December 2023

If you watch a lot of home renovation shows, something not much commented on is the sameness of what tends to be produced. The stunning rooms people gasp at increasingly look all the same. What we like, what we desire, is fundamentally social. /2

The thrill which produces the gasp is the thrill of experiencing a social transformation. Of seeing an individual home transformed into a high status design. A status defined socially. Literally a ‘makeover’. The owners of these homes now have higher social status. /3

The aesthetics is entirely a social thing here. It’s not any objective beauty, within 10-15 years some new show will arrive at these homes and chuckle at how ‘dated’ they all look. Fashion is always like this, a mediator of social relations. Status is degrees of luxury. /4

And that’s variable too, because sometimes the highest status individuals will adopt a minimalist aesthetic, to create a contrast with the desperate rush of those who emulate them towards luxury. It’s always, all of it, about social differentiation. /5

Weaving this back into a passion of mine, the recognition of a sweeping transformation of all adult culture into an adolescent high school culture, through the establishment of mass schooling decoupled from adult life. The greatest passion of an adolescent? /6

We’re still in the Beatles era of cultural transformation. That passion is music. But musical acts play the same social role as fashions, they’re social differentiators. The acts people like are a fundamental part of their identities. /7

Call a person’s favourite musician crap and watch the violence of the response. Music has become a social battlefield, it marks out social territories more strongly than just about anything else. Getting back to gigs was a fundamental driver of anti-lockdown protests. /8

And it’s not that we used to be less fashion-conscious and this now marks a shift to a dumb, shallow culture. It’s that the fundamentally social processes underlying *everything* humans do is now much more visible. We see this with Covid. /9

It’s horrifying to many (including me) that experts in infectious disease can now adopt lunacies like living with pandemics. But that’s very fashionable, and science has always been as driven by fashion as anything else. It’s just now much more visible. /10

Good scientists have always been sidelined socially, by waves of popularity in the field, by fashions. Planck again, recognising that the leaders of these fashionable waves have to die before change occurs. Social media has made all of this stuff visible, to all. /11

It’s no longer happening behind closed doors, the fashion-leaders now build their followings in full view of everybody. The only thing that interrupts this social process, as I Tweet about a lot, is catastrophe. natural or human-made disasters. Wars, plagues, volcanoes etc. /12

Catastrophes that sometimes promote humans to create institutions to manage those catastrophes, which can then shape our social behaviour for generations. Until the pressures of social life strips them away again. Until the next catastrophe arrives. /end

There is very little public policy now. Instead we get causes, organised as team sports campaigns on social media. It goes as far as ending up in legislation, when one team wins. It’s so dangerous, when the absence of a collective or public life is replaced by causes. /2

By whatever set of beliefs can be made the most popular in the economy of likes. People return to this front-line every single day, banging on about their team’s position, against the other team. We’re wallowing in the void stripping away basic governance creates./3

We’re not living in democracies now, we’re consumers and customers in a continuous ‘market’ of causes, beliefs marketed on social media to generate likes. Our legislation increasingly is little different to a new product a company brings to market. /4

We have representative democracies. Despite all the guff about ‘the people’ (never defined) being informed or misinformed or disinformed, representative democracy functions by most of us *doing nothing* to govern. Because that’s a specific job, the most complex of all jobs. /5

We leave it to thousands of skilled officials, hopefully minimally obstructed by the populist Gilderoys we elect to purportedly ‘run’ the place. We always forget history. Those ‘bureaucracies’ it’s so popular to abuse now were solutions invented by the same elites…/6

…who now lead the abuse against them. They were their solution to introducing genuine expertise to social problems that were way beyond then to solve. Just as elites invented public health, to save their societies. /7

It feels like logging on to social media each day is us doing democracy. It’s not, it’s destroying it. To use a favourite analogy, it’s literally like us all rushing the doors of the plane every day to try to tell the pilot how to fly it. We each have our own expertise. /8

But social media has now generated a belief that we’re all qualified now to comment on and action anything. We don’t TRUST anybody to do anything now. That’s what the libertarians want us to be like, it’s their victory. I’m one who came here to fight Covid, as an example. /9

I have no expertise in any of the jobs that normally manage pandemics. But I come here to support (and learn from) those who do have that expertise, not to add my own loon spin on what they do. I have respect for their work, I trust it. /10

But these platforms aren’t designed for that. They’re designed to turn societies into teams, fighting other teams. Causes replace calm, analytical public policy. The people who stripped away the forums for that calm work created these platforms to monetise that loss. /11

Somewhere for us to come and express our anger at the destruction of our collective life, by pulverising what’s left of it into even tinier, hardened fragments of anger-driven teams. Destroying societies, while making us feel like we’re putting Humpty back together again. /end

The worst part of European Australia wasn’t the invasion and colonising chutzpah of declaring the country ours. It came after, the settlement phase, now being increasingly documented through studies of the frontier wars. The wording is exact - *frontier* wars. /2

That period throughout the 19th century in particular when it was on for young and old, the great grab for land and riches. The get rich quick time seen in all frontier cultures, plundering the new land. The frontier war history interestingly shows the Brits lost control. /3

Right to the highest levels of British government, there was horror at the great murderous surges into the inland driven by settlers. Our own Wild West. The Brits quickly capitulated to this mob rush though, as they couldn’t manage it. /4

Culturally and socially through, much of the frontier culture still survives. You can see it right now in our housing culture. The decades-long orgy of profit-seeking, through new development and capital gains on traditional development. It’s a literal gold rush. /5

There was a long period in the 20th century though where this frontier culture was interrupted. Only one thing interrupts mass social behaviour. Catastrophe, in this case, two world wars. They made modern Australia, they interrupted the frontier. /6

Take the CSIRO as an example, a classic Australian institution focused on the public good. It had its origins in these wars, when government needed coordinated action on key fronts. Many of our ‘public service’ institutions emerged at this time. /7 https://t.co/dJtmhfDY6s

For the same reason. To coordinate and manage public life. Between the end of WW2 and about the late-1970s, mirroring the same process seen overseas in the UK and US, we had a largely public service-driven culture. The antithesis of frontier culture. A considered culture. /8

But from the late-1970s on, the same shift to destroy these institutions began, that I’ve Tweeted about a lot elsewhere. The ‘small government’, ‘free market’ era. Socially really just the return of the frontier culture. Like the 20th century never happened. /9

That’s why housing is the Wild West. Governments no longer plan or build housing. It’s a frontier, each to their own. Grab what you can. In the absence of another total catastrophe, that’s the default for most Western cultures. What we stupidly call ‘the economy’. /end

The Tories have been in power for 13 years in the UK. Strip away 13 years of propaganda and spin and what's been their fundamental aim and achievement? To redistribute wealth and power to its team, the wealthy and powerful. /2 https://t.co/jAOFnsVZFs

They'll claim they've provided 'opportunity' for all to do well. Aspirational politics. They know it's just spin to hide looting of the Treasury, by their team. As always, everything is about cuts to their own taxes. Funded largely by bracket creep for ordinary folk. /3 https://t.co/CS06qD1glP

If we give up pretending societies are economies and go back to seeing them for what they are, groups of people acting in social ways, the world makes sense again. Everybody going backwards, except their team. /end https://t.co/M7OCBOBr0L

It was the first identified oncogenic (cancer-causing) virus. More have been identified since. Some estimates say more than 250,000 cancer deaths each year are caused by EBV, approximately 2% of all cancer deaths. It’s a causative agent in a range of other diseases too. /2

Including infectious mononucleosis, oral diseases, autoimmune diseases, multiple sclerosis, a range of hematological and epithelial cancers, and EBV-associated hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (EBV-HLH). See: https://t.co/WXrLtHXzcN /3

The important point here is that most of us have EBV already living inside us. It’s a persistent pathogen, and infects us often asymptomatically. Using the current corrupted touchstone for good public health, it doesn’t kill or even make many people sick in its acute phase. /4

By new measures of public health practice, everything is fine. The danger of using the wrong paradigm to think about infection. Pathogens are part of ecosystems, they’re not just looking for a one-night stand. The acute phase is their on-ramp to a hoped permanent residence. /5

EBV is also insidious because it had infected pretty much all of us before we even started to understand the dangers it poses. That’s the danger of asymptomatic or ‘mild’ infection, seducing us into thinking nothing is wrong. In disease control germs it’s also not Everest. /6

Pretty much all bodily fluids, not airborne. Now the link to MS has been confirmed, there is actually discussion about whether more should be done to control its spread. What should jump out at us about it is that NOBODY KNEW the chronic impact, from the acute manifestation. /7

This is so often the case for chronic disease caused by infection. The acute on-ramp gives little or zero indication of what’s to come. And while the concept of ‘leaky’ vaccines (vaccines that don’t prevent infection) is controversial, maybe there is something to see there. /8

Whether it’s smart to rely upon vaccines-only, when they don’t prevent infection but only severe disease. Whether that just makes the on-ramp wider, allowing for more and repeated infections. Vaccines are agencies in that same ecosystem the pathogen inhabits. /9

Even for our ‘sterilising’ vaccines, other public health measures are employed to control spread. To prevent infections. Our Covid strategy is an economic strategy, not a scientific or medical one. /end

In that way, the thinking goes, milder variants out-compete virulent ones. There’s a realism about this version of ‘living with’ pathogens that recognises the fundamentally microbial nature of life i.e. we can’t not encounter microbes. (There’s a but coming here though.) /2

An example Ewald sometimes uses is the virulence of cholera, depending on the quality of water available to people. Cleaning the water means cholera has to work harder to infect people, because spread is cut back. /3

This can lead to an evolution to mildness in cholera variants, as without healthier hosts, transmission is cut right back without the easy route of dirty water to spread it. Ewald has data to show that this seems to be what has occurred, in Peru for example. /4

You can apply this thinking to Covid. Cleaning the air should force SARS-Cov-2 to become more mild, because it loses the access to lots of fresh, easily available hosts. In evolutionary terms it’s then not in its interest to have high virulence, it needs every host it can get. /5

This is the main role then of NPIs (non-pharmaceutical interventions, like cleaning water and air, basic public health approaches). To work on the *environment* for pathogens, to drive them to mildness. Pathogens have an ecology, we focus too much on immunity alone. /6

It’s a sensible argument that informed the history of public health, that clean air, water and food in particular will have dramatic impacts on our health. Virulent pathogens so often emerge when these basics of life aren’t being looked after. /7

Including for non-human organisms. SARS-Cov-2 and other zoonoses for example often emerge when the environment for other living creatures is damaged. It’s a common sense argument for respecting the living conditions of all things. There is one but here though, perhaps. /8

I Tweeted yesterday about Epstein Barr Virus, EBV. It’s an example of a pathogen that for us is almost universally mild already, when we encounter it. But it gets much more dangerous over time, as it takes residence in us. Its chronic impacts are much worse. /9

I’m not sure how this gels with Ewald’s ideas. How would we engineer mildness for chronic impact, when we don’t know what the chronic impact will be? If the acute presentation is already mild, only time will usually say if the chronic impact isn’t. /10

Maybe this returns us to basic public health. Basic hygiene of air, food and water and respect for ecosystems might minimise these questions even needing to be asked. There are no utopias. /11

Ewald is also a strong advocate for the idea that many of our chronic diseases have an origin in chronic infection, so it’s definitely on his radar. /end

Societies seem divided because they’re NOT divided. Vast accumulations of common-wealth in the hands of a tiny few. That fractures communities, leading to anger. To prescribe ‘being nice to each other’ as a solution to that is gobsmackingly stupid from a seasoned politician. /end

The enabler of the tyranny of ‘the economy’ and economic politics more generally is energy. Fossil fuel energy. Concentrated in only a relative handful of locations worldwide, and giving those locations enormous leverage over the rest of the world. /2

That extreme inequality of energy distribution *is* the power and wealth inequality we often speak about. Not only does it concentrate power in a tiny few hands, the energy itself drives the delocalisation of the entire globe. The massive network of transportation. /3

Which decouples people from the land that has been their historical ‘sovereignty’. Now you ‘go to where the jobs are’, and these transport networks allow the pillaging of every type of resource, including people, to feed great centres of accumulation. /4

And we know how much of the mis- and disinformation in circulation is funded ultimately by the holders of these energy resources. This is why the revolution underway with things like renewables is about much more than just changing some technologies. /5

Households, particularly in Australia, are taking some power (literally) back. Rooftop solar is a tsunami disrupting all of the old fossil fuel networks of power. Many, including me, now can to exercise significant resistance to 250+ years of fossil fuel interests. /6

Our houses are able to generate most of the energy they use themselves, and that’s now extending to vehicles too, the greatest users of household energy and the greatest enslavers of ordinary people. The social implications of this shift are only just beginning to be seen. /7

Every projection for this shift significantly under-estimates the magnitude of the tsunami. Governments have been advised by people who understand it to ‘go households’. They’re very slow to do that, because of entrenched relationships with fossil fuel suppliers. /8

The tsunami is ignoring them ignoring the tsunami, and continues to disrupt at breathtaking speed. This is an industrial revolution unlike the famous one, it’s being driven heavily by ordinary people. What a time this is to be alive, as the world transitions…/9

…to being powered mostly by wind and sunshine. The magnitude of that shift again being hidden by these idiot platforms, like the Wormtongues of social life, filling peoples’ heads with brain-deadening slogans. The shift is happening regardless. Nothing is more exciting. /10 https://t.co/yu5b7rYreC

And it’s returning ‘the economy’ to its origins. Households. It’s in the etymology of the word. Economic politics likes to place business at the centre of social life. That’s insane. Business ceases to exist without customers. It provides them with goods and services. /11

Owners of businesses spout hilarious nonsense about how business creates jobs, and makes life possible for ordinary people. It’s completely backwards. Dissolve all businesses today but cash-up the public, and new ones would emerge at speed. /12

But do as the economy says, strip wealth away from ordinary people to protect business, and the whole lot collapses in a ridiculous and unavoidable heap. That’s the ‘cost of living crisis’. Solar in particular gives ordinary people a way at last to reverse this stupidity. /end

That drop is disrupting fossil fuel power in ways no amount of human talk-tests will ever achieve. The most hardened anti-renewables businesses are whacking the panels on roofs and into solar farms at record pace, because it saves them a fuck-tonne of money. /end

What it means is there will always be parts of reality where the existing social status hierarchies are hugely vulnerable. Hierarchies that otherwise are impossible to shift, without total catastrophe like world wars, or plagues of mass death. /2 https://t.co/ILNceezG3p

I suggest the weak point of those hierarchies today is energy, and specifically the plummeting costs of solar energy. That one reality-based fact is the key to bringing about a shift to our social status hierarchies, to fix our biggest problems. All of them. /3 https://t.co/qKb5bgBe7k

Solar panels may appear to have no connection to Covid, or inequality, or poor educational outcomes, or lack of funding for hospitals and schools, etc. But reality determines how our societies operate. There will always be keystones, in reality, that determine everything. /4 https://t.co/7KAAI4XUui

Energy, specifically fossil fuel energy, has been that keystone for over 250 years. All of our social hierarchies and the societies they spin off that we live in, trace back to fossil fuel energy. If you can disrupt that, you disrupt everything. And that’s what solar is doing. /5 https://t.co/SgczylRwtb

Households and businesses are falling over themselves to install them, they’re so cheap. Even traditional energy companies. It’s that link to households which is critical. Fossil fuel energy societies concentrate power (in both meanings of that term) in the hands of a few. /6 https://t.co/Jnr4lOTi9f

Again this is about MUCH more than providing cheaper (even free) energy to ordinary people. It’s re-working all of our social hierarchies. If you’re disillusioned nothing is being done about Covid, install solar. You may think that won’t fix Covid. It won’t, immediately. /7

But the people who resist doing anything about Covid are at the same time utterly reliant upon the old fossil fuel social hierarchies. It’s where they get their power. Hit them where it hurts. We’re hugely lucky that this technology is now available, cheaply, to all. /8

An individual or household can now be increasingly self-reliant with energy. Inside 1 or 2 days, all it takes to have panels installed. Add a battery increasingly and that self-reliance is even stronger, you can now even become a wholesale energy trader. /9

The important thing is to not be distracted by this being only about energy. The hierarchies in our societies have been constructed using fossil fuel energy for over 2 centuries. Now you can, as an individual, disrupt and even bypass those hierarchies, cheaply and quickly. /10

A KPI for the truth of this is that installing solar not only saves you money, you are worse off if you *don’t*. There is no greater ROI on your money than installing solar, forget anything else. Payoff times are under 5 years, for systems with a lifetime of 25 years. /11

Even during the payoff period, your weekly cash-flow is healthier even after buying the solar than it would be if you didn’t, because you’re saving more in energy costs than your repayments cost. You lose money by NOT installing it. That tells you you’ve found the keystone. /12

Households in Australia are already doing this. The existing energy infrastructure is buckling under the weight of this disruption. Accelerate this disruption, and watch the flow-on impact to all other areas of our life. /13 https://t.co/6sDhKiWWOV

Only by extracting the 250+ year-old parasitic tentacles of fossil fuel politics from societies will we see meaningful change. It’s why I focus on energy transitions more than anything else, even when Covid is the topic. Extraordinarily exciting things happen every day. /14

And unlike our relative powerlessness to get clean air in our schools and workplaces, something the existing hierarchies have zero interest in, you can strike terror into their comfort zones by backing solar. Everything else can flow from that. /end

As I Tweet about a lot, all life that we live is social, most fundamentally. Humans live together in groups, and those groups are driven by some pretty standard social behaviours, through all of history. Specifically, groups are structured by hierarchies of status. /2 https://t.co/Uh1Uu5cKEs

About 5% of any group of any size, from a tennis club through to a full nation, lead the rest of the group. The other 95% of the group follow, by imitating/emulating the 5%. Not because humans are stupid, but because nobody can do everything, we all have to take our cues. /3 https://t.co/exv3rRFumF

To return to the graph. You can see that at the beginning of the 20th century, the wealth concentrated in that 5% of society was enormous. While the graph ends before the 21st century, that trend has continued to today. The 20th century was an anomalous dip. /4 https://t.co/U7MLBAiChC

Everybody from communists to socialists and capitalists have interpreted all of this entirely economically. Ongoing, never-ending arguments about wealth distribution. But few stop to ask, why does this happen, socially? Throughout all of history. Status is why. /5 https://t.co/sPHvvUCKWS

It’s what all people aspire to, status for themselves and the groups they’re part of. To be recognised, to have ‘power’ and resources. Respected. The relative levelling of inequality in the 20th century must then have a social cause too. And it does. Mostly, catastrophic wars. /6 https://t.co/9U373Hujzv

Those wars stripped away existing social hierarchies, to mobilise societies to fight these global conflicts. Families with entrenched privilege and land found themselves surrendering status and wealth, to help with the war effort. We didn’t suddenly become more enlightened. /7 https://t.co/m9ZI2dPYae

Their status was removed from them, due to wartime pressures. Like I say a lot, only catastrophe really creates meaningful and dramatic change in societies. The social status/imitation mechanisms are far too powerful to be upset by any sort of reasoning or belief system. /8 https://t.co/2Qorybvs5q

And now, to the red circle. That critical period from the late 1970s I also Tweet about a lot. Economically you can see it represented the beginning of the end of the levelling of wealth, its reversal. But what happened *socially*, to do that? That’s the important question. /9 https://t.co/9taAq0aqKk

Status needed to find a way to disrupt the levelling of the post-war public institutions. (Note that this isn’t just ‘elites’ scheming. All humans will default to social status games.) Status needed a mechanism to turn around those post-war shifts. Enter - ‘the economy’. /10 https://t.co/NGMtmXapXf

I always scare-quote ‘the economy’, because it’s become such an accepted part of our lives that people assume it always existed. Like air, or water, or stone. They point to trade going back millennia. This is the mistake. Yes there have always been ‘economic’ transactions. /11 https://t.co/IQkQ468KHY

But ‘THE economy’ (the THE is the critical thing) is not that. It’s a much, much bigger claim. That all of these transactions are just cogs in a much bigger machine, that acts independently of society. That enables it, provides all of its resources. This is a balls-out con. /12 https://t.co/EWySXBoj1G

Because when you unpack what ‘the economy’ entails, you can see clearly the 100% social manipulation going on. An economy is made up of ‘markets’, free-floating independent individuals thinking and acting alone. On face value, the complete removal of all status-driven life. /13 https://t.co/OCozdbaLEu

But that’s the trick. Because as the graph shows, once you let the economy rip, astronomical inequality returns to societies. That appearance of a status-free method of regulating human affairs is just a disguise to allow status back in. It provided the cover. /14 https://t.co/qy8zRf8BS4

All the ‘free market’ politics that took off from the late-1970s was really this social change. A way for people to use social status again, while pretending they weren’t. By pretending that the inequalities that returned were the ‘equilibrium’ outcome of free-market trading. /15 https://t.co/AJ7YVvIV3g

It’s all in the specific details of modern economic theory, the magical self-equilibration of social life by the interplay of ‘supply and demand’, using money (monetarism) as the platform of that equilibration. None of the proponents of this nonsense live in this way. /16 https://t.co/bpdvKk7UcZ

They’re nearly always some of the greatest beneficiaries of this shift, enormously wealthy and powerful, claiming that’s because they’re much cleverer and harder working than everybody else. ‘The economy’ always was just a SOCIAL Trojan Horse to return status to the centre. /17 https://t.co/8rcIHVN5EV

Every time some sort of post-war type regulation is proposed to level inequalities, you can count on ‘the economy’ to pile on, with its enormous dictionary of slogans about ‘picking winners’, and ‘aspiration’ - ‘having a go, to get a go’, etc. Cutting the ‘red tape’. /18 https://t.co/wEYfShmRRb

We have fundamentally misunderstood this by using the same economic lens to try to understand it. It’s a social change, the economic mumbo jumbo just enables it. And to be clear, this isn’t to say the 20th century more level world was necessarily better. /19 https://t.co/mf1bnaHdAd

Up to a point it is, because everything functions better if everybody has enough to get by on. But humans crave status more than anything else. When the catastrophe of WW1 and WW2 faded, status was back. Under cover of this fiction, ‘the economy’. /20 https://t.co/ZXERHwjvV6

Modern conservatives know this, they’re much smarter socially than progressives. They know that the 99+% of society without their wealth will still vote for them, if they can turn that disparity into aspirational imitation. Imitative rivalry. Keeping up with the Joneses. /21 https://t.co/OGjV6NhibA

And that’s the politics they’ve been running for 70+ years, with huge success. Progressives are clueless, thinking everybody wants to return to the levelised 20th century. Which conservatives easily dismiss as ‘the politics of envy’. They know nobody likes being low status. /22 https://t.co/bcEbeO7W5c

The economy always was a social tool. It doesn’t represent anything in actual reality. It was a way to launder status, to reintroduce it to society while claiming to be doing the exact opposite. /end

In much of the world that link has never been much there. People make the best of a bad situation, forced to try to do everything for themselves. And that’s now how we’re increasingly having to live. We can ask every day why ‘we’ aren’t doing anything. There is no more we. /2

‘We’ was a response to catastrophes in the 20th century, mostly the two world wars. Where existing social hierarchies had to make way for a collective war effort. Our last 70-odd years are us living off the fat of that disruption. It’s why times seemed so good. /3

Women made inroads into patriarchies, because men were either dead from the wars or had to surrender much of their pre-existing status to allow societies to function with women in the workforce. We got used to the idea of a benevolent ‘we’, looking out for us. /4

History shows time and again that it’s a fiction. It only arises in response to catastrophe, to save society’s bacon. Once the threat has gone or is perceived as gone, the old hierarchical status games re-start. Thus our shock now at total lack of regard for public anything. /5

That’s how most of the world has lived for generations. The only solace to rich Westerners may be that the collapse we’re living is what’s also driving an eventual reunification. When things are catastrophically bad, ‘we’ may come back. /end

Image credit: https://t.co/XWJeUNSzle

The 'team sports' I often Tweet about. 95% of a group will imitate/emulate 5% of the people in a group, and quickly. Driven by the desire to challenge another group they see as their enemy. Why Peter Dutton et al replace public policy with picking fights. 'Culture wars'. /2

They know it galvanises large numbers of people, extremely rapidly. Going for small modular nukes (which don't exist) will really smash the 'Greenies'. That sort of thing, usually unsaid. If good people want to change society back to sanity, they'll need to think the same. /3

You need manias, metaphorical 'gold rushes' that cause a mass movement of passion towards some imitative rivalry. We already do it with housing, the desire to get rich quick and have a higher status than next door. You need to engineer FIGHTS. Skilfully. /4

To transform your issue - like Covid or climate - into a team sport, where people want to join your team to bash the other team. The other team being a caricature of actual people and their beliefs, a comic book, strawman enemy. Progressives (rightly) find that distasteful. /5

Because overdo it and you engineer social collapse. Nothing but fights, team sports. But we're heading there anyway, by only one side doing this. We desperately need to counterbalance their crap. /end

Much of the public won't be bothered whether the ALP is right, they were never interested in the details in the first place. Acting inside the frames made by your opponents simply reminds the public of the original accusations about you. Like re-opening a septic wound. 2/2

Link: https://t.co/rz8vOG1fNr

O’Neill transformed Alcoa, in quick time, doing something that nobody saw coming. He took a huge organisation, and instead of trying to fiddle with all the different aspects of it, he told the staff they were only going to focus on one thing. Safety. Analysts said he was mad. /2

They quickly had to eat humble pie. The revolution at Alcoa is probably unprecedented in history. What O’Neill recognised is that in an organisation, everything is already connected. The key to bring about change is to find the most densely connected thing. /3

In this case that was safety. Ruthlessly targeting safety not only had the advantage of bringing everybody along - who would argue against being safe? It had fingers in every tiny part of what Alcoa does. A single workplace accident could unlock a whole network of connected…/4

…workplace and management practices that needed review. This one simple focus transformed the organisation, and very fast. What stops us changing bad situations and drives our despair is viewing them incorrectly. Organisations and societies don’t function in the way we think. /5

You don’t have to convince millions or billions of people to change, to bring about change. You don’t have to ‘mobilise’ them with protests and messaging and persuasion. You just need to target something that connects all of them already, and then change that. /6

I’ve been Tweeting about how I think this ‘keystone’ for our current public decay is energy. Fossil fuel energy has determined every aspect of our culture for over a century. It’s a terrible mistake to think this is just about energy, like that’s some separate thing. /7

How our cities evolved, how we live and work, all of that has been transformed by fossil fuels. If you want to change that system fast, you need to target energy. Disrupt it. That’s what solar in particular is doing, right now. Again the danger is seeing this as only energy. /8

For those concerned about Covid, or housing, or whatever, it’s the same keystone. The lack of progress on all of those traces back to a fossil fuel-driven culture. Transform the energy, the rest will follow. Why I say people are absolutely not powerless. /9

Put solar on your house, if you can. Nothing will change the world faster, it already is. That includes pushing aside the vested interest opposing actions on Covid, and climate, and on housing. All of their power and wealth traces back to energy and fossil fuels. /10

Here in Australia this has already been happening, for years, barely noticed. Ordinary households are about to break the entire grid, a grid built to reflect fossil fuel culture. That sea of yellow. It’s going to change much more than where we get our energy from. /end https://t.co/uM9EeWzJTA

While it’s likely impossible to know how many humans have died from influenza in history, it’s surely hundreds of millions, based on the records we do have of later times. So if that’s your model for making a disease ‘endemic’, you’re sacrificing huge numbers of people. /2

And just as we notice deaths less if they’re constant and ongoing (humans perceive change rather than steady states), rather than in epidemic peaks, our Covid strategy is focused on current death rates. Rather than deaths across generations to come, or the past 4 years. /3 https://t.co/sVnKRTiB0O

It’s always the area under the curve, not the peaks, that show how much long-term damage is being done. So even if this retrospective story of influenza’s history with us, much of which we don’t know, is true, it was a terrible price to pay to reach today. /4

And there’s a humdinger of a twist to this story as well, in the data we do have about influenza. The socially acceptable levels of mortality from the disease are historically almost brand new. Only in the past 150-odd years has influenza mortality reached ‘acceptable’ levels. /5 https://t.co/QsomqIcn4s

Not coincidentally corresponding pretty precisely with the emergence of public health practice. Deliberate, targeted action drove that mortality down. Not centuries of ‘living with’ influenza, generating supposed hybrid immunity through constant infection. /6 https://t.co/eEZZMR3z7o

The idea that by vaccinating and allowing constant mass infection, we’ll achieve this sort of trajectory, doesn’t seem to match the historical experience. At no point in the past did we decide to live with influenza. Until we decided NOT to, it killed at will. /7 https://t.co/poqokqiJh3

Like most of our collective life now, we’re weighed down with slogans and framings that are entirely political, with little to no connection to reality. Or just enough resemblance to make a narrative seem believable, even if it’s complete nonsense. /8

When you launch an assault on everything public, on collective life itself, which is our politics since the late-1970s, all that’s left to give an echo of that old collective life is slogans and other forms of resonating propaganda. Political earworms. /end

@AdamBandt

Link: https://t.co/ZbTKtBzAFP

The narratives around ‘living with’ Covid were driven by a tiny minority. A smart tiny minority, who knew how to embed that desire into wider social action. They knew peer pressure, social conformity, would do the job for them, if they played it right. /2

But peer pressure NEVER means the people who go along with things like what they’re doing, or even agree with it. We all know this, from school. They’re not dumb or compliant sheep, they’re stuck inside the strongest force in the human universe. Imitative rivalry, conformity. /3

This is also a positive, because it shows that you don’t need to ‘mobilise’ or convince entire populations to bring about widespread change. It only takes a tiny number of people (about 5% of any group) to drive fundamental change. The other 95% will follow. /4

Look at the history of failure on climate change. The climate denialists have been winning for decades. Surveys and other data consistently show this is again a tiny minority position, which the overwhelming majority of people don’t agree with. And yet the minority wins. /5

Good people are too nice. These tiny minorities are usually not nice, they’re ruthless. And that ruthlessness hires the best strategists to find ways to get 95% of societies to agree to do things they fundamentally disagree with. They’ve been winning for decades. /6

I’ve told parts of that story here over the past few years, how conservative politicians and church leaders in the US in particular in the 1950s decided to form an alliance, to take back control of politics, in the centuries-old conflict of Church and State. They strategised. /7

Billy Graham was a key figure, but there were many others. Conservative politicians were interested in political power, the church leaders in undermining the secular State, to return churches to the centre of social power and control. You don’t need to study much history…/8

…to know this is almost the entire history of Western (and other) societies. Why do we think it ended in the 20th century? It didn’t, and it’s still the driving force of the 21st as well. Look at the US, where conservative politicians no longer even attempt to hide it. /9

I’ve said before I’m also agnostic about the outcome of this movement. There are powerful historical reasons to say secular States have been an abject failure. They killed over 100 million people in the 20th century alone, in wars. /10

And the Catholic Church more or less built Western society, on any fair reading of history, despite our Enlightenment-flavoured objection to any religious institution at all. So what’s at stake here won’t fall into the easy binary team sports of our modern fake debates. /11

This is an ongoing battle at the deep geological level of societies. Their most fundamental operating systems. I don’t want to get bogged down in more fake debates of Church vs State and the role of religion, I want us to acknowledge though that much more is in play here. /12

That if you want to shape societies in certain ways, you have to strategise. Not just protest and complain about the people who currently win these battles, as if they’re ever going to listen. You have to be smarter than them, to out-strategise them. /13

They’re also patient. It’s taken them over 70 years to fundamentally upend the public-focused agreement at the conclusion of the two world wars. The agreement to create something called a public, and to put it at the centre of our societies. I’ve Tweeted how they did it. /14

They invented a fake substitute for society, called an ‘economy’, and with it a whole framework of ideas like markets and competition, to undermine and dissolve the collective focus of public politics. It was a social strategy, which we mistake for some shift in economics. /15

With the economy, they’ve dominated every single public issue. Now nothing can be done or even talked about, if it’s said to damage this fake economy. The real purpose is clearer every day, to shut down all public, collective life. That’s what the economy was designed to do. /16

To generate a new model of social life, where everybody on the planet was a ‘free’ individual competing to maximise their own individual good. They of course don’t believe this themselves, or act in any way that is consistent with it. They form groups and hierarchies. /17

And use the economy as a Trojan Horse to give these groups and hierarchies ultimate power. They dispensed with the idea of public policy years ago. They generate masses of socially destructive slogans instead, earworms they fire into the community every day. /18

Earworms that rally masses of people around the economy, around prioritising coffee shops over public health for example. Their deeper game is to cement and extend their dominance in social hierarchies, using these ‘economic’ decisions to dissolve all other hierarchies. /19

Where they may have come unstuck now is with populism. Populism is social dynamite, nothing goes viral faster and allows the fast total domination of collective life. But it has a sting in its tail. Because it’s uncontrollable. Those who try to harness it always fail. /20

The great fascist movements of the mid-20th century were really populist movements. They took over much of the world in very short time. Their leaders met brutal ends. When populist fantasies fail, the crowd is always brutal. Completely unforgiving. Look at Trump in the US. /21

The Republicans at first loved the vote-winning machine he was. Then he took over their entire party, politically castrating every other person in them. They’re now puppets to his every whim. And he also won’t succeed longer term, populism never can or does. /22

Popularity can never bind people together. It’s always a rivalry, something these social media platforms milk for profit. All it can ever lead to is social collapse. And as I say, catastrophe historically is all that leads to major social change. That’s our trajectory. /23

To finish by looping back, we should with fair minds look back to what churches achieved. (I’m not part of any church or religion, I should add, but nor am I against them. Life isn’t a team sport.) They maintained social institutions which they also invented, for 2000 years. /24

They knew something about how to manage societies sustainably over centuries. We may not want theocracies, but they weren’t always that then either. We could learn a lot by understanding what they did. Another thread, another day. /end

This happens because car races are heavily regulated. The F1 rules for example are over 330 pages long. The drivers all know what the others are going to do at that start, because all of the driving they do on track is heavily regulated. /2

If you tried to do this at an ordinary red light, you’re going to be troubling your insurer pretty fast, for rear-ending the cars in front of you. Some may be fiddling with their in-car audio system when the light goes green, or arguing with the kids, or whatever. /3

There’s no coordination of all the different drivers. To jump straight to the key point here - to achieve a situation of maximum individual freedom on the road and competition requires heavy control and coordination. It’s only the rules that make competition possible. /4

That allows each driver to drive with maximum freedom, the fastest they can, while sharing a road with other cars. After so many years of politics telling us freedom and competition require de-regulation, here’s an empirical example of how wrong that is. /5

The boy racers who like to drive on public roads by ignoring rules, what they call ‘driving to the conditions’, are nothing like racing drivers. A racing driver who drove like that in racing would be either dead, or banned. You can see the smear thing happening with Covid. /6

The argument that public health measures are ‘restrictions’, the whole BS of phrasing quarantine as ‘locking down’. Public health was invented to create FREEDOM, to act in the constant presence of infectious disease. By regulation, and other controls. /7

Just like car racing. It’s not a binary between individual freedom and oppressive regulation. It’s regulation and restriction that creates the individual freedom. That standardises transactions enough to add predictability to them, to give people freedom. /end

Link: https://t.co/rgpG9KvP6W

The debates never end, they're incredibly tedious, because the actual facts of the matter were never at issue. What's at issue is the different social positions of the rival social groups. For example the meme on Tweet 1 of this thread. /2

Many of the anti-EV 'debaters' don't know a single thing about science or engineering, or even vehicles. But they'll latch onto anything they can find, often made up, if it gives them a perceived edge in their group rivalry. /3

Often they're the kids from school who used vehicles to build a social identity, to define their place in the world. And who now see the world rapidly shifting to a type of vehicle that bypasses much of that culture they're a part of. Their man-sheds are social HQs. /4

Or we can use Covid as an example, the alarming number of people with expertise in medicine and public health who have spent the pandemic promoting views that have not even a tiny resemblance to public health practice going back over 150 years. /5

They do it because it carves out a social space for them, a way to differentiate themselves from other public health professionals and achieve higher status. You get less angry at the apparent stupidity of people not understanding basic things when you realise it's irrelevant. /6

They're not interested in the reality, only in their team. Actual change comes either when their team becomes dysfunctional and dissolves for some reason, or again as Planck said, when the team gets old and dies. Housing will be like that. /7

Many boomers will never admit they've gamed housing for massive capital gains, so it will take the passing of that generation - that team - for real change to happen. One exception is when some technology disrupts the entire fake debate. /8

Solar is doing that right now. It's so cheap that even interests previously aligned with fossil fuels are switching to renewables, because it's saving them a fortune. They'll find a way for the old team to rationalise that shift. /end

Societies that truly focused on material wellbeing would bring joy and peace to the world. instead, and particularly now through social media, they focus on idealisms. Abstract philosophies and beliefs that lead to nothing but destruction, division and war. /2

Just think about what a reset of all of this towards material wellbeing would produce. The importance of providing for the material needs of humans, as opposed to team sports debates over abstract beliefs. A focus on materiality also requires nurture of the ‘natural’ world. /3

The natural world from which our material existence derives. It’s a fundamental shift of filter for how you view human history and culture. All of the sterile, hateful idealisms that consume us. Look at Gaza right now, being pulverised into dust. /4

Nothing is safe when our idealisms go to war. A focus on material wellbeing wouldn’t allow the constant destruction of our material legacies, built up over centuries. And as I’ve tweeted about at other times, there’s an even bigger reason to refocus on materialism. /5

The creation of ‘material’ life also binds humans together. Only building and maintaining things creates social stability. Ideas and debates and idealisms never do. At this time of the ultimate celebration of incarnation, it’s time to rediscover materialism. /end https://t.co/eOxjNVsLA6

I feel real disquiet scrolling through social media at Christmas time, watching people transacting major parts of their social lives through these platforms. Christmas in the West of course is one of the most important social times of year. What causes the disquiet? /2

To me it’s the way we’ve accepted now the shifting of so many of our social transactions onto platforms created by billionaires for profit. This isn’t a tired old argument about capitalism or the evils of money. It’s a social and cultural observation. /3

That we’ve privatised our social and cultural spaces and experiences. That this tiny handful of businesses have appropriated much of our social and cultural life. Many spend a lot of their days and nights, on these platforms. They shape how we interact with friends and family. /4

They shape communities, because communities are social and cultural life. And it’s insidious because when you scroll through all of the curated images of grinning, happy people doing family and friend things, you can’t help but feel like this *is* living in a community. /5

Ignoring that the moment you start to transact your social life on a social media platform, it becomes fuel for the deepest DNA of these technologies. Imitation and rivalry. Whether people are even conscious of it, their social life is suddenly being compared with all others. /6

The ‘peer pressure’ of high school life is suddenly the main mechanism of all adult life as well. And again the fuel for that activity is the social lives of the users. Who remembers years ago getting the humblebrag Christmas letters from some friends? /7

A long list of achievements of themselves and their family members during the year, which you’d read with an eye-roll and yawn, and often not finish because the skiting was so tedious? This IS the world of social media. People don’t just post to share happy times. /8

They’ll tell you that’s what they’re doing, but comparison is the essence of all social media, if you use it for long enough. It’s insidious, and the images and stories become more curated over time, to try to outdo others. Look at our celebrations, aren’t we fabulous? /9

So there are multiple layers of disturbing social change happening here, for mine. At the most general level, as above, we’ve allowed our social lives to be transacted on platforms owned by a tiny handful of businesses. Who then monetise these lives for profit. /10

But it goes deeper, because we then individually become hooked like opioid addicts to the endless imitative rivalry this ‘sharing’ generates. This is the main mechanism that generates the social shift I Tweet about. The transformation of all life into high school culture. /11

These platforms are the mechanism that drives that adolescent culture of constant comparison and status hierarchies into every nook and cranny of all social life, at all ages. It was already the root of adult life too. But significantly moderated by existing institutions. /12

Institutions that embedded multi-generational insights, from past tragedies and disasters, into the operating system of the adult world. But of course, social media attacks these institutions with more viciousness than anything else. /13

Trump used Twitter to take over leadership of the free world. The proliferating crop of imitative populists now emulating him are following the same script. Populism is just high school life, and populism is our culture now. We know popularity is the currency of school. /14

And yes, there are productive things you can do with this hyper-networking of lives too, I’m still here because of some of the benefits of having instant access to so many interesting people. But we’re playing with fire, the negatives are much more dangerous. /15

To narrowly route our social transactions through these platforms is the thing destroying our societies faster than anything else. Adult life was never designed to function as a giant high school. Nothing of importance is increasingly getting done. /16

Every urgent social need is weaponised for the team sports debates on these platforms, fodder for the adolescent culture wars of competing groups. Gaza for example, I just can’t, on these platforms. You’re either Team Israel or Team Gaza. It’s childish. Literally. /17

And with Covid, you’re Team Infinite Covid, or Team Zero Covid. How about just being ‘let’s do basic public health work, like we do for all other infectious disease’. *tumbleweeds* Doesn’t ignite the team rivalry in the same way. Our social lives have been stolen from us. /18

By the same interests who are breaking the older institutional foundations of those lives, in order to monetise the wreckage. You can call them the libertarians, the anti-State politics people. But they’re really just extending high school culture to all culture. /19

And they intend to be the top of those adolescent hierarchies, their freedom schtick is nonsense. They’re only interested in their own freedom to do whatever they like, not yours. To be blunt, most of these platforms come out of the US. /20

A culture endlessly at war with itself, with its own institutions, since its inception. A cultural emigration fleeing what it saw as instituional persecution in Europe, and determined to set up a new world free of all hierarchy. Except all social life creates hierarchies. /21

Social media platforms are just one of the latest ways that culture has tried to reinstall structure and hierarchy to the fantasy of everybody being free to think and do whatever they like. To rebuild society from the ‘bottom up’. Except there is no top or bottom. /22

Hierarchies are in every social group, of every scale. From the tiniest committee to entire nations. What this produces is chaos, in every society the platforms are exported into. It ‘mobilises’ every type of stupidity, and gives it purchase in our wider social lives. /23

Stupidities and evils that previously were controlled for, by our institutions. Now continuously undermined by these platforms, 24 hours a day. I’m sure you can feel that decay and collapse, everywhere you look. /end

A friend is a senior lawyer, now retired. One day we were discussing the law, and the huge success of Judge Judy. I expected him to be scathing about her, and was surprised that he was a huge fan. Why he was a fan is an insight into the sophisticated way law thinks. /2 https://t.co/L1GZyMOVFc

He said in all his years working with the public, what he’d realised was that they mostly just wanted somebody to act as an arbiter in decisions that were well beyond them to resolve themselves. He said the courts are constantly gummed up with petty grievances. /3 https://t.co/dfo8Z1LXDj

This is where he’d become a huge fan of Judge Judy. Somebody with legal training and understanding of due process, separate to the judicial process. He felt that a huge number of the grievances people take to courts could be resolved using a mechanism like this. /4 https://t.co/xYEo7cru4v

That people weren’t so much looking for the formal stamp of an official court ruling, they just wanted to be part of some authoritative mechanism, using a skilled and forceful third party, to resolve their disputes. The law already has done this for years with mediation. /5 https://t.co/7HPUGbX5hO

To try to reduce the load on formal court proceedings. But the Judge Judy method allows for the full antagonistic situation where parties can’t agree, without the expense and stress of court. This is what I Tweet about a lot, how societies use the 95/5 rule. /6

In a human group of any size, from the tiniest committee to a full nation, about 5% of people set the direction, and the other 95% follow it. And this isn’t just people being ‘sheep’, because we all have many areas of our lives where we have to follow others, their expertise. /7

Populism has demonstrated this with alarming clarity. How people can follow any sort of ‘influencer’, if it gives them a sense of what to do in an otherwise confusing situation. Reality TV stars can become leaders of the free world. /8

Judge Judy is an example of directing this foundational social behaviour away from pure populism, and towards a hybrid model where existing institutional wisdom is married to populist need. Judy was an actual judge, with knowledge of law and due process. /9

The thing I would love law to have introduced to other areas of life but which sadly is slow to catch on, is case-based thinking. Each legal case demolishes the distinctions we make been specific and general, local and global, individual and collective. /10

Every case is both informed by precedents, previous cases, while at the same time capable of becoming a precedent for other future cases. All of them. Everything is both local and universal, at the same time, in every detail. It’s a genuine wonder that is rarely noticed. /11

In politics or science or just about anywhere else, we struggle with fictions about the need to get a ‘big picture’, bird’s-eye view of things, to not ‘get lost in the weeds’. But everything is in the details, the most specific and universal things, at the same time. /12

I Tweeted a few times that tabloid journalism understands this so well, and progressive people mostly don’t. How what happens in one situation, to one person, can have immediate universal impact, can ‘go viral’. Because everything we think and do is *already* universal. /13

The language we speak, the ideas we use, all of it is a collective thing, while at the same time a fundamental part of who we are as individuals. There’s no binary. Every day on Twitter I see anguish because people seem so stupid, to not fight Covid for example. /14

They’re framing themselves in the way that defeats them, as isolated individuals powerless against great majority waves of opinion. But that’s not how societies work. Collective or global things aren’t the summation of lots of tiny individual views and actions. /15

Everything collective is ‘viral’. It’s some individual way of looking at and thinking about things that resonates with most other people. Often very fast, inside a day. We all have the power to make those global changes, by finding the right way to frame the issue. /16

We don’t have to spend years convincing millions of others, to effect change. We have to find the key that makes them flock to a change, in that 95/5 way. Instead of railing against the existing 5’s, we need to create new 5’s. That will bring change fast. Massive change. /end

https://t.co/uDgKjSJ1Ji

Who’s paying for this massive expansion to air travel? Mostly you and me, the public. Fossil fuel-based industries are masters at outsourcing massive costs to the public and governments. Not just for infrastructure, but in subsidies, zero-cost astronomical pollution etc. /2 https://t.co/gT3OrxqYhn

As the source article says, the ignoring of climate change implications of this ridiculous ongoing expansion could make many of these airports stranded assets. But that doesn’t matter, they were paid for mostly by taxpayers. Socialising the losses. /3 https://t.co/o79RlGdJRt

There’s a very interesting twist in this story though. Just as centralised electricity production and distribution with massive coal and gas and nuclear plants is a business model in collapse, new hints are emerging of how aviation may look under climate action. /4

Fossil aviation is heavily reliant upon massive hubs, these airports, as the driving force of air travel. The economics of air travel mean less than 1% of airports are responsible for 70% of all flights. Those near refineries, for access to fuel. /5 https://t.co/CJ7R5gdnCq

While replacing the capacity to fly anywhere in the world in 24 hours will be difficult without fossil fuels, domestic aviation could become much more decentralised, in turn creating renewable energy hubs in local communities. We may all end up flying a lot more, not less. /6

In much quieter, safer and cleaner planes, not as dependent upon the centralised airport hubs. Electric planes are already emerging for these domestic distances. So rather (using Australia as an example) than everybody having to make their way to a major centre like Sydney…/7

…or Melbourne to get connecting flights to somewhere else in the country, people could increasingly be able to fly from location to location directly, from where they live even in regional areas, without the need to detour through a major hub, onto a major carrier. /8

Decentralising energy, which is what renewables do, can decentralise everything else in our societies, energy is key to everything we do. Fossil fuels aren’t just about chemistry and physics, they’ve also created highly stratified, centralised business and social models. /end

As with much anti-EV propaganda, generated by a tiny minority of idiosyncratic drivers, international air travel is being used to obstruct action that would benefit many more people than those who can fly internationally. /2

About 2% of the world flies internationally in a given year. That 2% use tens of billions of litres of jet fuel to enable their country-hopping. Remembering that fossil fuel engines achieve not much more than 30% efficiency, that’s a colossal amount of energy wasted. /3

Yes jet planes can allow you to fly anywhere in the world inside a day. But you waste eye-watering amounts of energy to make that possible, staggering amounts of a high energy density fuel. What I think is rarely noticed is that this is already a broken business model. /4

Even without climate change, it would be impossible to extend this sort of travel to a significantly larger proportion of the world population. The energy required is simply not available. Let alone the massive infrastructure to shunt fuel and planes and passengers around. /5

So let’s not even pretend this was an industry that was catering for ordinary people, in global terms. It never was, nor was it ever able to be. The basic physics and engineering made that impossible. The attempts now to electrify international flight may be backwards. /6

It’s one of those activities that needed to be questioned fundamentally, rather than translated into a climate-friendly version. If you criticise international travel, immediately people will jump all over you talking about how their families would be separated without it. /7

But they’re only separated in the first place BECAUSE of it. Only this highly elite energy pig activity made it even fathomable that we could maintain ordinary family life spread across every corner of the globe, jumping on and off planes like they’re local buses. /8

It’s one of those cases of induced demand. There was no demand for running a family across multiple continents pre-jet planes, because it was impossible to do. It would be a much more obvious step to reframe our expectations and assumptions. /9

The problem of mobility is that it gives an appearance of greater freedom, while actually stripping away much of the agency people have. A world where every location is equally accessible to all people, is a world where all locations lose any special reason for being. /10

To be mobile means to sweep away the social rules built up over millennia around place. Place is an existential fundamental. Look at how many elections are won ‘protecting borders’. By the same people who expect to be able to travel unhindered across everybody else’s. /11

To be homeless, or State-less, to have no allocated place on the planet you can in some way call your own, is one of life’s greatest miseries. But the politics of the economy respects no place. Only mobilisation. Everything must be done to remove restrictions to movement. /12

Except, again, where that means movement into the places the Economy Gods call their own. The homes/places of the international travel crowd. They want full protection of place for those, just not anybody else’s. It’s classic remnant imperial behaviour. Our old empire DNA. /13 https://t.co/BLgYbrVy3j

We won’t find climate-friendly ways to do regular international air travel, because even with fossil fuels, the activity was already the exclusive playground of the international elite. The fact many ordinary people in rich countries don’t see themselves as that? /14

Just proof once again that privilege is mostly invisible to itself. A reframing of international travel is much more importantly a re-discovery of the importance and agency of place itself. The thing all empires disrespect most fundamentally. /15

Having to learn to negotiate with place again, respecting the homes of others as well as ourselves, rather than transforming them into easy-access tourist destinations. The rest of the world isn’t ‘sights’ to be seen. It’s peoples’ homes. /end

Here in Australia the same thing is happening, communities for example who have lived happily alongside prolifically polluting and butt-ugly coal-fired power stations for decades are suddenly outraged because somebody wants to put sleek while windmills on the hills. /2

As the agency of collective or public things has been progressively stripped away since the late-1970s, all that’s been left for people to express their agency is for them to act as spoilers for the few collective things left. Nobody is paying attention to most people. /3

So they will latch onto anything that at least opens some form of space of collective attention. Somewhere they may be at least seen and heard. Even if the things being spoiled in this way are profoundly important to our collective well-being. /4

Sometimes this shift is called identity politics. We invent constantly new ways to differentiate our individual selves from the crowd, taking all of our older collective ways of being and re-territorialising them into 8 billion new sovereign territories. It’s not the answer. /5

It makes us even more slaves to the destructive forces that brought about this dismantling of societies. While you’re fighting for collective *or* individual rights, you’re part of the problem. There is only one way out of the mess. To reject that ‘or’. /6

There never was and never will be any meaningful distinction between individual and collective. All the raw material a person uses to shape what they see as their individuality is collective - language, ideas, events. But all collectivity is also made by individuals. /7

Individuality and collectivity are two *phases* of social life. Just as water can be solid, liquid or gas. It’s all still water. The reason humans developed collective mechanisms was to increase individual freedom. Opposing them to each other is nonsensical. /8

Unfortunately, as I Tweet about a lot, the only thing that tends to ram this point home to most is total catastrophe, where suddenly people recognise that their individual lives and collective freedoms are the same thing. Humans are prodigiously social creatures. /9

History shows you simply can’t break through the imitative rivalry of group status games, without catastrophe. Or total disruption, the emergence of some engineering for example that so undermines an existing status quo that it becomes impossible to maintain it. /10

Renewables may be like that. Now so much cheaper that even their greatest oppositions historically are falling over themselves to invest. And because energy is central to everything we do, that may shatter the status quo in multiple ways. /end

There’s an underlying sense of evil common to both. We’re very timid and tabloid in how we now think of evil, if we ever do at all. There are elements of life that are absolutely intent on (or oblivious to) causing us extreme harm. /2

And these resonances are likely not just analogies or accidental, plagues/infections are common in ancient religious texts. A person infected with a serious pathogen is literally possessed by that pathogen, using the body for its own ends. /3

I wouldn’t be surprised if the idea of demonic possession actually derives from infection, the harrowing experiences with pathogens throughout history. Some of those even lead to hallucogenic and other ‘demonic’ symptoms. /4

There’s also the understanding common to both narratives of the extreme difficulty in extricating the possessing entity from the body. And in fact infection is likely the greater foe there, it being almost impossible to free the body of some infections. /5

And both narratives recognise the cunning and charm of the opponent, the ways it seduces us into becoming its host. I often Tweet about the normalisation and trivialisation of infection, when in reality it’s one of humanity’s greatest evils to be confronted. /6

Ask those working in infectious disease, often on the same pathogen for an entire career, about the magnitude of the fight this is, how ‘evil’ these pathogens can be in their complexity and impact. Let alone those suffering terrible from ‘post-viral’ disease. /7

Post-viral disease may in fact be just viral disease, in its chronic form. The body ‘possessed’ by the pathogen, for life, ‘integrated’ as they say in The Exorcist series. I don’t trade in analogies, I suspect these connections are not historical accidents. /end

@CrabbBrendan does malaria sometimes seem an ‘evil’ foe? (My thread is about possible historical connections between infectious diseases and descriptions of possession.)

Just one more market. As social media increasingly replaces all of our social and cultural life with these curated feeds of fun times, driving imitative rivalry, a constant pressure to portray the best episode of Love Boat ever, featuring yourself. /2

No real sense of the existential passions and challenges of life, the pleasure of taking on life’s problems and understanding and sometimes solving them, no sense of mystery. No link between the life of your bullshit job, and your fun times. /3

No sense that your daily work could align both fun and tackling societies’ greatest challenges, that the greatest fun in the world may be to work hard, like great artists and scientists do, the passion of understanding and easing the suffering of others. /4

Just marketed packages of fun, more revenue, as if the greatest happiness or even joy in life is to escape it. Don’t be a killjoy, have fun! Fun is compulsory, and a rivalry. Ever more extreme sports and experiences, always new territories to trample to death, as tourists. /5

No sense of the pleasure of just being. In the most ordinary ways, doing the most ordinary tasks. That can’t be allowed, because it can’t be monetised or made into a rivalry. Continuous adolescent boredom, always looking for ‘something to do’. /6

If we allowed ourselves to stop, even for a moment, on this perpetual treadmill of fun, we might have to confront the actual realities we’re living. We might have to just be. The P-plates for adult life should be the capacity to sit and do nothing for several hours. /7

To go nowhere, to cook your own meal, to not always be hungry for stimulation and new experiences and sights. To understand rather than experience. We’re on a well-worn track here, of endless distraction. Leading to social collapse and catastrophe. /8

An Australian writer I once greatly enjoyed and respected lost me completely when announcing they’d decamped to Paris for the summer, to write. Hungry for more experiences, and to be able to say ‘I’m in Paris’, on the dreary treadmill of imitative rivalry. /9

Couldn’t just be. Had to consume somebody else’s home as an experience. The Love Boat still chugging along. Most Western culture is the arse-end of empires, bored aristocrats looking for stimulation. Not ‘to be, or not to be’. But ‘to be, or go on a cruise’. /end

Every day lots of people speak the truth of Covid, and climate change for that matter. It makes little difference. ‘Power’ is not some separate arena we petition for change. Nobody is listening. The power to change the world isn’t the power of revealing truths. /2

It’s the power of building the world the truths embody. Of persuading, of making the reality you’d prefer ‘go viral’. Bad people are winning because they make their lunatic, toxic beliefs desirable to people who are actually harmed by them. Analytical anger is no antidote. /end