12 December

We never leave high school. Here’s a lens to look at the world today through. There are 2 hierarchies in school and life. A social one, of status, with Prom Kings and Queens, the most popular people, at the pinnacle. And then a second hierarchy, where people do more or less well at school, academically. Expertise and knowledge, which determines your position in that hierarchy. The two hierarchies coexist, in school and life/work. And they overlap, (very) often in work for example hierarchy is determined by status rather than expertise. Populism, our current political model, is when the social status hierarchy replaces the expertise hierarchy completely. Elected representatives start to make decisions without expertise at all, everything is 100% popularity-based. Experts get called ‘unelected elites’. Which is just the jocks from school trying to win again, they hate that popularity isn’t the thing that wins, like it always did at school.