conditioning, Wi-Fi… these things help you achieve something in the moment. There might be future implications from the use of these technologies, but that’s a by-product of a thing designed to produce an immediate solution.

   There are other exceptions to ‘now’ technologies inside humanity’s backpack—debt, and contraception, for example—but democracy is a big one. Because the influence of a democratic action expands outwards both spatially and temporally from its act; those few seconds taken to put a tick on a piece of paper dramatically under-represents its share of impact across a population and across time.

   I don’t want to get all stupid with this. Obviously, I understand one vote among millions would be unlikely to be missed in practical terms but, counterintuitively, for a democracy to be viable, that single vote must be as potent as every other vote so, as insignificant as it seems, the embedded principle in that single vote is also integral to the entire system and therefore all people are impacted by it.

   Recently, I think we’ve tended to fall deeper into the trap of thinking about democracy as a ‘now’ technology. This is a pretty human tendency (see also: buying shit you don’t need using debt, and having regretful sexual experiences using contraception) but it’s especially divisive and unhelpful with democracy. When you think of democracy as a ‘now, for me’ technology, you end up thinking voting is about stuff like “owning the ‘libs’”, “stopping Trump”, or “tax cuts” (or the mind-boggling current talking point in our national election campaign about “fixing potholes” rather than diachronic problems like education, health, poverty, and the law).

Anyway, if you think about democracy in those terms, you have to conclude two things:

1. We should ensure anyone participating in democracy should be as well-educated about it as possible.

2. We should ensure those participating in democracy understand they have a lot to gain or lose from it.

These are interrelated of course. It’s hard to have a high-functioning democracy when wealth can be spent on propagandising (“re-educating”) and lobbying for gains or losses that don’t represent a more organic majority desire: I won’t stoop quite to describing this as “buying votes”, but it’s certainly “buying a presence in voters’ minds”.

Regardless, it’s worth acknowledging that we might have differing definitions for things like “well-educated” and “most to gain or lose”, but I think recent and in-depth discussions about civic principles, and a lot of years to be impacted by your choice, are a pretty good benchmark.

Which brings me to…

There is no age in a modern childhood quite like the age of 12.

You’re on the cusp of being a teenager; hormones in full-flight. Chances are very high you have a smartphone, and you’ve been exposed to social media and porn. You have a good sense of how different people have different motivations. You’re aware of sex alcohol and drugs, although (hopefully) they’re not a part of your life yet. You’ve picked up the basics of numbers and words, and been exposed to different sports, philosophy, science, art, and entertainment. You may have discovered a love of music or an abhorrence of music practice. If you haven’t experienced it directly, you’ve certainly seen poverty and war on TV or TikTok. You likely have a bank account or some pocket money. You certainly know what climate change is, and have seen BLM, anti-abortion, anti-war, or anti-tax protests on the news or your street. You know about school shootings, stray dogs, gangs, pandemics, and terrorism. You know the name of your country’s leader(s) and other outspoken politicians, and have heard the right-wing party are “good economic managers” or “fascists”, and the left-wing party are “community-minded” or “woke”. You’ve sat in traffic. You’ve been to a doctor or a hospital. You know sugar and smoking are bad for you. You’ve met people who weren’t born here, and people more vulnerable or in pain than you.

You’re also still in some form of education, mostly public schooling—almost everywhere now, legally, you have to be and, practically, even if you live in abject poverty, you’re not old enough to get a useful job to support your family. You mostly have a single Intermediate/Junior-high/Integrated Primary teacher, who has the autonomy to teach across different subject areas. You are forming your own opinions and thinking about what you might want to be when you ‘grow up’. You are realising you don’t agree with everything your parents or grandparents or teachers or other adults say.

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Any voting age is subjective. What is it about 18, 16, 21 or 65 that makes you more able to understand your democratic obligations? There are certifiable morons at all of those ages. What is it about a 12-year-old—or the 13 and 14-year-olds who would make up most of our first-time voters under this system—that makes them less able to understand their democratic obligation than anyone else?

Let me lay this out:

• At no point again in your life will you be in the sort of solicitous environment that your final year before college/high school provides. There is no other time where society can teach civics consistently, before students are split across subjects, teachers, and other obligations. And there is no better way to teach democracy than to back it up with the practical application of voting.

  Some schools teach civics already of course, around this age, but any universal civics education is entirely forgotten in a further half-their-current-lifespan (6-8 years) before they can put any of that knowledge into action.

• The evidence is, if you vote young you vote for life. An 18-year-old has far more ‘interesting’ things to worry about (from their perspective), including sex, exams, out-of-touch parents, the Barbie movie, and so on. Playground problems of a 12-year-old are easily superseded by the novelty of a “real adult” responsibility like voting, so they will take up the opportunity.

  A healthy democracy is one with engaged voters at all ages. The earlier we can kick off good, literate voting habits, the better our democracy works.

• There will never be a better way to teach people about the unique power of democracy than to put a kid in a polling booth by themselves and let them make their own choice. I’m sure plenty of people would say “Parents will just tell them who to vote for”, but really?? A 12-year-old is mature enough to understand they can make their own decisions, and certainly old enough to know how to lie about it if their parents ask.

  On the other hand, they are not old enough to have been indoctrinated by slogans, or particular party colours.

  There will be few times in their life when they will have felt the power they will feel in the privacy of that polling booth, so they will vote for themselves. They will vote for the world they want, in a way that flustered, fearful, and intellectually-conditioned adults never fully can.

• I’ve spent years studying economics and spent weeks writing a series about how little we understand about money, the economy and wealth. And yet every day I read something new and think “Fuck. That’s interesting. I’ve not thought about it like that before”. The main purpose of my writing this newsletter is to help me crystalise new ideas for myself—the older I get the more I realise I don’t know. No one fully knows how this stuff all interacts, so to pretend that the average 16 or 18 or 21-year-old has much more idea than someone younger is just naïve.

(generated by Canva)

So, why not make the voting age 10 or 8? I think 12 is a nice number² because a 12-year-old is starting to feel like they’re ready to do more adult things. Of course, a large number of 12-year-old voters would be incredibly immature—chances are we’d get (unelectable) ‘No School on Thursdays’ and a ‘Free Ice-creams’ political parties forming. But, a 12-year-old is not a child, especially now with how smartphones and the internet have widened their exposure to the world. I think most 12-year-olds, with the support of a decent civics curriculum, will take their responsibility far more seriously than a very large portion of adults.

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I should point out, one other idea I’ve talked about in the past was a weighted voting system where you might, say, have three votes between the ages of 18 and 30; two votes between 31 and 65; then one vote until your death. I still like this (in the absence of a civics education) because it fulfils the 2nd requirement of democracy, where those with more to gain or lose are more incentivised to vote. However, it’s fair to say, it prioritises temporal democracy over spatial democracy in a way that might get complicated in the future should, for example, our life expectancy change, or how we define a ‘democratic entity’ changes.

We’re alive at an interesting time in our history. With the unrestrained nature of ‘digital’ money and debt, the unrivalled reach of free speech, and the existential danger of both natural [sic] and man-made threats, we are testing democracy in ways we’ve never had to before. In the end, the success or failure of a society, and humanity overall, is a collective endeavour so the more engaged, and diverse, the minds we can include in the mix, the better.

-T

1. I’m not making this up. Brown Noise is an actual thing that I discovered recently when the Calm app tried to slow down my rage-watching of climate science videos on YouTube. It’s supposed to ‘turn off your running brain’ or some shit (there’s no real credible evidence of that, but placebos do sometimes work). Far more interesting is the fact that it’s named after a guy called Robert Brown, not just another random colour as you might assume if you’ve ever come across terms like White Noise or Pink Noise. The more you know!

2. Most will be voting for the first time at age 13 or 14 anyway