2 December

Left and Right politics is just adults playing football while pretending to run nations. Institutions run nations. The true story of our time is the gutting of those institutions, led by status-driven revolt against post-war institutions (the ones that created a ‘public’ to guide the re-building). And the countercultural anti-establishment push of the boomer generation. This started to really take root from the 1970s, both currents aligning. What we call neoliberalism (small government, free market politics) and the countercultural peace and love movement are the SAME movement. Both attack institutions. Even those institutions that retained staff had much of their work contracted out to the private sector. This destroyed the coherence, accountability and institutional memory of the institutions, and thus of our societies. What replaced these institutions? Imitiative social behaviour. Trends and viral fads. That’s all that structures our collective daily argy bargy now. Structuring hierarchies have been replaced with ‘trending’ waves of mass attention. Our nations are now just giant high schools, riven by popularity-based trends that shift every 10 minutes and have no connection to the material problems of our nation’s life. Not an analogy. Boomer culture replaced adult life, structured by hierarchical institutions maintaining a public sphere, with schoolyard life of group-based imitative status rivalry. It was all the boomers knew, they (like us now) spent their entire formative years IN high school. When they left, they remade adult life to match it. That’s what ‘kidult’ culture means. Social media copied this same structure, dramatically magnifying the shift.