January 2024

I lived in Europe as a kid, and it’s when it first occurred to me how empty the idea of ‘experiencing’ is. Standing overlooking the fields at Verdun, being told this was a special place, and having no understanding why then. All I experienced was fields. /2

People are not some unexposed photographic emulsion, they bring their ideas and beliefs and histories to every encounter, to every experience. A large part of that experience will be what they brought with them, to the encounter. That’s the key to understanding this idea. /3

What we really mean by ‘experiencing’ a place is the encounter between all of our social and cultural beliefs and expectations, and an actual physical location. ‘Ah, so this is what the Great Wall is REALLY like’. Or ‘um, this is just some fields (Verdun)’. /4

The key thing isn’t the location, it’s the social and cultural framework we’ve framed that location with. Increasingly today the purpose of travel is imitative rivalry, that’s the social framework. We travel to see what we see others seeing, in their social media feeds. /5

And to be seen in turn, at that location, in our own social media feeds. The battle then becomes to go to ever-more obscure places, ‘off the beaten track’, and not because you want to experience something specific about those locations. But because it wins you points. /6

In the relentless games of imitative rivalry. I’ve Tweeted before about how science and philosophy have critiqued this naive idea of a pure encounter with something, for centuries. You’re not closer to the ‘real Paris’ by standing next to the Eiffel Tower. /7

You may be a lot closer to that real Paris by reading a novel from some author who’s lived there. Experience, like truth, is a series of encounters that produce meaning, and the richer the framework you use for the encounters, the richer the experience will be. /8

‘Being there’ may often be the worst way to experience something. It may leave you like me as a young kid at Verdun, experiencing pretty much nothing. But I’m not just picking on travel, because our entire culture is now incapable of understanding place. /9

We see it as locations on a map, that we can visit. But place, like the concept of ‘home’, is a series of mediations between a person and their surroundings, often built up over centuries or even millennia. Australians huddle the coast flying in and out for ‘experiences’. /10

While othering most of the land they actually live in as an exotic ‘outback’, useful for tourism. Or housing itself is about property development, about real estate, rather than the agency people find from their relationship with land. We’re not grounded. /11

It’s our old imperial DNA, movement and accumulation. We accumulate sights now the way we used to accumulate rubber and sugar. We do it even within our own land, not just OS. And in a pandemic, we push back against any sort of disease control why? /12

Ultimately because it might restrict our movement, our accumulative journeys. We can’t have that. We’ll drive the virus deep into what should be our most sacred places, our own homes, rather than interrupt the free flow of coffee and trips. /end

Rather than use the health data to try to show the folly of applying economic politics to a pandemic, we now have, thanks to people like David Cutler and Larry Summers, the direct *economic* data to show it's not working. A catastrophic economic emergency. /2

This is the narrative that will bite. Economic politicians aren't interested in health. But if their beloved economy is a rotting corpse, they have to take notice. The sociopathic, laughable splitting of a society off from an economy now exposed, byt their own economic data. /end

https://t.co/I1fwJJvfJw

Cyanobacteria are probably the ultimate example of the highwire act Michel Serres talked about in his early book, The Parasite. Both enabling and destructive, at the same time. Responsible for creating much of our modern breathable atmosphere, oxygen factories. /2

But in doing that, they also killed about 90% of life that had evolved in the first couple of billions of years of Earth history, in the Great Oxygenation Event. Much of it had been anaerobic, and oxygen was a toxic poison to it. /3

‘Blue-green algae’, not strictly an algae but a bacteria, is probably the greatest mass murderer in all of Earth history. Some researchers even link it to the other mass extinction events. But as Serres would say, without it we wouldn’t be here today. We couldn’t breathe. /4

The fascinating insights Margulis’ work leads you to though make you realise that all other life on Earth has always been a bit player, to microbes. Some bacteria for example will pretty much live forever, provided they’re fed and watered. They don’t age. /5

‘Macrofauna’ - all the plants and animals and other living things on Earth - are constructed by microbes, inhabited by microbes while alive, and return to microbes on death. We’re the finite mortal experiments microbes make in construction, to further microbial ends. /6

Their focus is literally eternity, they will quite happily cast any organism aside as just one more fun experiment, to make another one. That’s really what evolution is all about. Not some progression to some higher perfection, macro-life is *less* complex than microbial life. /7

So in this context, the idea of ‘living with’ pathogenic microbes is really quite sociopathically hilarious. Far and away the most common way microbes live with macro-life is to kill it. Not because microbes are evil, but because macro-life is just a series of experiments. /8

Aggregate structures microbes use, to further the ends of microbes. As in the Great Oxygenation Event, if other life gets in the way of furthering the end of some microbes, they’ll very happily sit by and watch them all die. To them all macro-life is intrinsically transient. /9

It’s like smashing something you’ be made out of Lego. Not a catastrophe, it can always be rebuilt or something else can be built with the liberated blocks. Our most fundamental vanity as humans is the idea we’re a more evolved form of life, to microbes. All life is microbes. /10

And us surviving doesn’t mean embracing microbes where we come across them. Many we come across will happily kill us. We’re no big deal to them. It’s understanding the fundamentally microbial foundation of all life that paradoxically makes microbial control so important. /end

Thinks anybody still talking about Covid as a threat is engaging in catastrophising, completely out of perspective with the scale of the threat. He's wholly within that fake return to normal we bought by vaccines that took some of the rough edges off severe disease. /2

I sympathise with him, because I've met experienced and knowledgeable people here that work with infectious diseases who still refuse to answer one basic question for me. Why are we allowing a pandemic to be defined by the level of disease, and not by the level of infection? /3

Public health knows that infection is the key, because if you don't control it, microbes as living things can continue to evolve ways to avoid anything you might do to try to prevent them killing or maiming you. But we won't address this political shift in definition. /4

Never mind that even with our political focus on severe disease and death, on the logistics of managing hospitals and aged care, we've been letting the bodies pile up anyway. It's a rush to the exits of public anything. History is better than science here, /5

I ask people like my friend to name other pandemics humans have deliberately chosen to live with, any time in history. They never can, because there aren't any. As far back as the Bible and even earlier, human communities knew pandemics were the deepest evil. /6

And I suggest all we've done is kicked the can down the road, taken the blunt edge off the microbial assault with vaccines that can't control infection, and offloaded all the resulting chronic impact onto future generations. This is of course the Western business model. /7

Since the 1970s anyway, to live for the now, have recreational lifestyles, fuck tradition and custom and thought and planning for the future. Live in 3 or 4-year electoral cycle bubbles of engineered enthusiasms and fads, popularity team sports. /end

Almost certainly this gap is closing because Australia has run a very generous system of allowing pretty much an unlimited number of foreign players to play in the local comp, easily the most competitive in the world. /2

Doing that has allowed foreign players to learn how to play like Australia, and how to (sometimes) beat them. The parallels with infectious pathogens are obvious. If you give them the opportunity to evolve by not controlling their transmission, they will always eventually win. /3

They're so much more numerous than us, and the evolutionary landscape so open to even the most bizarre novelties, that allowing them free rein in human hosts will deliver them victory on a plate. /4

It's why you can't understand pandemics or infectious disease more generally with a focus on a small, finite timespan. Evolution doesn't really happen fast, mostly. With netball it wasn't one year of foreign players playing here. It took quite a lot of years. /5

But if you let time pass, the transition is inevitable. Also why even with infectious diseases with apparently 'sterilising vaccines, the public health control guidelines still talk about restrictions on transmission. The two HAVE to go together. A vaccine is not a medication. /6

It's an intervention into an evolving ecosystem, by its nature transient and subject to change. As I discovered myself in my adult life when I contracted whooping cough, despite being fully vaccinated. /7

And this is why I will keep asking why we're allowing the definition of a pandemic to be shifted from amounts of infections, to amounts of severe illness. Add time to the equation and they're functionally equivalent things. /8

Knocking some severe disease on the head today, with a Covid vaccine for example, without controlling transmission just means delaying the inevitable defeat of those vaccines by the pathogen. /9

P.S. for netball, it's improved the game, closing the gap. But you never want pathogens to be in the game in the first place, with infectious disease. Them winning is you being sick, and dying. /end

This is the ratification of the Peace of Westphalia, in Nuremberg in 1650. 1648 is often given as the origin point for what we call modern States. The thing libertarians hate so much. The name is very revealing - the PEACE of Westphalia. States were invented to bring peace. /2 https://t.co/0efmOccIQ6

Peace at that time from more than 30 years of war, which had killed millions of people. States were the solution to this horrific bloodshed. And this is where the libertarians are so disgusting, tearing up one of humanity’s greatest learnings, born of tremendous suffering. /3

A recognition that some form of collective mechanism was required to regulate the social life of peoples, to stop the descent into endless war and bloodshed. Interestingly, prior to 1648, humanity had already learned and forgotten that same lesson. /4

The wars this peace was designed to end came about when a previous international unity, the Holy Roman Empire, came under increasing assault from monarchies from several countries, wanting their own ‘sovereignty’ to surpass that of the Church. /5

There’s no doubt that whatever collective mechanisms humans invent, others will try to bypass or destroy. The battle to maintain a collective as well as individual focus (or better, to see those as the same thing) is as old as history. /6

These are basic social facts, often described as political facts. Humans act socially in everything they do, politics is no exception, it’s just another name we give to the same social behaviour. We form groups or teams, which compete in imitative rivalry with other teams. /7

Take the language of modern libertarians. The ‘Nanny State’. That identifies the players here precisely. Who has nannies? Not you or me. Rich toffs, mostly. They see the State as a restriction on their capacity to achieve maximum power, status and wealth. /8

They’re brought up with parents constantly railing against ‘red tape’ and laws and regulations standing in the way of their easy accumulation of more wealth and more status and power. They’re socialised into this hatred. Covid then represented a complete violation, for them. /9

Of everything they hold dear. Their ‘freedom’ to do whatever they like, unfettered action for their team. I’ve Tweeted a lot about how this same *social* grouping has been fanatically active since the late-1970s, dismantling the great creation of the post-WW2 period. /10

‘The public’. A constructed entity designed to manage the collective survival of societies themselves, during and after the wars, sweeping aside previous hierarchies in favour of a collective focus in social affairs. These elites despised every moment of it. /11

I’ve also Tweeted how they invented one of the most strategically clever political tools ever, at this time, to reverse this shift towards collective life. What we call ‘the economy’. Replacing society with self-regulating markets. A social invention, disguised as economics. /12

Of course markets don’t exist, all economic transactions only exist and operate through extensive and structured regulation. Through laws. But the belief plays its social purpose, of obstructing everything that might have a collective, public focus. /13

By saying it ‘interferes with the market’. A genius social invention that allows the libertarians to rebuild all of their old social hierarchies, while pretending they’re just operating in a market, the true function of which is to stop anybody else doing the same. /14

Once you know this, you can see modern libertarians for what they really are. A (small) social group, a team, prosecuting their claims for social domination, for status and wealth and power. Historically, to restore a prestige they had pre- WW1 and WW2, the great disruptors. /end

One of the good things about this is that it will make visible to people the amount of fuel/energy required to feed our aviation habits.

A constant theme of mine is the difference between space, and place. Space is map-world, the lands of the world divided up into spatial territories by lines on a map. That’s also travel and tourism culture, the lands of the world parcelled up into ‘sights’ to be seen. /2

All travel is social. We’re not travelling through the world, we’re travelling through our own social relationships. A sight to be seen is one generated by the social activity of others going to see it, and feeding back what they find. Others then go on the same journey. /3

Which is really just a journey through a map, but even more participation in a social activity, with the locations there only as infrastructure for that social activity. It becomes imitative rivalry, to be seen in prominent places, and even better to find new places. /4

So that you become the influencer who generates new waves of ‘travel’, to new locations, really just building a new social network focused more on you. I encourage people to think about space entirely differently, in the same way they think about human relationships. /5

The locations of the world aren’t spaces. They’re PLACES. They’re a *relationship* between a diverse range of humans and non-humans, giving a place a unique and ongoing dynamic character. The most fundamental level of place-making is your own home. The concept of home. /6

The places we travel to aren’t sights. They’re homes. Homes for people, animals, plants, rivers, geologies etc. Places that are made and constantly remade. In relationship terms, a tourist is like a speed-dater, looking for a quick fling with the places they touch down in. /7

Justifying it by saying they’re getting ‘experiences’. Everything is an experience, you don’t need to leave your backyard to have an experience. You don’t fuck everything that moves at home to have the ‘experience’ of all of those people (though maybe some do). /8

But this is what travel does to locations. It doesn’t matter how many Ptolemaic acrobatic epicyclic methods you come up with to be a more ‘authentic’ tourist, you’re still just having casual sex with all of these places. With peoples’ homes. /9

This all fundamentally matters for the two biggest issues of right now, Covid and climate. Both driven by this same stripping away of place, and replacement by space. Mass, spreading infection is a violation of the sovereignty of place. Driving infection into peoples’ homes. /10

Climate change is 250+ years of refusing to respect any sort of sensible use of energy, to drive mass mobilisation of everything. People and resources. To destroy place and turn it into nothing more than a resource. This is what empires have always done. Destroyed place. /11

Replacing it with smooth roads and waterways and flight routes, to bring the spoils of conquest back to the massive centres of accumulation at the centres of the empires. Slaves, sugar, spices, minerals, this process hasn’t ever really ended. Slavery became ‘labour hire’. /12

Extractive cultures, decoupled from connection to place. Except their own places, which they protect violently, but even within those nations those not at the top of social hierarchies can expect to be sleeping rough if you allow the process to continue. To have no place. /13

Mass Covid infection is a violation of my place, and everybody else’s. To have infection deliberately driven into my home, by the refusal to do anything to stop the circulation outside it. That restricted the great mobilisation culture, and that’s not allowed. /14

It’s not ‘capitalism’, an empty word. It’s a social and cultural refusal to come to terms with place and what it means. To be grounded. To have to make and maintain a relationship with the land you live in. Rather than it just be a theme park to tow your caravan through. /end

They're the new Industrial Revolution being deliberately obstructed by entrenched interests profiting from the last one, over 250 years ago. And that most famous of all Industrial Revolutions wasn't 'capitalism' launching assaults against society either. /2

It was society finding spectacular new solutions to social problems it had lived with for centuries. That's what industrial revolutions are, SOCIAL transformations. Technology is not a binary, with society. /3 https://t.co/CtLkU2EQTL

By far the greatest boon for economies is fixing social problems. That's all that industrial revolutions are. It's why when clever people design new ways of doing things, those things sell so well. They're filling an enormous unmet demand. /4

We need to take the fight back to enemy territory, the economy itself. We're not saving it by refusing to do things for climate change or Covid. We're holding it back, weighing it down with 250-year-old lead in the saddlebags. /5

Spawned by social problems that have long since moved on. We have new social problems now, like Covid and climate change, that need a new industrial revolution. An absolute boon for the economy. That's how all economies prosper, fixing social problems. /6

'There is no such thing as society' modern neoliberal/libertarian politics doesn't understand a thing about economies. It's just human shields for representatives of a now very old industrial revolution, well past it's use-by date. /7

Rent-seeking, it's all it is. They need to be forced out of the way of our economic development. Which is the same thing as our social development, go figure. /end

Link: https://t.co/h21NBboldg

Because society runs by team sports, have a look at how often FOI legislation is driven by political conservatives and libertarians. They're often the instigators, it's a major plank in their continuous assault on public institutional life. /2

To be clear, everybody wants accountability. But look at the accountability FOI offers. It's standard populist libertarian thinking, of individuals holding institutions to account. Yes organisations also use FOI, but the framework here is binary. /3

Government, and 'customers' of government. It shifts the locus of accountability outside the institutions of government itself. Away from the checks and balances and due process built into any well-run government. It engineers a deliberately antagonistic relationship. /4

Yes some might say it's just one more layer of checks and balances, to sit alongside the rest. But anybody who works with FOI will be able to say just how much that's true. A huge number of FOI requests are deep conspiracy lunacy. Government institutions are swamped. /5

And again, this happens because the way government has historically been made accountable, through its permanent, tenured officials whose interests are not aligned with popularly-elected leaders, has been under assault for decades. Slogans about 'red tape' and 'bureaucracy'. /6

As with public health, well-functioning democracies do a lot of this due process work through skilled officials that are more or less invisible to most of the public, most of the time. That's the design, so people can get on with their own lives. /7

But if the leadership level then directs opposition to these mechanisms themselves, which is what the political libertarians do constantly, then society begins eating itself. And the libertarians don't care, because they don't think society even exists. /8

Just as a justification for social media is that it apparently provides lots of information to the public, to help it make decisions. Codswallop, functioning representative democracies *deliberately* restrict this flow of information. It's the design. /9

Nobody would ever get a thing done if we were all supposed to be across all of the details of everything going on. It's such a stupid belief that's it's astonishing it ever became widespread. The root social war we're in the middle of is a war on TRUST. /10

That's the war the libertarians started and want, to destroy trust in institutional democratic life. To undermine all expertise and authority, and place it instead in the hands of every person, no matter how stupid, venal and violent. Look how that played out, for Covid. /11

Where motivated fantasies about 'living with' novel pathogens suddenly became common sense, ably assisted by the boosting algorithms of social media. our public health institutions knew what to do in a pandemic, and for a while in Oz they were allowed to. /12

Which is why we were kicking Covid's arse, more or less eliminating it from community circulation. The next stage of that deep expertise would have been the shift to workplace and home-focused infection control, but that was never going to be allowed to happen. /13

Because it represented far too much 'State' control, for the libertarians. We jumped insanely straight from emergency action, to 'personal responsibility'. Like building an airport, then saying 'ok, everybody go and fly your planes however you like'. Offensively stupid. /14

To finish, also never be fooled into thinking political libertarians actually believe in this shift to individuals running societies. THEY want to run the societies. The individualist nonsense is just their Trojan Horse way of stripping away *anybody else* challenging them. /15

Any collective action to regulate public life will be opposed as more 'red tape', except their own regulatory actions, designed to reinforce their own positions. Why I say always focus on the team sports. These are social battles, between teams. /16

The beliefs are just fodder, you can point out all day long to libertarians that their beliefs make no sense on any measure. It's not the point. They don't believe them either. They use them strategically, to make their team win. /end

What Leigh Sales misses here is what most political journalism now misses. That we’re living through something that happens repeatedly in history, always with devastating consequences. A surge of populism. /2

You’d think 100 million+ dead in the 20th century via two of these surges, the world wars, would have focused our attention on the phenomenon. But we learned nothing. We label those wars against ‘fascists’, one of our adolescent social media debating terms. /3

The fascists of the 20th century were just populists. Fascism is populism’s endgame. Leaders who appeal to ‘the people’ directly, who attack society’s basic institutions in favour of a popularity cult focused on themselves. ‘The people’ is a fiction, it’s a populist weapon. /4

Used by Trump and others to justify what they’re doing, when in reality populations don’t act as some defined agency that the term suggests, or as the fascists have always liked to call it, the ‘will of the people’. All nonsense. /5

Leni Riefenstahl’s famous ‘The Triumph of the Will’ a classic populist propaganda meme. Self-serving gibberish about the people rising up to take control, how do we not hear the not even hidden resonances with the bullshit people like Trump utter every day? /6 https://t.co/uZOTDoFTt1

None of it is ever about anybody except the Great Leader, whoever the populist blowhard of the day happens to be. Transforming all of the checks and balances and due process of societies into a mono-dimensional orgy of popularity, focused on the Great Leader. /7

This is why I Tweet so often about the lethal danger of popularity as a mechanism for governance. Popularity is a mechanism children use to establish social hierarchies, in schools. Adult life is supposed to move beyond it. It’s the most toxic political poison. /8

Experienced politicians used to have a type of gentleman’s agreement never to use it, they knew it was a way to blow up societies. But the sugar hit of popularity is too tempting, and eventually they succumb. John Howard started the modern surge in Oz, with his race politics. /9

Race was one of those areas politicians in the late 20th century had reached an unspoken agreement never to touch. They knew it was a path to easy votes, but also that it destroys communities. Howard didn’t care. Many in his own party looked on in horror. /10

What followed was *decades* of weaponised immigration politics, which the loon Right of the LNP milked mercilessly for election wins. Populism is heroin for a politician, cheap and fast mass shifts in votes. The community is terminally damaged by this. /11

Short-term wins lead to long-term social collapse. How we don’t see that makes the catastrophes of the 20th century a tragic waste of time, in the we never learn a thing from history sense. Trump and others like him are populists, we know how populism works. /12

Where the only currency of power becomes popularity, with no checks and balances of any kind. Schools fight this hierarchy constantly, and adult life has institutions to do the same. It’s those institutions the Great Leader populists despise and attack relentlessly. /13

Social media has been the greatest of all gifts to populism, its economy of likes is populism in its purest form. It’s allowed populist insanity to mobilise at an exponential rate. Trump more or less took the US Presidency using not much more than Twitter. /14

None of these social collapses will be fixed until we target the root cause. Popularity as a mechanism of governance. Elections are a sad part of that problem, which people won’t admit, seduced by populists into thinking elections ARE democracy. /15

Elections are a mechanism to involve the public in governance. A terrible mechanism, because they assume popularity is a measure of what’s socially important. But popularity is just fads and fashions, it shifts constantly and is easily manipulated. /16

It’s allowed every tinpot Great Leader wannabe in the world to game our complex institutional democracies, and turn them into personal fiefdoms. We’ve been here before. Tens of millions died. We didn’t learn. /end

1. The same thing happened in 2011 in Chicago in a cold snap, except it was hundreds of ICE vehicles abandoned. 2. The reason is the same in both cases, people needed to have the vehicles running to keep the heating going, and ran out of fuel. /2

3. In both cases people were carrying far too little fuel/charge for an emergency weather situation, something motorists are advised not to do. 4. EV owners can recharge at home, something ICE vehicles can't do. These EV owners were queued at a supercharging station..../3

...possibly because they were travellers. It's not a limitation on EV technology, it's driver behaviour. 5. This is an extreme weather event, which the majority of world drivers will never experience, and which there are simple solutions to in any case. /end

We all know this shot, part of a series from the 1930s showing construction workers in various eye-opening (from our modern standpoint) situations of extremely high risk. Apparently at least some of these were staged, as promotional photos. But the risk is there, and ignored. /2 https://t.co/kkLXqflPly

This is what I suspect I’m seeing in the case of the GPs. Like anything that becomes a part of our everyday life, risk here has become socialised, and thereby normalised. If you’re a medical professional exposed to high risk from infection every day, a culture will develop. /3

That high-risk environment will become socialised, in some way. It’s how people get through the day, day after day. They ‘find a way’. As with the casual indifference to heights with the construction workers, I think HCWs can become fairly oblivious to infection. /4

Pre-Covid we already knew this to be true in hospitals for example, where doctors were seen to be some of the worst offenders in hygiene control, not doing even the basics like washing their hands between patients. Some of it is maybe a macho thing, a ‘fuck you’ to the risk. /5

Some of it may be the socialisation of overwork and pressure, allowing something to give so that HCWs can continue to function. Whatever the reason, risk will be socialised in some way. The airline industry is very interesting here. /6

Cavalier in so many other ways, but flight safety has been a ruthless focus for many decades. Often driven more by regulators than airlines, and now sometimes found to be wanting in some cases. But the point is risk is always socialised, in some way. /7

And with Covid, it’s alarming to me anyway how easily many HCWs have been happy to play along with the normalisation of Covid risk. My own GP masks, with a surgical mask, not because I ask them to but because it’s their practice policy. /8

By 5 minutes into a consult, it’s under their chin, like an ornament, the mouth and nose completely uncovered. We should not expect *any* profession or occupation to be immune from the dynamics of socialisation. There will always be a social reason for what they do. /9

All behaviour is led, socially. I think health care has some serious questions to answer about why casual indifference to air quality seems the majority model in this most exposed of all industries. We don’t tolerate it for manufactured kitchen benchtops. /end

Link for graph: https://t.co/BaJQZy5oTH

65 million tonnes of fuel is transported every year. Over 2.6 million journeys by tankers each year. The tankers travel 15 billion kilometres every year. Range isn’t a property of a vehicle, it’s a property of its energy supply network. Data: https://t.co/wmcXXOO9yN /end

The truth of human societies is in some ways both brutal and simple. Humans are social creatures, first and most fundamentally. That doesn’t mean they’re naturally warm and cuddly and peace-loving, it actually means the opposite. Because sociality is driven by status. /2

Left to themselves, humans create groups, where 95% of the group follows the lead of 5% of the group, who are the high-status members. At all scales. A whole range of things create status, there’s no rule, it’s about human desires and how they’re operating at a point in time. /3

These groups then compete with other groups in imitative rivalry. Imitation is the key social act, it forms both the groups themselves (where the 95% imitate or emulate the 5%), and also then drives competition between groups. Why I call groups ‘teams’. /4

Because this mechanism is very similar to team sports. It’s why we LOVE team sports. They’re a window into the DNA of all human culture. Most of what I see here every day for example is people being part of some team or teams, and competing against other teams. /5

Zero Covids vs Infinite Covids, EV-lovers versus ICE-lovers, climate change action vs inaction, Left vs Right, etc. All team sports. The issues they discuss are important, but are hijacked for the team sport. The issues become the football in the game. /6

If societies let this mechanism carry on for long enough, eventually things collapse, as we see for example in many South American countries right now, where gangs more or less run the show. This is the great lie of the ‘freedom’ of libertarian political ideas. /7

That just leaving people alone to do whatever they like leads to a life of freedom for all to pursue whatever life they prefer. It does nothing of the sort, it surrenders humanity to continuous competing teams, fighting for status. Gang warfare. /8

Humans don’t, EVER, exist as free-floating individuals. They’re social, they exist in groups. And these groups are created by imitative rivalry, both internally and then between groups. The constant battle for status and team victory. So how do we get beyond this? /9

Historically, only one way. Through total catastrophe. The team sports eventually lead to complete social collapse, war, pestilence etc. Only that has the power to disrupt the social imitative status mechanisms. Humans are forced to devise collective ways to fix things. /10 https://t.co/t1SGPMZRL4

To survive, not because they want to. It goes against all of the imitative rivalry of social life, to do it. In the world wars, those status hierarchies were largely destroyed, society was levelled. Leading to the construction of a new ‘public’ space. Our past 70 years. /11

Here it is, through one powerful lens. You can see that from about mid-century, post-WW2, life got very good for us. We were healthier than we’d ever been. And richer. And why was this? Because we were forced to create collective mechanisms to service public life. /12 https://t.co/7MmWv0sdQP

It was the wars and the Spanish Flu pandemic that created the public institutions that built our god-like good lives of the past 70 years. We planned and coordinated and organised societies, to work better. Rather than leaving it all to status hierarchy games. /13

But as night follows day, leave that good life to run long enough, say a generation or two (70 years), and people quickly forgot the origins of that good life. The collective action that created it. And so, as always happens in history, status came back. Imitative rivalry. /14

You can see it, from about the late-1970s, the push to remove all of these public institutions, as ‘red tape’ and ‘bureaucracy’, in favour of ‘markets’ of free-acting individuals. We see that as an economic shift, but like all human things, it was a social shift. /15

It was a set of convenient ideas to bring back status-driven imitative social life. Back to the gang warfare. Where apparently free markets are really just continuous waves of fads and fashions, creating status and power/wealth for some teams, and not others. /16

This is what societies will always default to, which in social terms is a type of feudalism. 5% rule, 95% follow. And that 95% are eager to follow, everybody clamours for status. Look at what happened in Oz schools when people got the choice of status privates or public. /17

We’re so used to thinking ‘democracy’ is anti-feudal that we assume feudalism is a bad thing, by definition. But it’s how societies always operate, without catastrophe. It’s not people being oppressed, people again clamour for status. They LOVE it, the team sports. /18

As an historical aside, one of the reasons I’m certain the Catholic Church was able to sustain social cohesion for so many centuries was that it introduced an entirely different element to this social mix. It took the top of the status hierarchy, God, and sacrificed him. /19 https://t.co/aQ6ckOnl3L

You don’t have to be ‘religious’ to understand how this was different. To take the top of the status hierarchy, and have that top surrender that status entirely. To go so far as to allow themselves to be killed, to tame the imitative rivalry. Rene Girard saw this. /20

But that’s a topic for another day. It shows though how these basic social mechanisms are there throughout history, and today is not fundamentally different. We lived historically unprecedented lives, here in the West, for the past 70 years. Because catastrophe made us. /21

Sadly we may now need it to save us again. But the rest of the world will look on and think ‘about bloody time you came back to the pack, and lived the lives again we never stopped living’. /end

She’d easily meet the criteria of ‘vulnerable’ that minimisers use. And we’ve all seen them utter reassuring words for the past 3-4 years about protecting the vulnerable. So, my question is - how can she celebrate her birthday, without catching Covid? /2

Something her doctor says would almost certainly kill her. Say 30 people are invited, with the current amount of spread in the community, it seems unlikely they’d all be free of Covid. How does this event or her life more generally function without her living in isolation? /3

Very many of the people she’d like to celebrate with haven’t been masking or taking any precautions, and she doesn’t want to have that argument with them, because they’re often drunk on the Kool Aid of getting back to living their best lives’. /4

The removal of PUBLIC protections means people like her are on their own, battling not just the virus but also the people who will quite happily bring it into her home, regardless of the consequences. She absolutely isn’t happy to sacrifice her life to allow Covid to spread. /5

She’s one of the faces of what I call the new lockdowns. Locked in her home, to stay alive, because governments and businesses will do nothing to control circulation of a lethal virus in public spaces. Removing public controls privatised lockdowns. /6

The vulnerable (and that can be any of us) have to lock themselves down, to avoid infection. The public space becomes a sewer of filthy air, which gutless politicians cowed by a tiny handful of extremely vocal cookers do nothing to mitigate. While business ignores WHS. /end

Smoking in public places. You don’t need to be that old to remember a time when to go out to a club or pub meant choking on thick second-hand cigarette smoke, and your hair and clothes stinking when you got home from the same source. That’s now mostly over. /2 https://t.co/1pdlVwodIo

But the fact it’s such a recent public health initiative highlights the massive, aggressive reversal of our public priorities, under Covid. The transition to this indoor smoking ban originally gave smokers their own dedicated spaces, separate to main areas, to smoke in. /3

I think that highlights so well how we’ve completely reversed our priorities, in only 4 years. It was widely accepted that somebody smoking was putting others at risk by polluting their air. The transition to fixing that allowed smokers various co-existence options. /4

Where their air was quarantined from that of non-smokers. Think about how this is the complete OPPOSITE of what we’ve now done with Covid. Where those who want clean air are told to make it themselves, to create their own enclaves. And told this makes them some kind of weirdo. /5

It beggars belief, how short collective memory now is, that nobody says ‘um, we just put that sort of bullshit to bed, with smoking, only a handful of years ago’. Those calling for clean air are calling for something we were ALREADY DOING, just a few years ago, with smoking. /6

Insisting upon clean public air. Recognising that there is no such thing as private air, that those who dirty it should either be forbidden from doing that, or at best be given quarantined spaces to transition away from their habit. For Covid we’re doing the reverse. /7

If you want clean air now, either stay home, or tie yourself in Twister-type knots trying to create isolated havens of it in public spaces, using masks and purifiers and trying to get facilities to use decent ventilation. It’s beyond absurd, it’s disgusting. /8

That only a few years after we won the fight to clean public air in public spaces from toxic cigarette smoke, those who want to maintain this clean air are told they’re mentally defective and getting in the way of those who want to fill the same air with infectious diseases. /9

It’s striking too how, despite all the pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo these infinite infection freaks evoke about hybrid immunity and living with viruses, when pressed you can always force them to reveal their true motivation. They want their social life back. /10

You can’t find a more perfect example of rampant adolescent culture now dominating even adult life. That the greatest emergency of the past 4-5 years is seen as interrupted recreational lifestyles. Rather than a pandemic that has already killed more people than World War 1. /11

They hate the comparison to WW1, saying it’s ridiculous. The deaths make it a perfect comparison. Nobody argued to stop fighting World War 1 because people couldn’t go on holidays or have parties or go to gigs. That would have been considered outrageously selfish and stupid. /12

And yet here we are, with even prominent people arguing that the most pressing problem facing societies in the face of an ongoing assault from Covid, is that they need their recreational lifestyles back. Like seriously, who gives a fuck about their lifestyles, except them? /13

They’re plainly too stupid to understand that we don’t each get to choose what air we breathe. That their ongoing spread of infection means everybody else gets NO CHOICE but to become infected. Their private activity is not private, they’re using public air, and fouling it. /14

Their arguments are the exact equivalent of ‘drive to the conditions’ boy racers, who drive however they like on public roads, paying no attention to speed limits or other rules. It’s anti-social bullshit, and needs to be ruthlessly excluded from social life. /15

And again, SO recently, we already did this, with air. With smoking. It’s astonishing that they’re allowed to get away with publicly spruiking something so fundamentally at odds with what society was already doing, pre-Covid, Clean public air was not some distant goal. /16

We’d already legislated it, for smoking. It’s not some unachievable fantasy, we were *already there*, substantially. Their anti-social, freeloading ‘what about my social life?’ whining should make them a public laughing stock. And a public enemy, which is what they are. /end

The Roman republic governed by a Senate was the closest thing to modern democracy. Not a democracy, but not far off, elected magistracies to a governing Senate. Voting was heavily restricted to elite members of society, but ours was too until not long ago, historically. /2

The Republic was sandwiched between The Roman Kingdom, where Rome was ruled by kings, and the Roman Empire, where Rome was ruled by emperors. This is where it gets interesting. Of those 3 main periods, the republic was far and away the worst time to be a Roman. /3

The Roman republic existed in a state of more or less perpetual war. The contrast was so marked with the empire which followed it, that a term was even coined for it. Pax Romana, two centuries of unprecedented peace that followed the replacement of the republic, with emperors. /4

There are deeper social questions here, about how humans organise. Right now we’re living through another experiment in the belief that ‘the people’ should run society, what we think of as democracy. /5

It’s worth pointing out that since universal voting was introduced in our own societies, relatively recently in historical terms (about a century ago), we’ve had two global wars where more than 100 million people died. And right now we’re refusing to fight changes…/6

…to climate that could wipe out our entire species, and pretending we’re living with a pandemic. All under a governance schema where we say that populations, the people, are in the driving seat. Or at best we say the people are being obstructed by vested interests. /7

Meanwhile in the US and elsewhere, easily the most notable development is the huge rush to elect completely unhinged populists, in a cult of the Great Leader that is equivalent with old Kings or Emperors. I suggest the idea of ‘the people’ driving democracies is the problem. /8

The people is not even a thing, an agency capable of acting. It’s just all of us, a counting statistic. And we’re seeing clearly in every modern democracy that if you offer them something much closer to a King than a Roman Senator, they’ll fall over themselves to have a King. /9

Something Dennis Altman analysed very well in his book. And he’s not a monarchist. It’s time we got a bit brutal with our ideas around democracy. As I Tweet about a lot, I think all societies, at all times in history, actually operate the same way. Socially. /10 https://t.co/DOC6iQy89G

Humans imitate one another, and specifically they imitate those they see as having higher status. This forms groups, aligned around the high-status individuals. These groups then compete against other groups. This same mechanism operates at all levels of society. /11

From a tiny committee running a soccer club, right through to a Nation State. Team sports, as I sometimes call it. Status shifts constantly according to shifts in human desires, leading to new ‘influencers’ and new status hierarchies. Fashions and fads. /12

If you don’t offer this mechanism to people, they will run it themselves. What we call the democracy of the past century, where we say we’ve replaced status hierarchies with aggregated votes of millions of individuals, has been riven by status-driven chaos. /13

Everything becomes dominated by elections, popularity contests, both at election time and between elections. The jostling for social status, via popularity. And as above, leading to a world of Trump, where leaders are hard to distinguish from ancient Kings or emperors. /14 https://t.co/HWCtQRkJt5

It seems difficult to escape the conclusion that we’re fighting the most basic social realities of human existence, in our attempts to replace status hierarchies with an idea of populations governing themselves. As a result we’re getting the worst possible outcomes. /15

Populist wannabe Kings who are up there with some of the worst excesses of imperial and monarchical rule in history. None of the checks and balances of a cascading, structured nobility, holding the sovereign to account. No culture of noblesse oblige. /16

We forget that the earlier origins of modern democracy in our times was these structured nobilities rising up against tyrant Kings, creating systems of checks and balances. The Magna Carta, for example. Societies figured out how to tame their status-driven fundamentals. /17

There will never be utopias, because human desires are never stable, and all of this mechanism is driven by those desires. But if we’re realistic about how groups of people, of any size, operate, we will at least be able to sand the rough edges off inevitable excesses. /18

I look on every day at people hopeful electing somebody else will fix our problems. That’s this same ancient social mechanism operating, people look to be LED out of the wilderness. But at the same time we’re bogged down in the fantasies of ‘bottom-up’ change. /19

That this leadership will emerge from the daily percolation of everybody arguing with everybody else. Now on social media. As the Roman Republic discovered, all that leads to is perpetual argument and war. Gangs jostling for status, trying to reinstate a status hierarchy. /20

For today’s problems, we need to give up the idea that progress will be more of the same endless consultation, discussion and debate, to ‘bring people along’ with the facts. While they faff about with that historical fantasy, bad people offer the people new Kings. /21

Like Trump. Who lay waste to societies with completely unbridled populist rule, shed of all checks and balances. Good people need their own Kings to counter this shift. They need to recognise how societies have always operated. /end

Insurance is a good reality-based politics guide for Covid too. Covid has been an explicit exclusion on many if not most policies, since early in the pandemic. Most of our public narratives are off the with the reality fairies. /end

We can take a healthy interest in the work others do. But the overwhelming political movement of our time isn’t about misinformation and disinformation. As if societies run on information - they absolutely don’t. They run on TRUST. A healthy, social thing. /2

Recognising that expertise has to be distributed, in a complex society, there’s far too much for any one person to know well. Meaning we rely upon a trust of others to know the things we don’t know, and to act on them accordingly. That’s what our institutions are. /3

It’s how they emerged, the infrastructure of trust. The way societies delegated expertise in all of the different areas of life. The dominant political movement of the past 70 years has been an all-out assault on these institutions, by attacking the trust that creates them. /4

By dismissing them out of hand as ‘red tape’ and ‘bureaucracy’. Replacing them with the ludicrous idea of everybody knowing everything about everything, and mobilising that magical universal knowledge using social media, to run societies. From the ‘bottom up’. /5

Or so the fantasy goes. I don’t know about you, but in the several different jobs in my own career, often there are too few even competent in the work they ARE qualified to do. Let alone them having mastery of all the areas they have nothing to do with. /6

My own response to cookers and other universal know-alls now is nothing to do with the information they’re trading with. I simply ask them what their area of training is, what they work on day to day. And ask them why people should trust them. /7

And not trust the people actually trained in and working in the field in question. And ask them if the people in those fields are coming to their workplace, to cast doubt on the work THEY’RE doing. (The answer is almost always no.) So what gives them the right to do it? /8

Why this fundamental lack of respect for the work other people do? This astronomical hubris at thinking they’re a universal expert, on everything? I find focusing the discussion away from information and facts and back on the social violations of trust is much more productive. /9

To put it back on people, to ask them if they would enjoy climate scientists for example coming to a building site, if they’re a plumber, to criticise and question their plumbing work? It would make them furious. These are basic questions of respect. Social questions. /10

Not questions of information and facts. That’s a dead-end. What’s the point of arguing data and facts from a whole range of fields most of us know very little about? This highlights the real political strategy in play, to destroy all hierarchies of trust. Our social rules. /11

And replace them with a unidimensional trust in a Great Leader of some kind, an influencer or a Trump. Because this politics doesn’t remove trust, it corrals it. Makes all of it detour around a handful of grifters looking for social domination. /12

They destroy the peace and calm of a life where we don’t need to be constantly thinking about and evaluating everything, because we trust others to do things for us. And our institutions have checks and balances built in to protect that trust, to ensure it’s not being gamed. /13

Or rather they try to restore the peace and calm of life by making all trust detour via them. So that they become a single source of truth, which is really a single point of trust. This is how societies work, and always have. Via trust, mediated by status. /14

Society is social. All of it. To fix bad things, we need to focus on the social, always. On the basic social ways we interact with each other. Not slug it out over data, and try to know and do everything ourselves. /end

Sometimes you have to go back to first principles to understand why things are such a mess. In this case, both sides of this modern fake debate agree on one thing. That government, or the State, exists as some over-arching level of oversight and control of societies. /2

One side says that’s a good thing, the other says it’s an oppressive restriction of individual freedom. What’s funny though is that the State or government, as described in that way, doesn’t exist and has never existed. So they’re arguing over literally nothing. /3

When I say government/the State doesn’t exist in this way, I mean that societies have no levels. There is no bird’s-eye view level of oversight and control. If there was, politicians wouldn’t spend all day every day desperately looking at polling. /4

If they could occupy some sort of control room and have ‘power’ over everybody else, they could ignore polling completely. But they know that their fates and the fate of any decisions they make are in the hands of the public they supposedly represent. /5

One of the reasons I switch off when people wheel out concepts like ‘fascism’ and ‘authoritarianism’ is because it ignores that society isn’t a machine where you just plug in different operating systems. You can’t just come to power and then boot up ‘fascism’. /6

There are no levels, a fascist government that succeeds is the result of a whole range of social behaviours amongst the wider population that support that success. Those who grew up in Nazi Germany for example have written about how the shift there wasn’t imposed on them. /7

It was a gradual and then fast re-jigging of all of social life. Fascism is just the endgame of populism, and when you read historical accounts like Haffner’s, you can experience that firsthand. Fascism arrives unexpectedly, by people just following what’s most popular. /8 https://t.co/rWSIRP1Cu4

And then suddenly the populist Great Leader and his thugs have total control, and act however they like. Something we all experienced at school, with popular bullies. It’s not some Star Wars type narrative of evil dark forces imposing fascist rule on their people. /9

The people clamour to put the Great Leader there, in great populist surges of enthusiasm. Only then do they realise, too late, that the whole movement wasn’t about them, it was about the Great Leader and his cronies. The point here is there are no levels. /10

The illusion that a government or State ‘controls’ us is only one that can be sustained if you ignore the basic fact that anybody ‘in power’ is continuously paranoid about the people deposing them. /11

Mussolini lived an illusion of total power, until the Italians killed him and strung him up by the feet in a square, like a carcass in an abattoir, next to his lover. The same people who had cheered his rise to power not long before. /12

The illusion of society having levels, with the top level being the one that controls the rest, comes from a misunderstanding of scale. It’s about delegation. Humans, in groups of every size, have always delegated some tasks to some small number of people in those groups. /13

If you have a local soccer club, some handful of members are delegated the job of running it, as president, secretary, coach etc. They’re not at some different level, they’re just members like any others, delegated a specific role, on behalf of the group. /14

The group retains control, they can turf them out at any time if they’re not happy. And they often do. This is the key thing we miss, that the ‘macro’ level of a group or society is not some different controlling level of reality. It’s a handful of delegated, specific tasks. /15

Governments are the same. They’re not a separate, distinct body existing at some different level of society, controlling everything else. Government is a long list of delegated, specific tasks, which it performs for the wider group (society). /16

Its members, the politicians, are just members of the same social group as the rest of us, society. And like with the soccer club, if we don’t like what they do, we replace them. The critical thing is to not misunderstand their job. They’re not there to have ‘power’ over us. /17

They are us, too. They live in the same communities. They’re there to do the specific delegated tasks of government. To build and maintain roads, schools, hospitals, armies etc. We need to drop this idea we vote for people to ‘have power’ over our entire lives. /18

They don’t have that, even if they wanted to. It’s a misunderstanding of how government evolved and what it does. It’s literally nothing more than a long list of practical, specific tasks. Tasks the group wants done, for them. We delegate roads and schools etc., to them. /19

Both the libertarians who whine about State control and those who promote it as a good miss the point entirely. The State is not a thing, in that way. It’s just that list of delegated, practical tasks. That’s literally all that it is, in reality. Populism obscures this. /20

It makes us think we’re voting for either Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker, to have control over everything that happens. But populations control everything that happens, they’re totally flat, there are no levels. They decide who ‘rules’. But that rule, again, is not rule. /21

It’s a list of highly specific, delegated tasks that a society wants done, to provide a workable collective life together. If we could strip our politics back to just those specific, practical tasks again, these pointless debates would evaporate into their own hot air. /22

If instead of cheering on various leaders in our daily team sports, we ignored all of that and focused only on which specific things aren’t getting done, like roads not being fixed, and dirty air in buildings. Then sanity would return. If we de-mystified ‘power’. /end

Am sure now this is what it is. Overseas similar flags have been banned because they got caught up with far-Right movements. https://t.co/OBDeMMO7VD

He saw what some call the ‘democratisation’ of knowledge as a catastrophe for societies. Which of course today would be seen as outrageous elitism. But peeling back the obligatory outrage we evoke for everything now for a minute, to get to the specific ideas? /2

To question the default here, that knowledge should be the right of everybody to engage with and own. Do we believe that for anything else humans do? Do we think everybody should be allowed to fly a plane without training, or wire their home, or do surgery? Of course not. /3

For every other activity humans engage with, there’s a sensible recognition that people need aptitude, training and experience to be trusted to do a specific job. What Lawrence saw was the total lack of respect for knowledge, that led to it being seen differently. /4

What we paint as a liberalisation or democratisation of knowledge is actually gross contempt for it. To allow all knowledge to be DIY is to say it’s worthless. That it requires no extensive training and experience to master, something we’d deny for everything else we do. /5

Lawrence said beliefs and knowledge are dangerous, lethal for societies, if not regulated by the sorts of training and experience that we use for everything else. That just as some people have a specific vocation for plumbing, only some will have a vocation, for knowledge. /6

The importance of scholars and scholarship. That, as a specific vocation, with its own specific rules, the sort of rules we see as vital in any other human activity. Rules institutionalised in places like universities - it’s why they exist. Not as job-training factories. /7

Lawrence in a series of brilliant essays describe how this rot starts, in schools. (He began his career as a teacher.) Where the older models of accepting only some small cohort of students would have aptitude for scholarship was replaced with ideas about mass education, /8

He saw how that generated a burning anger in those not suited for this work, a seething resentment focused on those who were, like requiring all students to compete at an elite level in athletics. Most will fail the latter, and also the former. And it will make them angry. /9

Where previously they would be allowed to pursue their own specific vocations, and would ignore, tolerate or even respect those who pursued the specific vocation of scholarship, now they would be made to feel stupid. By forcing them to take on work they’re not suited to. /10

Leading to a society I think we can see pretty clearly today, where everybody is encouraged to believe that ‘democracy’ is the right of anybody to think anything, about everything. And to challenge that right is to evoke the anger of those who were forced to be faux scholars. /11

Who now see all scholarship as a sham, who embody the maxim ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’. Who have zero respect for scholarship, because that respect was shredded through years of hated schooling. Some people hate sport, because of forced participation in it. /12

This is the same, but for knowledge and scholarship. But also worse, because while those who hate sport don’t pretend they’re good at it, those who hate scholarship are convinced it’s not even an area of expertise. Anybody can Google anything. /13

There’s little to no visibility of the specific mechanisms of scholarship that create the knowledge studied in schools. For students, it just seems to appear there, like something would in a Google search. Why would they respect an activity they’ve never seen or heard of? /14

In an environment where they’ve been made to feel stupid, struggling to undertake tasks for which they have no vocation? As Lawrence would say, what is so wrong in acknowledging that working with knowledge is a specific expertise, that takes a specific vocation and work? /15

Welcome to the world, 2024. Where there’s no rank with knowledge, no way to say that something is just plain wrong, because it has no scholarship behind it. Where to even suggest that is to be seen as some elitist autocrat. Where to trust scholars is seen as laughable. /16

They’re part of ‘the elites’. Once upon a time you could counter some of this by example, like’ well you’d still go to the doctor if you’re sick’. Now people don’t, they look to influencers for healthcare. They reject basic vaccination. Etc. The march of populist destruction. /17

We need to recognise knowledge and the scholarship that creates and maintains it as specific vocations, undertaken by specific, trained people with their specific expertise, inside their ancient institutions. But that now seems a dream. And Lawrence would say, we did this. /18

By not acknowledging knowledge as a practical human activity, requiring specific practical skills and disciplines. By not allowing some, likely small, number of people to be seen as good at that, just as we think about other areas of human activity. /19

Lawrence would also say we misunderstood something basic. That it’s unquestionably true that there is no socio-economic or class basis to this specific vocation. He was living proof, a brilliant mind, from a very impoverished background. But our response to that? /20

We engineered schools to make everybody do the same scholarly work, rather than get better at identifying those, from any area of life, with a vocation for it. A sort of dumb massified response to an essential insight. What that produced was anger and resentment. /21

Amongst the kids with no vocation for this work. Towards those who do have that vocation, now playing out in adult life, across the world. /end

Populism is the endgame of this trust mechanism. Where it becomes obvious, as is often noted for Trump supporters for example, that ‘reality’ is whatever the populist leader says it is. Followers TRUST the Great Leader to decode and determine all of reality, for them. /2 https://t.co/jEF4eDU5A9

It’s important to note that this isn’t because people are stupid. Trust is the currency of all social life. What populists do is attack trust itself, launching continuous assaults on all of society’s trusted institutions and other sources of trust. Leaving only themselves. /3

Humans are social, first and last. They don’t do the Enlightenment ideal of examining the world around them, trying to decode and make sense of it. Even science doesn’t do that, peer review is an obviously social process, not epistemological. /4

Societies wouldn’t function otherwise, the world and societies are far too complex for any person to be able to make sense of and negotiate alone. We have to rely upon others to do things we can’t, we have to trust. But intrinsically this means we have to trust LOTS of people. /5

Because reality is far too complex for any individual or even group to have any sort of meaningful handle on, alone. And this is where populism is easily identified. Any time all of life is routed through the views of one person or group alone, you have populism. /6

When they are the only trusted arbiters of reality, you have a hijacking of trust, and therefore of society itself. When every other voice of expertise is rendered as an ‘elite’ to be ignored. It’s classic cult behaviour. /7 https://t.co/K2xwCPlRHj

We won’t beat cults by just saying people in them are stupid. It’s not about intelligence. It’s about the continuous removal of all other sources of trust. And those not in cults use trust to regulate their social lives as well. They just trust lots of people, not one. /8

This makes social change a very different job to countering misinformation and disinformation, of providing facts. It makes it about restoring trust. Trust at all levels of society, to dismantle the hijacking and re-routing of it through only a Great Leader. /9

Or to use Covid or climate change as an example, to restore the complex web of trusted expertise that informs those topics, rather than allow influencers and populist politicians to hijack those networks and re-route them through themselves. /10

Again, this is not about providing facts or information, or countering misinformation and disinformation. It’s about focusing on the *social* ways trust is established and also stolen. Why are vast numbers of people abandoning society’s complex webs and networks of trust? /11

This is something we can all target in our own lives. Instead of slugging it out with facts and factoids every day, ask the basic question - why don’t you trust the people who know this stuff? Always bring the question back to trust. /12

Identify which people cultists/populists still DO trust, outside the Great Leader. Their dentist, for example, or plumber. And talk to them continuously about why they trust those people, but not others. I find talking about trust restores the idea of RESPECT. /13

That we need to respect other people, and their expertise, and if a populist doesn’t, ask them why they aren’t respecting others. Sometimes people they know personally. Always bring it back to the social relationships in play, not the facts. /14

Disrespect is rudeness. The team sports of political populism relishes the conflict of beliefs, that’s its fuel. But you can short-circuit it by bringing the attention always back to basic human decency and respect, the trusting of others. /end

Link: https://t.co/B7JdarQgTV

When you scroll through your feed, it can give the impression of being a sort of addition of views. The Tweets all share the same seamless space. But pause even for a moment over the individual Tweets and you’ll see something very different. /2

Each is like a window not into some tiny fraction of our overall collective view. Each is all of reality, viewed through one specific viewpoint. It may be focused on one specific topic, but through the lens of how that person sees the WHOLE world. /3

This is profoundly different to the idea that collective things are made up of lots of individual component things, added together. Our electoral process has created that misunderstanding, where ‘the will of the people’ really is just the adding together of individual things. /4

Just marks on a piece of paper, the ballot paper. What’s notable there though is this only becomes possible where the entire context of why a person crosses one box rather than another, is stripped away. Voters are just numbers, able to be added together. /5

Some say of elections that ‘the people have spoken’. But they don’t speak, that’s the point. They make simple marks that are able to be numerically added. It’s politicians and commentators who then *project* a ‘voice’ onto those marks, to say what they mean. /6

What ‘mandate’ they imply. One of the reasons I say to never, ever trust anybody who talks a lot about ‘the people’ as a justification for what they’re doing. The people is not a thing, it’s a mathematical construct, from voting, able to be then inserted into any narrative. /7

And I’m not saying ‘the people’ are betrayed by the voting process. I’m saying ‘the people’ doesn’t exist. Humans do not act as a collective body in that way. Go back to Twitter to see this. Every Tweet is each individual seeing ALL of society and reality, in one way. /8

Again they may be talking about something very specific, but they’ll be doing that through the lens of their way of understanding everything, in society and reality. Each believes something for a whole range of contextual reasons, based on their entire ‘worldview’. /9

When you scroll through Tweets in a feed, you’re not seeing the atomic components of some collective view of the people. You’re scrolling through worlds. In more technical terms, you’re not seeing society’s atoms, you’re seeing its monads. (Another thread, another day.) /10

How do you then transition from all of these individual worldviews (world-views, the term is literal) to some sort of collective thing? Well…you never do. Not because we’re all isolated individuals, the libertarian fantasy. But because we don’t ’add up’ in that way. /11

Populations act collectively when there’s some *overlap* of all of these individual world-views. Where each person decides to lend some support to some proposal, from within their own world-view. Two people may support the same thing for *entirely different reasons*. /12

Individuals never surrender their individuality to these collective things, they always just lend their support to them, a provisional support that can be withdrawn at any time. And what will determine that is their entire world-view, on all of life. /13

Politicians know this, it’s why they poll continuously and live in fear of every single poll. They know that peoples’ allegiances are constantly shifting, based on how individuals perceive proposals from within their entire world-view. It’s why they create ‘narratives’. /14

They know people are less focused on a specific topic than on the impact that topic has on their entire world-view. Narratives offer world-views. Our politics is not a battle of specific issues, it’s clashes of entire world-views. Researchers have shown this, empirically. /15

Look what happens when you map the actual views of voters in traditional categories, like moderates, independents, undecided etc. They’re all over the place, hardly anybody agrees on anything. This is true for rusted-on voters too. This is why politicians LOVE elections. /16 https://t.co/TQ4VHqSyCo

Elections allow them to bypass this enormous diversity in world-views, and speak on behalf of ‘the people’ on the basis of a simple number, that ignores the diversity. But they also discover how tiny and provisional support given by individuals is, when narratives shift. /17

Both the UK and Oz for example have had revolving-door prime ministers in recent years. The support individuals give to any politician is always provisional, and can shift quickly and brutally. All on the basis of entire, whole pictures of reality and society. /18

Not added together, individuals don’t ever surrender their sovereign world-view. They may choose to act in concert with others, but *each for their own individual reasons*. Why I also say the distinction between individual and collective is a false one. /19

All of our views are collective, they’re based on our individual world-views. But we’re also individuals, at the same time, always. Even when acting collectively. Our collective life is us individually lending some tiny part of our attention and energy, to a shared cause. /20

For our own reasons. There is no group mind, no ‘the people’. There are world-views/narratives, stories about how all of reality fits together, that can be shared, and which individuals can subscribe to, to a greater or lesser extent. /21

That’s what creates the illusion of ‘the people’. People will shape those narratives in their own ways, constantly shifting and modifying their world-views, creating constantly shifting allegiances. Good politicians know that ‘the people’ is really about shared narratives. /22

Why they will be much less interested in specific issues than they are in creating world-views. Like aspirational world-views, ‘if you have a good, you’ll get a go’. And why defeating bad things is about creating other world-views, not throwing data and facts around. /end

It is you, they just let you speak. You’ve just found some skulls.

It looks a big spend, hey. But look at the comparison, only as far back as 1999. Government spending as a % of GDP hit almost 35%. But adding history here, for perspective. Just defence spending alone in WW2 hit 33% of GDP. /2 https://t.co/p9sD4Dy4IJ

You can see it in the public debt numbers. How for most of the 20th century, until the critical decade of the 1970s, government happily used debt to invest. I want to argue the 1970s is a watershed, because that’s when politics got its grubby hands involved. /3 https://t.co/Bs3GdilOoH

First, look at GDP growth/decline over that same century. How that big surge of government borrowing and expenditure in WW2 for example led to decades of booming economic times. That’s INVESTMENT. Not ‘spending’, as later politics would call it. /4 https://t.co/f4BQ9tAOKA

Amazingly, investing in the country made it boom. Who knew? This is where the 1970s poisons the well. The introduction of small-government, market politics. Where government borrowing and spending is re-defined as the worst evil. Just let individuals do it all, in markets. /5

Have a look at government expenditure as a % of GDP once that waffle became entrenched, compared to the earlier 20th century. Hovering well below 20% most of the time, settling now around that 23% mark. There’s no particular reason that amount is chosen. /6 https://t.co/BQURtwP5M5

Or rather there is. Political ideology. Small government, market politics. Ignoring 70 years of unprecedented prosperity, due to massive government investment in Australian life. I’ve Tweeted a lot of times about how this was actually a social shift, disguised as economics. /7

That the elites pre-wars clawed back control of societies by inventing a fictitious market economy, which defined all State intervention as an obstruction to the perfect operation of a market. Which achieved exactly what they wanted to achieve. /8

A massive flow of wealth and power back to them, with every attempt to regulate that wealth and power in the way we’d done for much of the 20th century described as anti-competitive, destructive of the market. A complete con. A hijacking of social status that they’d lost. /9

The wars and Spanish Flu pandemic destroyed previous social hierarchies, allowing a fundamental refocusing of collective life, on collective aims. 33% of *all* GDP devoted to defence alone, in WW2! Spending under 35% of GDP to fight Covid has to be seen in this context. /10

And let’s not call it spending, using the free marketers’ propaganda phrases. Let’s call it what we used to call it. Investment. In public life. The enormous investments from early to mid-20th century set Australia up for those unprecedented decades of prosperity. /11

We were fighting emergencies, but we not only ended the emergencies, by doing that we set our society up for a much higher quality of life for generations to come. Now compare that with the dreary free market narratives around Covid. A ‘spending’ narrative. /12

Where emergency payments had to be scaled back as quickly as possible, apparently. And the fundamental reason for that is again social. Those same free market hijackers knew their game was up. That their 50 years of dismantling public investment was at risk. /13

So that ‘the economy’ could return to some apparent normal, really just everybody trying to pay for everything themselves, bankrupting most. No public investment to address the causes of the pandemic, to create a new boom in prosperity and health that we saw after WW2. /14

I’ve also Tweeted how Industrial Revolutions more generally are misunderstood as technological and economic phenomena. They’re social phenomena. The revolutions address glaring social need, which is why addressing that need leads to an explosion of prosperity. /15

The free marketers are deliberately blocking the next Industrial Revolution, because they’re the people still living off the fat of the previous one, over 260 years ago. They’ll tell you economic and social problems are distinct. That they need to be ‘balanced’. /16

Rubbish. They’re obstructing economic activity as much as social activity, because they’re the same thing. Industrial revolutions address social need. They’re pirates, trying to suck the last gasps of the last Industrial Revolution into their own bank accounts. /17

So that’s how to see what’s happened with Covid. It should have been an ECONOMIC opportunity (like climate change) to create a new Industrial Revolution, creating vast new prosperity and health for all. They’re not protecting the economy, they’re destroying it. /18

In their own dreary propaganda language, all of these modern small government market ideology governments have ‘lazy balance sheets’. A total drought of investment. Gone is that essential truth, that you have to spend money to make money. Again they’re just pirates. /19

Looting collective wealth for personal gain, under cover of a ridiculous fantasy narrative about self-regulating markets. It’s feudalism, returned, history’s most stable social form. But without any of the historical sense of obligation of the privileged to those below them. /end

Something about the series which isn’t much commented on is that it shows the entire social status hierarchy. Some of the complex interconnections between the different layers of society of that time. And all under one roof. And that’s an important thing. /2 https://t.co/jXiQseSqWn

Because it shows that in earlier times the fundamental interdependence of these ‘layers’ of society was much more fundamentally understood, the criticality of each role. It’s SO easy to approach a show like this with modern sensibilities, and simplistic ideas of progress. /3 https://t.co/z1x1ew7DzZ

Where we might say that we no longer have these status hierarchies, and working people are no longer servants to our more privileged people. But status hierarchies are and always will be societies. We need to look harder. We often hear about ‘service industries’. /4

And how they’re dominant in modern economies. The language hasn’t even changed, most of us are still ‘in service’. The name hasn’t even changed. What *has* changed is the close social ties between service workers, and their employers. /5 https://t.co/oNTwqFXELS

The employers no longer have skin in the game. No meaningful responsibility for the social well-being of their staff outside a strict labour hire relationship. Look at this photo, both ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs’ sharing the same social space. /6 https://t.co/VlBE5r2GYz

Like the older show on a similar theme, with that name. Upstairs and downstairs are brilliant shorthand for social distinctions. Again, with our smug modern eye we can watch these shows and congratulate ourselves that life has ‘moved on’. /7 https://t.co/HTa2jP0qHQ

But our service industries show that the same social distinctions remain, and always will. What changes is our attention to them, and their interdependencies. Modern labour hire is much closer to slavery in its social model, than to an upstairs/downstairs social model. /8

Social relationships stripped of mutual obligation, only the work remains. Nothing in our modern lives functions without an enormous amount of interdependency between all peoples, as ‘lockdowns’ showed so graphically. But we’re not seeing that *socially*. /9

It’s like now we have upstairs people who never see, speak to or even think about the downstairs people, living in the same house. They can brutalise them, and if they don’t like it, they import new ones, often from overseas at much cheaper rates. Slavery, not service. /10

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with working to provide a service, it’s the most noble thing. But to no longer recognise that socially as a fundamental interdependency, where the fate of upstairs and downstairs are profoundly linked, is new. /11

Like ‘the vulnerable’, under Covid. Lots of hot air about protecting them, protection which never eventuates. Delusional assumptions that the upstairs of society can somehow live free of the interdependencies. Covid brought in downstairs will eventually reach upstairs. /12

And vice versa. And I think it’s a mistake to think upstairs is just that hyper-rich elite we hear so much about, the top 1% or 0.1%. You won’t find many people who know much about how many of our essential services are provided. /13

Egged on by the new decoupled upstairs, those services are some of the most popular targets of social ridicule and complaint. The council workers all standing around while one of them does all the shovelling, etc. Or to go back to Covid, such a revelation in so many ways. /14

The main reason so many believe the pandemic is over is because the ‘upstairs’ told them it is. They don’t so much disrespect the public health work the ‘downstairs’ public health people have always done, as not even know it exists. /15

Decades of services decoupled from mutual social obligations created the impression that things like the good health of populations just happened by itself. Similarly, in lockdowns many of us suddenly realised that the people who did essential things like harvest our food? /16

They’re not even downstairs people. They don’t live in the same country, they’re imported cheap labour hire. Again, more a slavery model. Not only no obligation to them, in that upstairs/downstairs way, but complete invisibility of the work they do. /17

The tension of social relationship of these shows is so instructive to revisit. That sense of everybody being in it together, everybody having skin in the game. These old households were a model of wider society. A model now in tatters. /18 https://t.co/j5aeN4cdZL

And importantly, both the series I’ve used as examples here showed this model in decline. The destruction of those old status hierarchies, mostly via the two world wars. Our fatal error was to assume that destruction alone was the social progress we needed. /19

What we forget is that we needed to invent new status hierarchies, for newer conditions, and critically hierarchies with mutual interdependencies recognised and cultivated. Instead we invented ‘market economies’ stripped of any recognition of interdependency at all. /20

Just 8 billion separate consumers, operating in supposedly free markets. A fantasy, that is destroying all societies. /end