August 2024

A culture that isn’t grounded, that has no relationship to place, that understands the world as a series of ‘sights’ to be ‘experienced’, is always on borrowed time. Eventually it needs to come into land. Culture is not a game of musical chairs. Or maybe it is. /2

As we mindlessly and obsessively circumnavigate the globe, the number of chairs left for us to ‘land’ in post-travel is rapidly running out. We’re living a caucus race. All moving, never arriving anywhere. The important thing (apparently) is to just keep moving. /3 https://t.co/w8eTtH3Bmz

Stopping might make us confront what the point of it all is. We can’t have that. /end

If on the other hand those accusing others of activism are continuously involved in areas they don‘t work in, such as schooling and public health, then I think we can say they’re an activist. Some examples from this pandemic. /2

We’ve had quite a few vocal physicians continuously lecturing societies about what should happen in schools. Physicians don’t work in schools, and to be blunt their understanding of them comes exclusively from having attended one. /3

I’ve flown in planes many times. I’ve never once thought this qualifies me to lecture others on how to fly planes. They would rightly tell me to go away. I have worked in schools, and throughout this pandemic have noticed the glaringly missing voices in Covid-school debates. /4

Voices from INSIDE the bloody schools. Anybody who works in schools knows the infectious farce they are right now. Lives are being ruined. And yet to this day all we hear publicly is *still* the same activists who never set foot in a school. Arguing to do nothing. /5

Similarly with aged care. It’s a Covid slaughterhouse. And yet those tasked with running aged care seem to spend more time commenting on why we should do nothing elsewhere, such as in schools, than on doing anything to end the slaughter in aged care. That’s activism. /end

That’s also why people are genuinely puzzled when you tell them Covid isn’t over. They never were assessing that using science of any kind. They were assessing it according to what the people around them were doing. 2/3

Also why they say things like ‘you don’t have to wear a mask any more’. Again, no science there, it’s about permission and conformity. Societies are social. In every detail. They run using social principles. Not on information, ever. /end

If you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas. Attempting to use these platforms to fix real world issues destroys all chance of any solutions. It creates and maintains teams, who battle. It rigidifies society. It destroys action. SM is social heroin. We can’t stop. /end

Because sociality or connection are driven not by warm cuddly togetherness. They’re driven by rivalry. We become social to have an identity, as part of a group. A group that is then a rival to other groups. /2

I really don’t think this is difficult to see, we’ve all lived it. From school onwards, we spend our lives continuously negotiating membership of different social groupings, and being anxious about doing it. And yet we still describe sociality as an intrinsic good. /3

That’s the paradox of society. It’s more cohesive when we connect LESS. When our connections to others aren’t social, but rather practical. ‘Administrative’. That’s what ‘the public’ was, as an invention. Now completely confused with social groups. /4

The public is a construct created by public institutions. It’s what dreaded bureaucrats create by analysing the practical ways we coexist, as a population. In managing health, and water, and education, and roads. That’s what makes us cohesive. /5

Continuously maintaining practical ways populations live together. Focused *entirely* on ‘keeping the lights on’ practical things, that avoid social relationships. What populism does, our current system of government, is replace basic administration, with social life. /6

The public has now disappeared. Replaced by a proliferation of social groupings, each clamouring for supremacy, in rivalry with other social groupings. A process astronomically accelerated by social media platforms. Connection machines. Networked madness. /7

Allowing the ‘mobilisation’ of every human depravity, because the content of what all these groups rally around is irrelevant. Anything can be fuel for the imitative rivalry that fuels the whole process. /8

This rot has spread into organisations too, where the failure to do basic work is now attributed to failures in ‘organisational culture’. Leading to workshops and other activities in helping people to be nicer to each other. As if, again, we need more social activity. /9

But we don’t go to work to be social. Of course we do have social relationships while there, but they’re 100% irrelevant to the work. It’s entirely possible to not like the people you work with, and still do great work together. /10

The great mobilised victories in the world wars threw everybody in together, which means by definition many who didn’t like one another. What unified them was the WORK to be done. Not working on their social relationships. Why I say get rid of populist, electoral politics. /11

Replaced by a governance focused completely on the practical tasks societies need doing. Not routing any of it through popularity/sociality of any kind. Elections are poison to this job. They tap into the deepest social mechanisms of humanity, our imitative rivalry. /12

Added to democracy as a way to create greater connection of the public, to governance. But all it achieved was to transform governance, into social life. We won’t survive that. Every time it’s occurred in history, we got social collapse. Shut social media down. /end

The extremely fast and effective attempts to shut down all public health action for Covid should have led those rightly appalled by it to think about strategy. Because those who do it talk out both sides of their mouths. Hysteria on their part, about public health measures. /2

And then affected calm, rational authority when rapidly shutting down any counter-attempt to raise alarm. Telling everybody to ‘calm down’, mocking others as hysterical. They should know, it’s their business model. It’s why within minutes they will respond on SM. /3

To any perceived narrative that may cause alarm at the ‘do nothing’ public health we’re currently living. That has to be shut down at all costs. This is basic tabloid media strategy too. Create huge alarm, then offer soothing framings to shift action in the way desired. /4

It’s all there on the record. Certain individuals and groups deliberately targeted public health action as old as humanity, by creating hysteria around its possible impacts. This had quick effect, shutting that action down. They use this strategy all the time. /5

And appear in public with calm assurance, when it’s challenged, labelling others as mentally unhinged and hysterical. Same strategy. I often get asked what might turn all of this around. And often say - catastrophe. /6

Literally, physical catastrophe, as history shows, is all that creates lasting change. But catastrophising (the verb), using alarm, may also get us some way down the path of repair. It’s what the bad actors are already doing, every day, while affecting calm rationality. /7

In the case of Covid and climate change, you don’t even need to make stuff up. The outcomes are already catastrophic. So as I’ve argued here a few times, focus on those catastrophic outcomes. Particularly individual cases. That’s what tabloids do. /8

They know the individual is also the universal, that this is what resonates. Every time I post an example of somebody’s life being ruined by Covid, the minimisers come out in force. They know that’s what bites. They’ll accuse you of making it up. They fear it. /9

Politicians today are weak populists, any sense of a bad thing going viral makes them terrified. It’s how a tiny group of whining anti-lockdown/anti-vax people, egged on by activist groups on SM, got so much traction in our Covid response. Politicians now won’t touch Covid. /10

Too afraid of triggering more targeted hysteria, from the minimisers. So make them afraid of ‘hysteria’ over what Covid is doing to our society. Something that is actually real, unlike the libertarian fairy tales. Be tabloid. And proud. /end

‘Mixed ideologies’ shows it. The content of beliefs isn’t relevant, people are grabbing a mixture of ideas to form and sustain rival groups. Shut down social media. Much of this is fomented by Russia, because social media is a wide-open door to our societies, for it. 2/2

If you work in a larger organisation, a critical metric to understand the health of that organisation is its meetings. An organisation that is constantly meeting, in my experience, is failing. It means the actual work is secondary to the social relations in the workplace. /2 https://t.co/Rpa69enVW0

It means to get anything done at all, you’re having to negotiate a path through all of the social groupings in the organisation. The more social, the more meetings. The more gridlocked the organisation becomes. I changed career about 5 years ago. /3 https://t.co/gSX9wVpuDZ

Moving from a large organisation that literally did not much else except meet, all day every day. Nothing was getting done. I moved to an organisation where I’d rarely have more than a single meeting in a week. The change has been profound. /4 https://t.co/5rBPstDFo8

Things get done. And not just that, but the atmosphere of work is much more relaxed. Because the workplace is not transacting its work, through its social relations. As I post about for politics, we misunderstand sociality as warm togetherness. But sociality is violence. /5

Not because humans are violent, but because humans desire. And sociality is then the clashing of desires. You can see it literally - not analogously - in workplaces as well, and in clubs, families etc. The more social they become, the more impotent and violent they become. /6

Who’s been part of running a local sporting club, where local fiefdoms are set up and eventually it’s all-out war between competing rivals? And little material work actually gets done, because the passion and attention is on the rivalries? /7

The same basic social behaviours recur at every scale of society, in all groups. Rivalries between competing groups/teams, battling for status. (I prefer ‘teams’ to ‘groups’, because it captures the intrinsic rivalry of groups.) /8

And to go back to meetings, actual action grinds to a halt. Replaced by intensifying toxicity of clashes between rival groups. When you ‘connect’ people, you are literally tying them in knots, in terms of action they can then achieve. Sociality is NEVER a tool for action. /9

Successful companies and successful societies ruthlessly separate social relations from work to be achieved. It also makes them far more peaceful and happy places. But what are we doing instead, everywhere? /10

We’re hyper-socialising everything. Through social media platforms. Everywhere from our most intimate personal lives, through workplaces and into politics. All major companies have people working ‘the socials’ now. As do all politicians. /11

In other words, we’re tying ourselves in knots, bogging down any action in endless team sport rivalry. And at the same time then continuously increasing the level of violence in our societies, at every level. Through these same team sports rivalries. /12

Unless we separate being social from doing work, our societies will implode and explode. Which they are, right now. Unfortunately we never learn this from history, when these implosions and explosions happen we get a grace period of apparent new freedom. /13

It clears the battlefield just long enough for us to forget what caused the catastrophes. And to start up the same social rivalries all over again. Social media is a new lethal weapon though in these wars. Insinuating itself into every single pore of our societies. /end

What have Western countries been doing for the past two decades to provide these vital technologies for transition to Net Zero? Absolutely fucking nothing, with only tiny exceptions. China on the other hand has been going gangbusters at it. /2

Driving prices down, the sole reason we’ve now lived through a massive decline in energy production prices, globally. They’ve done the world an enormous service, and still are, now offering astonishingly cheap, quality EVs and solar hardware. At scale. /3

And what’s our response? This is ‘anti-competitive behaviour’. Gave me a fucking break, where’s the competition here? We’re not doing ANYTHING. You won’t see a clearer case of how politicians are there purely to bolster the interests of big donors from fossil fuels and ICEs. /4

Now the European and American people will have massive tariffs placed on these Chinese goods, driving up costs at a time we need exponential increases in uptake. Thankfully for now Australia is benefiting from Chinese foresight and investment. /5

But it would only take an injection of Yellow Peril politics, like AUKUS, to fuck all this up for us as well. China is an industrial revolution, and has been for decades. A wonder of our age. Obscured from our view by old imperial racist claptrap. /6

Our lazy and entitled, fossil fuel-driven cultures do nothing except recreational travel. Bring on Asia, with its genius and work ethic. It’s the least destructive disruption that can save the world right now. /end

Not going to re-hash the basic mechanisms again here (have done a lot of threads on that). But the most difficult point I think for people to grasp is that societies simply don’t gradually improve anything. Only massive disruption brings significant change. /2

Because without that the mechanisms of social status we all live by are simply too strong. It’s far too easy to blame some baddies, in goodies and baddies narratives. ‘Capitalism’, ‘MSM’, ‘Zionists’, ‘Big Corporations’. etc. etc. We love these cartoon characters. /3

Because they feed our greatest passion. The team sports of group rivalry, fed by our deepest desire to belong to a group, creating an identity for ourselves. The cartoon baddies are infinite fuel for these group rivalries. So nebulous as to be wells that never run dry. /4

But at the end of the day, it’s always us. All of us. Playing the same social games. Imitating each other, trying to achieve status for ourselves and our chosen groups. It’s so entrenched in our being. We return every day, salivating, to the team sports. /5

Convinced that this next electoral victory will be the one that finally makes the difference. Or that this or that graph will finally defeat the Covid or climate deniers. And ultimately (what it’s all about) to bring victory to our group, and affirmation for our identity. /6

A wise old professor friend once told me he despised conferences, because of the team sports of academic life. He said you should always ‘spit in their soup’, when addressing a conference. Unsurprisingly they stopped inviting him. /7

We miss the social dynamics by calling them cuddly warm names, like ‘networking’ and ‘connection’. Social connection brings nothing but violence. Because sociality is violence. The clash of desires, of competing groups. We refuse to see it. /8

I shed hundreds of followers when pointing out that social media is intrinsically wreaking violence upon societies. That the medium is the message, and that using it to try to bring about change only entrenches the destruction even further. I spat in social media’s soup. /9

I honestly don’t care. Turning these platforms off would be both the fastest and easiest way to resolve pretty much every problem we’re currently facing. To force all of us to return to our institutional sources of expertise, to let them run things again. /10

Connecting the entire global population is utter madness. It sounds great in that warm and cuddly unthinking emotive way. It’s a catastrophe for societies. Connection is violence. Societies are defined intrinsically by the way they ration connection. /11

The way they choose which beliefs and desires to regulate. Regulation is the only human act that ever brings freedom. Not connection, which only brings violence. /end

I’m the only person masking at my work, and have been that only person for a couple of years now. This winter for the first time multiple people have said to me ‘you know I think that mask of yours might be a good idea.’ People are SO sick. And so *repeatedly* sick. /2

They know something isn’t right. The idea that we all missed out on a good healthy annual dose of pneumonia and whooping cough and scabies and MCAS in 2020-21 is too ridiculous to even say. But it’s the hypothesis de jour. /3

We’re infecting EVERYBODY. Over and over. The total absence of risk management in doing that is…there are no words. It’s like a dystopian science fiction movie. If as some suspect we’re seriously compromising the health of all those infected, there’s no coming back. /4

We’re already at dysfunctional. People return to work, barely capable of functioning, because there’s no more sick leave and nobody else to do essential work. And then they’re gone again, because they or friends and family just collapse. /5

Carrying diseases most of us have never heard of, or which pre-Covid only the old had in any great numbers. I’ve spotted people half-asleep at their desks, out of exhaustion. We’ve arrived at the chronic damage experts not motivated by self promotion warned us about. /6

And we arrived there scarily fast. Not the 8-10 years of HIV to AIDS or the several decades of EBV to MS. We arrived here in a couple of years. And there’s no indication whatsoever of any accumulating ‘hybrid immunity’. And no slowing of variant evolution. /7

The time to call BS on the whole charade is now. Reality is doing it for us. /end

And no, this isn’t to applaud everything happening in Russia and China right now. What’s happening there is the result of a collision. Between those much more ancient, restriction-based cultures, and catastrophes they collided with. /2

The CCP and Putin both derive from earlier revolutions. Revolutions that were freedom movements. Freedom movements that drew heavily from Western ideas. But they had none of the Western infrastructure to go with the ideas. They got the software, without any of the hardware. /3

Which created the catastrophes of both of those revolutions. Mass death, starvation, killings, oppressions. That’s what rampant populism - democratic software without democratic hardware - always produces. All societies need to be controlled. /4

Just as all infections need to be controlled. It’s adolescent fantasy that the world functions in any way with people having the ‘freedom’ to say and do whatever they like. Humans have ALWAYS regulated societies. The societies that didn’t haven’t survived. /5

If you don’t regulate and control social behaviour, you create a sociopathic killing machine. Sociality is violence. I think there’s a misunderstanding of the difference between collective action, and sociality. They’re absolutely not the same thing. /6

The idea of a ‘public’ is collective action. Where public institutions do things like enact laws to ensure people are fed, their sewage is processed, they have clean water and healthy food, people get an education, etc. That’s collective action. Not sociality. /7

It’s done by officials and legislators, and public servants out there clearing sewer lines and doing food inspections. Vaccinating and controlling infections. Sociality is the imitative rivalry of social groups, competing for status and identity. A completely distinct thing. /8

Collective action is practical keeping the lights on stuff. Sociality is…socialising. Duh. Populism is the confusion and conflation of the two. Where suddenly we try to use socialising, to keep the lights on. Where all practical action is routed through social status games. /9

Which, as we see right now, leads to none of the practical things being done, and everything being used as fuel for the status games. Social media is the technology that is driving sociality into every pore of our societies. We won’t survive that. /10

It means nothing is being done, while the levels of violence and anger are magnified many times over. Because sociality is always violence. Competing desires, the battle for identity and status. For belonging. /11

When we lecture Russia and China in our clueless superiority, about their supposed determination to oppress people and be ‘authoritarian’, we’re selling our own dysfunctional teenage culture as an alternative. They’ve been down that path. They’re ancient cultures. /12

Full of a deep understanding of the need to control and regulate social behaviour. We’re so ignorant even of our own history, where we did *exactly the same thing*, for nearly the entirety of recorded history. Our modern freedom fantasies are only decades-old. /13

And those fantasies are in terminal decline. Reality isn’t fooled, democracy as we now conceive it, as anything goes, is failing everywhere. In an accelerated fashion, everywhere social media is allowed to operate. /14 https://t.co/kOOUco4meP

Everywhere committing the suicide of trying to run a society, with sociality. Rather than with the calm, simple, practical collective activities of keeping the lights on. The stuff boring bureaucrats and people in high-vis clothing do. /15

Sociality is controlled through hierarchies of status. If you don’t provide those, with monarchies of some kind and their associated cascading hierarchies of aristocracies, humans will just reinvent them in more toxic forms. You’ll get Andrew Tate instead of Charles III. /16

Constitutional monarchies are the most sophisticated attempt yet to try to manage these two competing, critical human processes. Sociality/status, and collective ‘keeping the lights on’ activity. Republics dream they can focus only on one of these. /17

In Rome that led to the centuries of nothing but blood and war, under the Republics. Only soothed by the Pax Romana of the restoration of emperors. In republican modern America, we have a Presidential system far more monarchical than any surviving monarchy. /18

Societies have ancient tectonic plates, just as continents do. Deep patterns of recurring behaviours and controls on those behaviours. In our adolescent culture stripped of all time, of all custom and tradition, we can’t see it now. We’re focused on ‘living our best lives’. /19

Focused only on the present. Maximising ‘fun’. Like an eternal teenage party. ‘Authoritarianism’ is coming for us. All societies that don’t control social behaviour, that are populist, end up authoritarian. To save themselves. To try to restore order. /20

It doesn’t have to be that way. But it will be that way, because sociality/populism is Pandora opening her box. Nothing stops it, except catastrophe. Authoritarianism is always the last gasp attempt to save us. /end

Societies are fracturing because social media is connecting everybody, unmediated by any knowledge or social rules about good and bad beliefs. It’s all just team sports. Transforming all of society, in every detail, into high school status rivalries between groups. /end

Who have learned through centuries of bitter experience what happens when you don’t control social behaviour. When we use the word control, because we live in a teenage culture shorn of all past of future, we assume TOTAL control. Restriction. /2

Like being grounded. It’s how teenagers see any sort of restriction. But we control things, including peoples’ behaviours, to create *freedoms*. To restrict anti-social outcomes. We do the same with infections. Or used to. /3

We controlled infections, so that our lives weren’t full of sickness and death. But our 50-year old libertarian cultures, really just a flattering term for high school adolescent life, are one-dimensional. /4

Seeing all regulation and restriction and control as some sort of ‘authoritarian’ gulag. These aren’t analogies, societies are social. This is the direct result of high school culture taking over adult life, in history. /5

Removing the old institution-based adult life, where the institutions embodied centuries of brutal truths accumulated in history, to guide present-day life, and also did future-based planning. Now all mostly gone, in favour of an eternal present of lifestyle living. /6

Adolescent life. Whole societies now on a permanent gap year, from reality. How dare we lecture ancient cultures about having strong social rules, with our pathetic, impotent teenage culture that even allows entire populations to be smashed by a pandemic? /7

That would rather the whole civilisation be incinerated by human pollution, than interrupt its precious recreational travel? You won’t get any purchase with this. Teenagers will put their hands in their ears and say ‘blah blah’. That’s our whole culture now. /end

None of the -isms are real. They’re just banners a particular group or team marches under, in the exact same social process of imitative rivalry. Social status games. If you don’t believe that, explain where these -isms are plugged in? Where the USB port is, in society? /end

I wrote to the Health Care Complaints Commission about the incident, because there were no infection control procedures in place in the hospital, for a very high risk patient. They flick-passed it to NSW Health. But more specifically, to the LHD. /2

For a 'local resolution process'. This was an immediate loss from my point of view, because it was obvious the commission felt there were no systemic issues in play. So I waited to hear from the LHD. /3

They finally rang today, sounded like some poor registrar from the local hospital. They sounded very apprehensive, probably expecting a bollocking. /4

I think all action and change is led in organisations and societies, it's rarely the front-line people who are responsible. It doesn't absolve them entirely, 'I was only following orders' was thoroughly tested in the 20th century and found to be badly wanting. /5

But we had a civilised chat. My beef isn't (mostly) with them. It's with the NSW Government and National Cabinet, who lead our Covid response. The explanantion for why my mother caught Covid, from the LHD? /6

They expect a certain amount of hospital-acquired infection to occur, due to the 'millions' (quote) of airborne viruses in circulation in the community. So my mother's infection was apparently within the margins of error of expected hospital-acquired infection. /7

I wasn't going to argue this nonsense, the poor guy had a literal hospital pass here. But she didn't catch cold, she caught the 3rd leading cause of death in Australia. There were no infection control procedures in place. /8

So the upshot is, nobody gave a shit about her catching Covid, so she caught Covid. And that not giving a shit came from the very top of the tree, National Cabinet. That's the national policy. They also say 'protect the vulnerable'. I think they mean marginal seats. /end

You see this all through Covid. This space and others flooded daily with scientific data and concepts, to explain the pandemic. But all pandemics are social phenomena. Because humans are the hosts, and how they behave determines how a pathogen spreads. /2

We get all of this powerful and incontrovertible data, up against a mono-dimensional complaint that ‘we’ aren’t doing anything about it. There’s no flesh on that ‘we’. It’s just uttered, as if ‘we’ is something that exists and thinks and acts. /3

Michel Serres in the early 1980s dared to ask this exact question. ‘What does “we” mean?’ It’s thrown about with abandon, by politicians, activists, ordinary people here, etc. For a while I’ve shifted my own Tweets away from the science of Covid and climate, to this ‘we’. /4

Climate change and Covid won’t go away without an understanding of what ‘we’ is. None of our collective problems can be solved without that shift in thinking. It’s tedious to just tally up daily ‘facts’ and then moan about how stupid ‘we’ are for doing nothing about them. /5

Like one of my favourites, talk about ‘the people’. By politicians and social media fans. As if everybody jostling on social media every day for example is ‘the people’ at work. My Tweets for a while have tried to show that this concept is a load of bollocks. /6

The idea that social media for example is a daily percolation of ‘the people’ interacting completely ignores what it actually is. It’s thousands of groups or teams, battling for status, led by influencers. It’s imitative rivalry, foundational human behaviour in history. /7

It’s the battle for our individual identities and sense of belonging, which we prosecute through the membership, explicit or implicit, of teams in battle. ‘The people’ looks like the picture on the right. Not the picture on the left. /8 https://t.co/RwjqGt6FGb

Also why I argued that to tackle Covid for example, we need to address the lumpy, networked nature of our social relations. Covid is bred in a small number of key hubs, and dispersed through the networks linked to these hubs. Which makes it a MUCH easier foe to defeat. /9

Instead though the narratives are *still* ‘here are the daily facts’, and ‘why aren’t WE doing anything about them?’ There is no we. There is no ‘the people’. Societies are lumpy networks, driven by a handful of key hubs. Even the toxic stuff on these platforms is the same. /10

Remember this? How most anti-vax activity is driven by a tiny handful of people? Those are the ‘hubs’ for anti-vax. An entirely manageable problem, when the social structure is actually analysed, rather than a vague hand-waving ‘we’. /11 https://t.co/zmoKnAwrde https://t.co/2PZbiiWcTZ

Similarly I’m certain we could defeat Covid just by targeting the handful of hubs where it breeds. Dominantly schools. And there’s fantastic work happening there. Though a little too skewed to just providing ‘information’ to these schools, and hoping for the best. /12

That’s another focus for me. Societies don’t run on information. Their lumpy social networks are status networks. That’s what the team sports is about. You have to target the status mechanisms, to get traction. Engage school principals, for example, critical network points. /13

In a nutshell, societies are always 100% social. All the other ways we have of describing them, the various -isms and modern-day econobabble, are just names for teams in the team sports of group imitative rivalry. Societies are not any of those things. /14

They’re not economies. They’re not capitalism or socialism or fascism at work. They’re just people. Acting in groups, to create and protect identities. Groups that clash with other groups, trying to do the same thing. Every ‘culture’ in every country, is only this. /end

Society is now a (leaking) toilet. Via this fantasy of self-generating social order, by letting ‘the people’ interact without restriction. Really a trick to strip away ancient social structures, and replace it with dominance by people who promote these ideas. /end

Fraught because it’s like ivermectin, another miracle cure drug often trotted out by the ‘natural’ healing types. And then of course Linus Pauling’s long campaign in favour of it. But you know what. Fuck me if it didn’t work, for me. /2

Immediate symptomatic relief. Big reductions in coughing and wheezing. It was a lifeline at that time, pertussis of course being hell for sufferers. I’ve since found it to be reliably useful to ease wheezing for cold air and exercise induced mild asthma too. /3

I’m absolutely aware this may be just something that works for some people, some of the time. And that there is actual research on this topic, with mixed results. But curious for any insight or experiences from others? /end

In a representative democracy, the role of the elected is to be a community liaison point. The actual running of a nation is carried out by its officials. Thousands of them, with specific expertise. Populism is the collapse of this distinction. /2

When the elected (delusionally) believe they actually ‘run the country’. They usually have no idea how to run anything, there are no qualifications required for election. And that’s fine, their role is to represent the community, in governance. Not to run anything. /3

But under populism the elected wage war on the officials, who do the actual running of a nation, leading to social collapse. There’s not a more serious accusation under populism than somebody being ‘unelected’. That’s when societies collapse. /4

To go back to Year Zero, 1945. If you read the article, you’ll see a description of the process I Tweet about a bit. The total reconstruction of societies, after the catastrophe of two world wars. Sweeping away social status hierarchies, making space for fundamental change. /5

We lived off the fat of that massive reconstruction effort for decades. The institutions we set up to do it ran our societies to levels of health and wealth unprecedented in all human history. Then when life got that good, populism came back. /6

Social status hierarchies reasserted themselves. Through attacks on these institutions, called ‘bureaucracies’. ‘Red tape’. Everybody wins elections now attacking our core operating systems. The apparently progressive 1960s were an all-out assault on institutional life. /7

It’s the common thread to the ‘Left’ and the ‘Right’. We call it anti-trust in economics, but it’s a society-wide anti-trust movement. Smash the institutions, don’t trust them. Only the elected shall rule. Popularity will be our currency, what’s ‘trending’. /8

So as you wake up to another day of existential threats being completely ignored by the popularly elected, I think it helps to remember they never ran anything, anyway. It’s pointless waiting for them to do it now. They have no idea where to even start. /9

They’ll create fake pseudo-problems that are really just manageable popularity bombs, to create an illusion of action and change. But they don’t have a clue how to fix anything. Unfortunately societies only make fundamental changes when they’re at the brink of extinction. /10

At Year Zeros. Like 1945. Tens of millions died before we got to that point, it needed that amount of destruction to existing status hierarchies to make a space for actual change. The default state of fighting for status is evenly distributed, everywhere. /11

Doesn’t matter what team you are, whether Left or Right or whatever else, if you’re in the team sports, you’re in the social status games. None of that will change the world. No amount of getting things to ‘trend’ will. Trending is just victory for a given team. /12

Soon forgotten and overwhelmed by other victories. As the sad state of much South American governance shows, we’re all heading towards societies just run by drug gangs. ‘Market’ economies and ‘social connection’ driven societies inevitably lead to that. /13

The total victory of social status games, as a form of governance. Teams become violent gangs. Libertarianism and its freedom schtick is just one more gang, jostling for total dominance. Sociality can’t run societies. Socialising is not about running anything. /14

It’s about status and identity, not togetherness or action. As we all spend our days on platforms devoted to reinforcing this basic social process, we accelerate the progression to drug gang societies. Where the strongest and most brutal groups eventually triumph. /15

As Burke saw centuries ago, institutions are all that keep societies running. You can’t elect institutions, elections will destroy them, and are destroying them. Popularity solves no practical problems, except the status of the players. /16

I wish it wasn’t true, but only another Year Zero can save us. I’ve suggested the Chinese industrial juggernaut may be the most peaceful option there, and still believe that. Give up thinking the elected will fix any thing. It was never their job, and they have no clue. /end

Similarly while public health measures were in place earlier in the pandemic, some workplaces (such as mine) ran ‘resilience’ workshops, to make sure all of our ‘mental health’ was OK. I actually said to the HR person who invited me to go, ‘are you kidding?’ /2

That in a workplace like most others, where people rush out the doors on a Friday afternoon with big smiles because a week of drudgery and routine and abuse from the public is over, now that routine had been interrupted we were struggling? /3

I’ve never seen happier people than those being disrupted by the pandemic. Where their bullshit jobs suddenly let them do things like work from home. Where ‘work/life balance’ suddenly wasn’t just somebody’s lip service KPI. /4

Absolutely some peoples’ experience wasn’t that, they lost income and even businesses. But it’s not them being offered EAPs and mental resilience training. To this day I’m certain others in my workplace think i have a mental health problem, because I still mask. /5

I’ve flipped that narrative back on them. I tell them all the time that I wear a mask because I don’t have the mental health problem of thinking being sick all the time is good for me. That this is what resilience means, looking after yourself. /6

All of this gaslighting is just another example of something I Tweet about a lot, the renaming of some basic social processes. It’s more subtle ways of enforcing social conformity. Societies don’t run on information. They run on people doing what everybody else is doing. /7

When I see senior advisers to government smirk and mock those who still try to prevent catching a lethal virus, I see the schoolyard bullies we all remember from school, getting aroused by their brutalisation of others. They were forced into the background until late-2021. /8

By the emergency of Covid. But they weren’t going to let the social status hierarchies stay disrupted like that for long. Their ‘let it rip’ is truly the most stupid thing humans have ever done, at any time. And that’s a strong field. /9

They got away with it because society and even our personal lives are now transacted through social media platforms, that entrench that old bullying school culture into every facet of life. It was easy for them to get ‘go out and get infected’ to trend. /10

To get people to say ridiculous things like ‘we need to learn to live with a pandemic’, without even pausing to ponder at the stupidity of what was coming out of their mouths. Social conformity is not a knowledge-based activity. It’s a status-based activity. /11

The bullies knew that by pretending Covid was all now our ‘personal responsibility’, the basic dynamics of social life would destroy public health. Societies were transformed into competing status-seeking gangs. Public health always was a tool to disrupt conformity. /12

To ensure things that are unpopular but necessary, are done. As in WHS practice, we’ve known forever that leaving it to personal responsibility (i.e the ‘market’) will always just mean the bullies ruling everybody, in their gangs. /13

So now, as I always say, we’re still at school. Not an analogy. But in this school nobody is punishing bullies, that small handful of sociopaths. There are no staff, no detentions or rules. The bullies crow about this being a victory for the ‘elected’. /14

Betraying the popularity culture that was always their route to power in school. Where they brutalised the knowledge-based culture of the rest of the school. Social media is what entrenches this model. It needs to be switched off. /end

Image credit: https://t.co/LamidPA9Yf

Cook ordered that it be served only to the officers. The other men saw that this was a high-status meal, and demanded it for themselves. 2/3

You can see not only how all groups and societies work in that story. But also how all problems can be solved. You have to target status. Not information. Not class or capitalism or any of those other team sports topics. Status. /end

We need ‘competition’ to be the problem, because then we can deny any role for planning or leadership. For the State. That’s what ‘the Economy’ always was, a Trojan Horse to remove the State. It’s not a physical thing. It’s a political construct. Run by an ‘invisible hand’. /2

It’s not invisible though. The State created the economy and is the only way its fiction can survive. Corporations Law brings business into being. And it and a whole raft of other regulations maintain our trade and other economic activity. /3

Societies will not run themselves like some objective machine, provided you just have enough competition. That always was a *political* idea, not an economic one. The politics of the anti-State groups. A particularly US obsession. /4

‘The economy’ always was a way to do politics, while pretending to not be doing politics. A way to pretend you were just following the objective laws of economics, while you were actually dismantling public infrastructure. /5

And as I’ve Tweeted about before, you can see this quite clearly in the way that ‘the economy’ allows no significant political change to occur. Every meaningful policy to address social problems will be deemed unaffordable, and damaging to ‘the economy’. That’s politics. /6

All of this also acts completely counter to how societies actually function. Humans create status hierarchies. Those hierarchies create scale. That scale also is a much more efficient way to produce everyday goods and services. Because competition is just battles for status. /7

If you calm those battles by establishing a hierarchy, things flow much more easily. No economic mumbo jumbo about efficient or inefficient markets explains anything. Societies are SOCIAL. They don’t run themselves. They’re LED. Always. By hierarchies of social status. /end

All life lives in ecosystems, in niches. The building and maintaining of those niches in interaction with other living things sustains life, making it possible. A culture that respects no place in that way, that thinks only of continuous movement, breeds pathogenic life. /2

At home we trash our own ecosystems, turning them into housing developments and vast acreages of mono-cultural farms. Abroad we transform all locations into theme parks for our enjoyment, forcing locals to become servants in maintaining their own homes as an image. /3

An image of how we want that place to be, for our enjoyment. A theme park, like a Disneyland ‘world’. The locals lose their own homes, and their cultures become FIFO cultures totally dependent on the tourist dollar to survive. It’s a type of ecological rape. /4

All of this is traced back to our own culture, remnant imperial cultures of the conquest and accumulation of territory. For no other purpose than to accumulate it. We don’t even see our travel obsession as a simple continuation of our imperial past. But it’s what it is. /5

The childish philosophy underlying this is that we need to visit these places to ‘experience’ them. As with human relationships, we have no right to experience them, just as we have no right to shag every person who walks past us. A relationship is a commitment, to place. /6

Not a FIFO, Tinder-style enjoyment. We’re literally fucking the world, and we have our ‘bucket lists’ of places to fuck over. When i was a kid you got enjoyment looking at pictures of far flung lands. Them being far away added to their mystique. /7

We kept a healthy distance from them, just as we do in human relationships. We don’t stalk every person that interests us. We leave them alone. We can read about and see pictures and videos of exotic places. Being there actually gives us LESS connection. /8

We’re in tourist zones. Theme parks. I’ve been to Paris, but I felt a much deeper connection to it reading French novelists than I did by being a tourist there. I know a lot about famous thinkers and artists and other historical figures, by reading about them. /9

Not by sitting outside their homes ‘experiencing’ them. (Stalking them.) Which is all we do for places, when we travel. Stalk those places. Place is a relationship. Not a seeing or an experiencing. /10

‘Living with’ a pandemic is an oxymoron. From a moronic culture of dispossession and purpose-less hypermobility. When you destroy places, you liberate pathogens. Whether microbes or tourists. Living things that act outside any ecological or other boundaries. /end

About 100,000 people died of cholera in England, in the 19th century, pre-sewers. About two-and-a-half times that number have died of Covid there, in under 5 years. Imagine the ventilation half a billion pounds could buy. /end

We need much, much less connection. Connection requires the hard, complex work of negotiation of relationship. Not instant ‘follows’ and likes’. We’re obsessed with connection because our cultures are stalled at the adolescent stage of human development. /2

Friendship and connection are a stage of development teenagers go through, where they’re beginning to build a wider network outside their families, in which to embed their identities. It’s a temporary phase. We have it as an entire culture. /3

You’re supposed to move through that phase, towards self-determination, love and ultimately realisation of your individual self. Social media has trapped entire cultures inside that adolescent phase. /4

The deep anthropology of the violence of social relations has been extensively outlined by thinkers like Rene Girard. Our baseline assumption, that connection is an intrinsic good, is lethally wrong. /5

Teenagers know that the constant negotiation of friendship groups and status within those groups is violent, to their emotions and sometimes even physically. That’s the business model of these platforms, now used by all ages. The team sports of groups competing for status. /6

Groups which individuals use to help define their identity. As teenagers do, growing up. Except there is no up now. The process doesn’t end. We no longer progress to the calm doing of adult work, decoupled from status games, group rivalries. /7

Every single problem our societies face is now re-routed through one or more of these status games, which we ridiculously label as ‘democracy’ in action. It’s the schoolyard in action. /end

Interestingly the engineering leviathan of the Victorians had its origins in the Industrial Revolution that preceded Victorian engineering. That revolution was mostly about making industrialists rich. That’s much more like us today. But they didn’t win. /2

To some extent catastrophe forced a greater focus on public engineering, like cholera and the sewage systems and water supply projects. But it was more than that. Public change was being driven by status. That’s something we don’t understand now. /3

The engineers and scientists of the Victorian era were public celebrities, with enormous status. There were still echoes of the Enlightenment in the culture, the power and status of knowledge. Hitched to a monarchy that revelled in the glory of huge engineering works. /4 https://t.co/7Dxdss76z5

Societies run on social status. Connect that mechanism to public works, and you get astronomically rapid social development. Victorian England really was breathtaking in the scope of its ambition and achievement. /5 https://t.co/iWQEyxtAge

Contrast with today, where we have an even more vast engineering infrastructure and staggering expertise and experience. But where are the public works? They happen, here and there, mostly in what we now call ‘authoritarian’ countries. /6

And where remnant pubic institutions in the West still get input into social direction. Plus of course vanity infrastructure projects sponsored by populist politicians, brilliantly satirised by Utopia. But in general, ‘the market’ now rules. /7 https://t.co/ULaRxfVQRe

Meaning a nebulous idea of just letting everybody do whatever they like, and somehow the best outcomes will spontaneously emerge. Except of course they don’t. Because the theory is rubbish. Humans never, ever spontaneously organise in that dispersed way. /8

Not in a unified way. As in today’s world, you can build vast industrial empires producing existentially useless products, with no real public benefit. (Like social media.) Without status wedded to public utility, you get trophy wank projects. And naked profiteering. /9

The market is a fiction that produces nothing. It’s an ideology designed to specifically remove one centralised status hierarchy, the State, and replace it with the architects of the great fiction. If you don’t provide hierarchy, humans will invent it themselves. /10

To the fiction of the economy and its market, Victorian public works can only look like ‘picking winners’. Productivity commissions and conservative politics love that one. Like optimum public outcomes will happen by accident, through the magic market. /11

It’s an offensive, laughable fantasy. Billionaires will build rocket ships and bunkers on remote islands, not fresh air and water infrastructure. It is possible to marry social status to public utility. The Victorians did it. Many Asian countries are doing it now as well. /12

Meanwhile in most Western countries we’re stuck with a dreary ideology of individual freedom-driven social change. What I call a culture of drug gangs, which is the end result, when the battle between disconnected social tribes plays out. /13

We’re end-of-empire cultures. Drunk on decades of nothing but fun lifestyle living. Can’t build anything, couldn’t decide what to build even if we could. /end

This was a clear violation of personal space, for artistic effect. If you stood outside somebody’s home and peered through their windows, you’d be rightly arrested. But today, you don’t need to. They livestream their lives continuously, for you. /2 https://t.co/Jf3CHXSSCo

A 2024 Rear Window would have the apartment owners decorating their flats with the latest fashions, while doing make up and striking poses for Stewart’s camera. While monetising the views, with followers signing up for ongoing voyeurism. /3 https://t.co/FLqw3t3pms

This is a huge part of the personal attraction of SM, what makes it addictive. It normalises and legitimises voyeurism. An obsessive interest in others’ lives. But voyeurism isn’t the right concept I don’t think. Because what drives that addiction is social. /4 https://t.co/E48JLsl4ge

Not individual psychology. Our interest in what others do is a process of imitative comparison, to test our status in a group. We all want to belong, to fit in. To have a recognised identity. To know how our lives fit with others. We queue to have Jimmy photograph us. /5 https://t.co/yM6BL8FvX8

Because that gives us permission to look at his photos of everybody else as well. In a continuous and escalating game of social comparison. These days we take the photos ourselves, and distribute them to all the other apartments in the building. /6

All while affecting outrage at violations of our privacy elsewhere. A suspected murder viewed in the pics today would start a GoFundMe campaign. What gets attention and hopefully status is our alleged victim status. How we’ve been apparently wronged, by the collective. /7

Collective life is just a stage now, on which we perform our grievances. Covid quarantine brought every imaginable grievance out of the woodwork, delighted at the public visibility. Without an articulated and maintained public space, we use emergencies to create them. /8

Flooding every catastrophe with our team’s specific grievance, wallowing in the visibility. It’s why many mass shootings happen in societies that refuse the idea of a public, like the US. People want to be seen. /9

It’s why day after day here people wail into the void about why ‘we’ aren’t doing anything to fix the world’s problems. Nobody ever says who we is. Social media is the world you get when everything is social. Paradoxically at a time when politics is all individual. /10

But that was always a lie, a banner a particular team (the libertarians) march under, to promote their own (hyper social) group. We’re all living in Jimmy Stewart’s apartment block now. Spying on each other every day. Adjusting ourselves to what’s trending. /end

Obviously public health is dead right now, as the entire globe celebrates a continuous orgy of infection, with public health privatised and loaded onto individual immune systems. Local government is a remnant artefact of a time we did the opposite. /2

Its relative invisibility today, and the utter contempt most have for it, are a clear window into a broken governance system. Where governance literally meets the people, every day, with their specific needs, is the least visible layer of all governance. /3

State and federal governments, in our federalist system, dominate our attention. Because the faux team sports human dramas there are the bullshit our high school selves can never get enough of. Like the obsession with elections right now. Getting our team over the line! /4

Only to then spend the next 3-5 years moaning because our team barely fixed a thing. Not once stopping to think it’s because that whole system isn’t designed to fix anything. It’s designed for team sports. /5

When 19th century societies faced massive public health problems, as we do again now, they realised their State and federal governments had no idea how to fix any of them. So they invented local government. To actually do things. It’s still doing them. /6

Not because the local is the most important thing, none of that binary nonsense. Because the whole distinction between local and global has always been fake. An affectation. The problems local government fixes are global problems. The spread of disease, clean water. Sewage. /7

Leave those jobs undone and the problems don’t stay ‘local’. Infectious disease knows no boundaries. Local government is where universal/global jobs are actually done. State/federal government is just theatre. /8

Team sports. Mostly a waste of everybody’s time. State and federal politicians see local government as largely yokels. Which the elected often are, if you focus only on the elected layer of all three levels of government. /9

But the 19th century experiment of targeting governance at that exact point where local and global are indistinguishable is a forgotten experiment. I can tell you right now that if clean air had ever been part of this experiment, there’d have been no ‘living with’ Covid. /10

A political slogan from State and federal populist politicians. If actual clean air infrastructure and procedure had been embedded in local government, it would never have allowed this toxic fantasy to exist. /11

Don’t think of local government through the lens of elections and ‘the people’. All that idealistic claptrap. Local government is the ONLY level of government that focuses on fixing actual material problems, inside peoples’ lives. /12

Because State and federal governments invented it, to do that, fully aware they had no clue how and no power to do it themselves. Somebody needed to be in the actual communities, governing this practical work. Ditch the daily soap opera of State and federal team sports. /13

We need to refocus our governance back on solving the practical problems of our lives, which dissolve the distinctions between local and global at the same time. All practical government ends up local, but that local is also global, at the same time. /14

Right now this most critical layer of governance is under assault from toxic global movements on social media. Some local councils are staring into the abyss of governance by Facebook groups. We will not survive social media. /end

Or they’re middling researchers not making many inroads, who realised SM would allow them to use a bit of credential-cache to become celebrities with an unknowing public. /end

Our social models determine our likely success. I’ve Tweeted about how this is crippling our Covid response too. Minimisers paint Covid as a problem for all people, everywhere. This makes it seem impossible to do anything about, which is the strategic intent. To stop action. /2

I see it now with the best-intentioned people advocating measures such as masking and ventilation. Masking and ventilation are hugely important. But to adopt the model of needing to mask everywhere, and ventilate everywhere, is to lose. Minimisers want us to do that. /3

They want the task to seem impossibly enormous. That’s their strategy. We’re still focusing on means instead of ends, and using the wrong social models for the means. Defeating Covid requires a very specific, targeted strike. Not disruptive to most people. /4

Covid infections follow a hub-network structure. Infections breed and multiply in the hubs, and spread into the community using community networks, looking to form new hubs. The critical thing is to recognise that there *aren’t many hubs*. Relative to the entire society. /4

Target the hubs, and it will slow the spread of infections dramatically. We were already doing this when contact tracing and isolating. But we know the main hubs are very likely to be places like schools, even without contact tracing. You only need to slow infections. /5

Not stop them. Get that Rt < 1, and exponential decay will do the rest. CONTROL the disease, like we control other infectious disease. With targeted, strategic action. Not mass viral movements for masking or ventilation. Let’s go back to the idea of disease control. /6

Who could argue against disease control? Particularly when you point out we’ve been doing it for years, for multiple dangerous pathogens, and most people didn’t even know. That’s how minimally disruptive control can be. If you recognise the hub-network structure of spread. /7

Which is also the hub-network structure of society. Not as coincidence or analogy, humans spread the disease. The hub-network structure of spread *is* the hub-network structure of society. Viruses don’t go viral. That structure is the social status hierarchies I Tweet about. /8

To defeat Covid you have to target hubs. Which means you also have to target status. Like the Victorians in England, you have to make that work a high-status thing to do. Make the engineers the champions. People love engineers. They seem above the fray. /9

‘We’re going to send in the engineers to shut down Covid in some key locations’ is much more likely to get traction than ‘everybody needs to mask and ventilate’. Because we transact society on social media now, it’s hard to escape the universalising narratives. /10

Swift, strategic action isn’t about ‘mobilising’ the entire population. It’s a calm, practical task of identifying the specific risk, and applying a specific solution to that risk. Put the emphasis back on control, rescue control from the universalising narratives. /11

The original example of drinking. It’s possible to think that alcohol as a problem is exactly the same. Or violence. We target our public health campaigns at entire populations. But they’re not the problem. A tiny handful always are. Target the hubs. /end

What analyses of socialising never say, and what our now obsession with ‘mental health’, also another cause the minimisers co-opted for their Infinite Infection campaign, doesn’t say either, is this. Socialising is violence. The literal battle for social status. /2

Of course we’re unhappy when we can’t socialise, because then we’re low status. We’re not in the game. We absolutely need to reject the idea that the photo on that article suggests. That socialising is good for us because it’s warm cuddles. /3

If that were true, people wouldn’t need mental health breaks from the hyper socialising of social media. It’s continuous imitative comparison, the continuous, anxious attempt to belong and have status. We don’t understand this in ordinary everyday socialising. /4

It took social media to reveal the underlying mechanism, by turning it to 11. We are always in a status game, when socialising. Fighting to get and maintain a place in a given group. /5

Will Storr talks brilliantly about how the stories we tell ourselves *about* the socialising hide the mechanism actually in play. Minimisers didn’t rescue our warm and cuddly social lives. They rescued our battles for status, from the battle against a disease. /6

Look at the minimisers, they’re the perfect embodiment of what’s really going on. *Their* status has skyrocketed, because of the pandemic. Few had even heard of them, pre-Covid. It’s what it’s all about, for them. Fame, fortune, and status. /7

Meanwhile millions discovered the joys of just staying home, in the earlier pandemic. Of being free of the imitative rivalry at work and in their social lives. They found their families again, and their homes. As sacred places. /8

I know it’s a huge leap for many to see what seems like the most joyous activity, socialising, as an intrinsically violent thing. But think back to school. How often that socialising was brutal, the attempt to belong. To have an identity. That doesn’t change in adult life. /9

It’s just better hidden by the stories we tell ourselves. And the rough edges get rubbed off by having money, and being able to suppress what’s really going on underneath layers of entertainment, food and drink. To me it’s the most disgusting thing of the past 4-5 years. /10

That people whose actual interest is continued status and wealth for themselves (the ‘economy’ crowd), have co-opted narratives around social togetherness and mental health, and pretended to care about such things. They couldn’t give a fuck. /11

They want the status world back, the one they thrive in. Hidden beneath warm images of smiling socialising people, travelling and going to gigs, eating out etc. /end

The absence of basic coordination of the services societies require is papered over by offering cheap debt to everybody to try to buy those services themselves. See the dramatic rise in debt at the same time the politics of ‘small government’ took off, from the late-1970s. /end

See the astronomical increase in private debt from the late-1970s, the exact moment ‘small government’ politics took off. The moment we abandoned the post-war collective task of building societies, and returned to social status hierarchies as the sole structure. 2/3 https://t.co/tFGvwU7Jvl

All that has given the illusion of everybody being part of the same society is personal debt. You borrow your way into the fiction. /end

I posted the timeline of the collapse of the Roman Empire yesterday just to illustrate how a culture or society can go from seeming an eternal all-powerful force, to total collapse, in only a few decades. Nobody expected Rome to fall. And especially not this fast. /2 https://t.co/SK2ZzX7fgi

This is what I mean by a reality-based politics. Societies that focus only on their daily imitative rivalries, their team sports, are completely oblivious to wider patterns in play. That ‘complexity’ metric is particularly interesting. /3 https://t.co/JB67cZSTXZ

Meaning problems become too complex to solve, things become so interconnected that a break here causes collapse in multiple other places. We’re seeing that right now. It’s not just public health failing. Education, environment, energy - you name it. Things are collapsing. /4 https://t.co/Uuqp8OsUB8

I’ve done a few threads on how connection, which we crazily think of as a warm and cuddly intrinsic good, actually dramatically magnifies the violence in societies. Because the basis of sociality is competing desires, rivalry. It also can make societies much more fragile. /5

That’s what we saw during ‘lockdowns’, how completely interdependent all of our social processes are. Hilariously the ‘there’s no such thing as society’ libertarians were most offended of all, by lockdowns. But lockdowns revealed we are HYPER social. /6

We’re the exact opposite of the libertarian dream. Their markets and economies are hyper social connectedness. All of it is now falling apart. If you work in essential services you’re seeing it every day. It’s not lockdowns. They just made it visible. /7

If we zoom out and look at the patterns of all societies, in history, there are clear ways to show when social collapse is coming. We’re in the red zone right now. We’ll think we’re masters of the universe right up until the day the whole lot implodes. Like the Romans. /end https://t.co/EmXVnX5anE

This picture represents the Victorian’s visions for the future. Something really stands out, the collective flavour of those dreams. The public good. A society must align its status hierarchies with the realities of public provision. Or it’s dead. 2/3 https://t.co/hKsPmDxlEQ

What we call ‘the economy’ is not only hopeless at that, it’s hostile to it. That idea says just let everybody do whatever they like, and then the public good will spontaneously emerge. It’s the refrain we’ll be whistling as the ship goes down. /end

When we wanted to defeat Hitler, we stopped everything. We mobilised entire populations, in every nation. Massive disruption and dislocation. For years. That task was orders of magnitude smaller than fixing climate change. We don’t just need a tweak here or there. /2

All our jobs are not going to get us there, no matter how many Net Zero plans we build into them. Emissions is only one piece of the puzzle to be assembled. We’re still living every day as if this is just one more ‘issue’ to deal with. One more news story. /3

To go with all the other news stories. But this is the potential end of civilisation as we know it. Everything else is pointless. Why are we still rocking up to bullshit jobs every day, going through the motions? Societies should have been on war footings years ago. /4

The entire society mobilised to fight this threat, whatever it takes. Like we completely upended and transformed lives during the world wars. Everything went to the ‘war effort’. Climate change is a MUCH bigger challenge. Relatively, we’re doing absolutely nothing. /end

Societies run on status. This is clearly visible in Chinggisid societies, like Genghis Khan’s, with Khan the head of a status hierarchy that cascades down to every person. Our modern politics is exactly the same. We just rename the process, which disguises it. /2 https://t.co/NschEklKmL

Elections simply select status hierarchies. Using popularity as the sorting tool. The same tool and mechanism we use in high school. Democracy is fully Chinggisid if you realise that ‘the people’ is never an agency that acts, except to designate the hierarchy it will serve. /3

As the excerpt points out, the only true rival to Chinggisid sovereignty has not been what we call democracy. Democracy is Chinggisid sovereignty, with disguising labels. The only rival is monotheist religion. That’s our history in the West. Driven mostly by Catholicism. /4

The Catholic Church mostly built Western society, it’s a symptom of how impoverished scholarship is today that this is even disputed. They were always the only rival to the Kings. They replaced Chinggisid sovereignty, with a transcendent God. Another status hierarchy. /5

One where ‘transcendental belief systems…checked the earthly power of political rulers’. Girard saw that shift as also the one that short-circuited the intrinsic violence of the imitative rivalry of the battle for status, the Chinggisid model shared by our democracies. /6 https://t.co/tAArO78cgo

Democracy is not ‘power to the people’. That’s just spin. Our democracies are sovereignties where the status is granted using popularity, that’s all. And that doesn’t make them less violent in the longer term, populism is always fascism in its endgame. /7

All the tyrants of our era were populists. Immensely popular leaders in their beginning, sweeping to power using populism to bypass existing checks and balances. Exactly the same model being used by populists today. Chinggisid sovereignty, just with new labels. /8

The return of the kings. That’s history’s engine still firing on exactly the same cylinders it always has. Church v State IS history. That battle still hasn’t ended. It’s not actually clear which is better either. /9 https://t.co/mbYI1CkDjp

The Western church led a society for many centuries more than our current secular State societies have managed. More than 100 million people died in secular wars in the 20th century alone. And we’re in denial about status. It’s the engine room of both models. /10

Not information. Not power. Not capitalism or any other -ism. Status is what drives societies, whether Chinggisid or religious. Until we recognise that, we’re living an illusion. Our democracies are status games, not people magically running societies as individuals. /11

Social media is status games. Influencers, trends. Likes and follows. We need to choose what sort of status game is best for us. As Girard said, there’s a lot to be said for placing the tip of our hierarchies outside human rivalries. /end

Remembered.

There’s a growing perception of social collapse right now, as the teams become more violent and the basic material realities of our lives become dysfunctional. Hidden behind the econo-babble of ‘cost of living’. /2

Only the actions we take after major catastrophes, focused on the material realities of saving societies from extinction, really achieve social progress. That sense of ‘we’ from our lifetimes, of things being looked after, is a legacy of the post-WW2 rebuilding. /3

Three major catastrophes in quick succession, WW1, the Spanish Flu and WW2, forced direct material action on collective survival. Only catastrophes have the power to interrupt the social status games. We had 50 good years. By the late-1970s, the status games were back. /4

Hidden behind the Trojan Horse of status team sports. ‘The economy’. Really just a set of statistical indicators with no causal social model. Keep those indicators within certain ranges, and the social status quo is safe. Really it’s just code for ‘don’t touch anything’. /5

That’s all a ‘market economy’ is, social life with a stringent prescription to not interfere with ongoing human status games. No planning, no intervention on material realities. It’s the most brilliant con in history. /6

Leaving the field wide open for certain teams to swallow most of society’s resources for themselves, as their status skyrockets. Elected leaders have never addressed material realities. Those realities are just fodder for the status games of elections. /7

You can’t elect material problems away. Sometimes there’s some minor shift in the material realities as a result of different teams being elected. Their use of the material problems as election fodder does impact those problems. But that quickly fades to something else. /8

They invent fake problems instead, that are much easier to manipulate for the status games. Fake hysterias over immigration for example. Nothing that requires them to fix any actual material problems. You’re whistling into the wind expecting an election to fix anything. /9

Elections are team sports, not by analogy. It’s the same social model we use for actual team sports. It’s certain teams advancing their status at the expense of others. Only when decades of teams sports neglecting material realities leads to catastrophe do societies change. /10

When the catastrophe sweeps away the status hierarchies, forcing direct action on the underlying material realities. We were still living off the fat of the post-WW2 rebuild. But that fat is now gone, which is why nothing is being done to fix anything. /11

We’re now ‘living with’ pandemics! You can’t make this up. Everything is turned into fodder for team sports, while nothing actually gets done. Masks, energy, the types of car we drive, our sexuality, whether we use heat pumps. Watch it happen every single day. /12

Every problem that arises will be immediately transformed into a team sport between opposing teams. Usually on these platforms. Nothing will happen with the underlying material reality of the problem itself. Just days or even weeks of team sports battle. /13

Social media pours petrol on this fire, astronomically accelerating the shift to societies who do literally nothing except battle in teams every day, for status. Nothing gets done, to the underlying material reality. We’re all permanently at the game, cheering on our teams. /14

I feel most sorry for those who wait for somebody (usually ‘we’), to fix all of this. I’m sorry that history shows that never happens. Only catastrophe forces us out of our status games. You can’t elect your way out of the same problems elections cause. /15

When your team wins the grand final, the ground is a total mess that you leave for somebody else to clean up, and you go home with a momentary rush of euphoria, to the same material realities you had before the game. /end

A ‘healthy economy’ is ordinary people, with money to spend. It’s symptomatic of the true social role of the economy as an idea, that what we have instead is businesses hoarding nation state-levels of wealth, while ordinary people live on 2-minute noodles. /end

They’re social. Not economic. Even what we call the economic, is social. Gabriel Tarde described the simple mechanism that drives what we call economic activity, more than a century ago. And in doing that makes what we call an economy interchangeable with our social lives. /2

Tarde: “Economic progress supposes...a growing number of different desires, for, without a difference in desires, no exchange is possible, and, with the appearance of each new, different desire, the life of exchange is kindled.” There it is. Simple. /3

A whole century of econo-babble emerged to hide this most basic of social acts, pretending the simple commerce of human desires was instead ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ abstractions acting in self-equilibrating ‘markets’. Look at the economists who spout the modern drivel. /4

Dreary, plodding intellects drunk on the disbelief that anybody takes a word they say seriously. The same economic advice offered day after day, leading to the same boom-and-bust social damage time and again, with nobody held to account. /5

The entire world seduced and enslaved by a complete fiction. ‘The economy’. As some independent machine, that we all must serve to ‘afford’ to do anything. A complete political con. To strip away all agency, all social desires, to enforce a status quo. /6

It’s all ‘the economy’ ever was. Just another name for the status quo, a mechanism to protect it from any change. The surest way to see the actual function of this fiction, is to note that ‘the economy’ prevents action on EVERYTHING that urgently needs doing. /7

Ask an economist or a politician what and where ‘the economy’ is. They might point to ‘economic’ transactions happening, trade for example. But as Tarde said all those years ago, that’s a social process. The processing of human desires. /8

The best ‘economic managers’ ignore economics. They work with one thing only, the only thing societies run on. Human desires. I don’t hold my breath that the entrenched enslaving stupidity of ‘the economy’ will shift in my lifetime. /end