23 December

Societies always have a foundational status hierarchy, social teams that are the most fundamental people belong to, that structure the rest. For most of our history those teams were religious. In our lifetimes that seemed to have shifted to what we call ‘politics’ instead, whether a person is a Left or Right, or a ‘centrist’. But scratch the surface and some of those older teams never went away. It’s there in plain sight. Both of these recent PMs for example had as their true mission a continuation of church-led societies that they managed to mostly disguise in their daily work. They don’t bother trying to disguise it now they’re out of parliament.