21 December

People who still read anything I post here will know that for a few years I’ve re-focused much of my attention on status. I did that because status is the root cause of all human thought, feeling and behaviour. If you don’t understand it, your life becomes a puppet to it. And here’s a thing. Many if not most would not even realise that Christmas has this as its core message. Why was Christ crucified? Because he wanted to stop human status games. He assumed mortal form to short-circuit the scapegoating mechanism that humans use to end rounds of status games. Look at the Bondi shooting. The fight is on to find a scapegoat. Albo, or antisemitism. Or whatever. More status games, more groups fighting each other to own the event, to define it. To make their team win and give it ultimate status. Christ’s sacrifice was designed to stop all of that. By placing ultimate status in a transcendent God, made mortal. And then sacrificing him. No point even playing status games if the top of the status hierarchy is a God. But a MORTAL God. That’s the genius. Centuries of Christian civilisation, in partnership with the Roman Empire, implemented this. It created the societies we enjoy today. By bypassing human status games, and creating a set of principles and practices to live by, that took our own pathetic human status out of the equation. That torpedoed status-driven violence. Of course there are no utopias, it didn’t always succeed, and now status games through social media are completely out of control, so we’re heading for civilisational collapse. But it showed us the way to beat them. By targeting status itself.