There is a layer of humanity for which consequences do not exist. Its privileged membership would have you believe this is due to some intrinsic personal qualities or to the fundamental nature of the universe. Untrue. It is an amoral, stateless, self-perpetuating mechanism of wealth, influence, and violence that protects itself first, which means protecting its own. Additional legal, economic, and sociopolitical space is made where systems would simply crush others. Voting will not change this.
Each time you defer to these people or their systems and rely upon them for justice, each time you internally acknowledge any form of state or economic or religious authority, you strengthen, not diminish, this unjust and disproportionate order. Each time you give someone with power the benefit of the doubt and assume that they are working on your behalf, you contribute to your own destruction, to that of your neighbors, and ultimately to the destruction of the Earth.
Power does not simply corrupt itself or its practitioners absolutely. It corrupts everything and everyone, and turns all into extremities of its self-absorbed, self-perpetuating avatar. Power is the hegemony of thought and feeling. The all-seeing eye in the mind of the weak, that the strong may take as they wish and rest easy. Being part of something larger than yourself means being a horizontal part, a stakeholder, having agency. Any other form is simply someone using you for their own ends.