Votation != Representation¶

tl;dr: "The people" consists of not just voters. Who gets to vote? Biased via non-universal suffrage—age, ethnicity, gender, etc., voter suppression, gerrymandering. The People is the entire living population, their ancestors, and their descendants.

In order to do so it is necessary at the outset to reduce the ambiguity of the term "the people." For it has two different meanings, which it may be convenient to distinguish typographically. When we speak of popular sovereignty, we must know whether we are talking about The People, as voters, or about The People, as a community of the entire living population, with their predecessors and successors.

It is often assumed, but without warrant, that the opinions of The People as voters can be treated as the expression of the interests of The People as an historic community. The crucial problem of modern democracy arises from the fact that this assumption is false. The voters cannot be relied upon to represent The People. The opinions of voters in elections are not to be accepted unquestioningly as true judgments of the vital interests of the community.

[...]

The inhabitants of the United States who were qualified to vote for these delegates were not a large number. They included no slaves, no women and, except in New York, only such adult males as could pass property and other highly restrictive tests. [...]

Because of the discrepancy between The People as voters and The People as the corporate nation, the voters have no title to consider themselves the proprietors of the commonwealth and to claim that their interests are identical with the public interest. A prevailing plurality of the voters are not The People. The claim that they are is a bogus title invoked to justify the usurpation of the executive power by representative assemblies and the intimidation of public men by demagogic politicians. In fact demagoguery can be described as the sleight of hand by which a faction of The People as voters are invested with the authority of The People. That is why so many crimes are committed in the people's name.

[...]

The people, then, is not only, as Bentham assumed, the aggregate of living persons. The people is also the stream of individuals, the connected generations of changing persons, that Burke was talking about when he invoked the partnership "not only between those who are living" but also with "those who are dead, and those who are to be born." The People are a corporation, an entity, that is to say, which lives on while individuals come into it and go out of it.

— public-philosophyp. 31–35

Brave New World¶

Factory-bred, graded babies, reared by the state.

Adults occupied by soma, employment, not reproduction, or bringing up the next generation as their own.

Future, or past and present?

A world arranged around adults productive units¶

School start times arranged so that parents can dispose of their children at school before going to work, despite research showing that youth perform better at school when school starts later in the day.

School re-openings during COVID-19. Adults stay at home to work, while children still get bundled off to school with other children—so that they don't get in the way of the adults being productive. What a way to show young people how much society values their health or well-being as compared to GDP!

Nursery staff are being treated like cannon fodder so 'higher-value' work can go on

Millenials are fucked¶

Why millennials are facing the scariest financial future of any generation since the Great Depression.

Millennials Don’t Stand a Chance

Millennials: A Lost Generation Without The Booze And Jazz

In hunter-gatherer societies, the norm is that the old get left behind at some point, when they aren't as spry. citation-needed (Sahlins?)]

Antinatalists¶

Man sues parents for giving birth to him