September 2024

Populist movements say that we lose trust in expertise because ‘elites’ are out of touch with ordinary people, who need to be listened to. That’s absolute rubbish. What populism does is make the basic operating system of society everybody’s business. /2

When in fact historically they paid no attention to that at all. They rightly left it to expertise to manage. Populism is a pandemic of busybodyness. Where everybody is encouraged to think they’re an expert in everything. Which means everything grinds to a halt. /3

To say we can restore trust in expertise by doing even more of that is completely bananas. It pours petrol on the fire. Trust will return when it is *led*. When political leaders stop using expertise as a political whipping boy, the ‘elites’ of populist vote-buying rhetoric. /4

It’s now common for pretty much everybody for example to interpret the success of somebody like Trump as the result of struggling key groups, like white male blue collar workers. That’s nonsense. All change is always led. /5

That group like any other will respond to any life situation in a way they are led to respond to that situation. If they’re struggling with employment, how they respond will depend on how they are led to respond. We cling to this idiot idea of democracy as ‘bottom up’. /6

No human group, of any size, works in that way. All change is led, by about 5% of the group. Some disempowered groups are gentle and quiet. Others try to sack parliaments. The difference is in how they’re led. Always. /7

We saw the same with Covid, claims that public health collapsed because ‘people’ had fantasy complaints like ‘vaccine fatigue’, and were crippled by ‘lockdowns’. All nonsense. Public health collapsed because it was led to collapse. Deliberately. /8

We saw in the world wars that people under much harsher privations than during Covid were led to follow a course, despite their sufferings. What happened with Covid was populists simply leading people to interpret public health measures as unacceptable oppression. /9

A tiny minority led this change. The anti-State libertarians, though really populists wanting to capitalise on an emergency to boost their own status. Until we ditch our idea of democracy as led by ‘the people’, it will continue to collapse. /10

That’s populism, not democracy. They’re absolutely not the same thing, they’re not even similar. Populism leads to fascism. Fascism isn’t a distinct thing, it’s just populism allowed to run. Hitler and Mussolini were populists before they were fascists. /11

We will get trust back in expertise only when we stop thinking ‘the people’ is a thing, to be consulted. When that trust is again led, by giving it status again. As Victorian England did. Where engineers were feted by royalty. /end

Dutton is following a global conservative playbook, again. Start fights. Lots of fights. Have no policies, just fights. That fires up the teams. I saw another offshore wind farm approved but significantly diminished by these fights yesterday. /2 https://t.co/uHoRmP11Xz

The energy system was of zero interest to communities growing up. I live in an electorate with significant coal-fired electricity generation. Nobody paid it the slightest bit of attention, most of my life. Until fight politics turned it into fodder for team sports. /3

Now half the people I know foam at the mouth on social media every day with their newfound expertise in energy engineering. Manifested as mindlessly repeated slogans from the main fight promoters in the LNP. /4

Is there a single policy the LNP is taking to the next election? It all looks just like a series of picked-fights to me. Slogans. Enough to fire up the voters, who are all addicted to team sports. People love their footy. Fight politics makes governance into footy. /5

This is what populism produces. Anything is fair game, provided it generates votes. If you put popularity at the centre of your governance system, your society is dead. It’s only a matter of time. If urgent things were popular things, we’d already be doing them. /end

…this is why good people lose. They refuse to think and act strategically. They think facts and graphs will shift things. Populism by definition ignores all due process. Good people respect due process, and so refuse populism. Which is a sound instinct. /2

But societies will only ever change with massive disruption. Populism is a massive disruption. It’s how this numerically small group managed to shut down public health systems that were 150 years old, in only 2 years. /3

The delicate calculus here is that the changes populism is able to introduce never last. Only things that get institutionalised, embedded in society in an ongoing way, last. Mussolini ended up strung up dead by his feet in a public square, after his populist movement. /4

But if we want public health back today, it needs a massive disruption to the ‘living with Covid’ status quo. We could use populism to provide that disruption. Public health institutions could then work with the disruption, to embed itself again. /5

Alas progressive politics is clueless at doing that sort of strategic work, or even conceptualising it. Conservatives have had think tanks doing it for decades, which is why they keep winning. This stuff should be money for jam. ‘How dare we infect all of our children!’ Etc. /6

It needs brains, and courage, to strategise like that. Neither are available in politics. Popularity games. So the catastrophe that will bring change will sadly be the ongoing collapse of the health of populations. /end

Graphic from: https://t.co/ZXdiaI6ki1

This is what you’d expect, for a pathogen with a low dispersion parameter (k). That most people won’t spread it, but a handful will spread it a LOT. So the event a person goes to may be a superspreading event. In which case there’s a high chance of them being infected. /2

But if it isn’t, they may come home infection-free. Those two scenarios may *look* exactly the same, from the outside. Crowds of people mingling. Like these ‘Disco Clubs’, where women in their 40s and 50s pretend they’re 18 again. /3 https://t.co/Gnc0ZY54z6

Leading to people drawing the wrong conclusions about Covid and its dangers. If it’s the non-superspreading event, they may say this crowd has ‘good hybrid immunity’. When in reality there’s just no superspreader present. /4

This to me seems again the danger of framing Covid as something happening everywhere, all the time, and trying to tailor a response (or lack of response) according to that framing. Because that everywhere all the time model leads to nothing being done anywhere. /5

Minimisers use it to suggest it would be impossible to control Covid, without shutting society down. While people who want to control Covid launch impotent campaigns to get the entire population to control the virus themselves. They’re both situations that don’t exist. /6

Covid is not everywhere, all the time. It spreads from a tiny number of superspreading hubs. Sometimes. That can lead to everybody eventually getting infected, which is what’s happened. But not ALL AT ONCE. /7

Which is why people seem to get away with Disco Club type events sometimes, but other times catch Covid in seemingly unlucky brief encounters. The ‘macro’ picture is everybody getting Covid, eventually. But that’s like saying if you leave a small leak in the roof unchecked…/8

…eventually the whole roof will collapse. It may, but the cause was the tiny drip. Which could have been easily fixed. We’re using the dispersion characteristics of SARS2 to pretend we’re building immunity. The lived experience is reinforcing that mistaken belief. /9

Because many do avoid infection, doing many things. Until they don’t. The virus gets them eventually. It wasn’t hybrid immunity stopping them getting it those other times. It was their lucky avoidance of a superspreading event. /10

A pathogen with a low dispersion constant is much *easier* to control. That’s SARS-Covid-2. Easy to control. But we’re not controlling it, because we’re using the everywhere all the time model in our heads of how it operates. Target the hubs. /end

Thought I’d add a Wankpanzer to this thread, so that some male adolescent behaviour might balance things up for those who see the entire world through a particular lens. https://t.co/i3pU7Kh02q

I sometimes share NSW Health’s A-Z infectious disease control guidelines. To me they’re an excellent window into the public health world we grew up in. And they show a key thing. These operate 365 days of every year. And most of us don’t even know. /2 https://t.co/ItiJjOzRGL https://t.co/KSAtLHKdxi

Disease control *is* an everywhere, all the time thing. By swift, strategic targeting of spread, using each pathogen’s specific characteristics. It’s because of this strategic targeting that most of us never even see this work happening. But it is, everywhere, all the time. /3

It’s not just pathogens, nothing in society happens everywhere, all the time. Societies are networks. They look like this. Hubs connected by networks. We have the wrong model of society, and therefore also the wrong model of Covid. /4 https://t.co/sgu06gkZBZ

Minimisers WANT us to believe Covid is everywhere, all the time. That’s how they win, by saying ‘it’s impossible to control this, celebrate it with your hybrid immunity’. But those who want Covid gone often do the same. Vast totalising narratives. /5

The medium is the message. Social media did this to us, totalising narratives is social media’s bread and butter. Totalising narratives are rallying cries for social media teams. The more contested the battle, the more apocalyptically totalising the narratives become. /6

But as the existing disease control guidelines show, what needs doing is actually highly specific, and can be done with minimal disruption to most of our lives. Practical, calm work. Not hysterical social media ‘debates’ that never go anywhere. For example, just fix schools. /7

A very specific, calm, engineering task. Get some fresh air into schools, they needed it even without Covid. Other major public buildings have had it already our entire lives. We don’t need to route that through SM debates. We don’t need to ‘mobilise’ whole populations. /8

We don’t need hashtags or awareness-raising. We don’t need the public to understand or do anything much at all. We just need to send in the ventilation experts, and get that specific job done. It could be done without any fanfare, by a smart politician. /9

They don’t even need to mention Covid. Covid terrifies them because of possible ‘public backlash’. Just make it a mundane job of school maintenance. Job done. /end

It’s not really about workload. Or lack of work-life balance. Or pay and conditions. I mean all of those things are real, but there’s something much deeper going on here. Teaching is a low-status profession. You can always pick a low-status job in two ways. /2

The work it does is absolutely vital to society functioning. Teaching, child care, nursing, aged care. Etc. All the shitty work nobody really queues up to do. And secondly, politicians and others line up to praise the work. But then do diddly squat on the shitty side of it. /3

You can see it in the pandemic. The absolute disgrace of the infection sewers schools now are is due to them being low-status. Politicians had multi-million dollar ventilation upgrades to their workplaces. Schools were told to open a window. Sorry, recommended. /4

‘Personal responsibility’ public health in action. Meaning total inaction. The windows are shut across the country. As a culture we don’t value education, so we don’t value teachers. Our schools are childcare for the economy, nothing more. /5

I’ve never wanted to punch people in the face more than those talking head minimising know-alls crying crocodile tears over children missing school, in this pandemic. Like they ever cared about education before the pandemic. They never even mentioned it. /6

They’re the useful idiots political libertarians needed in this pandemic, to justify the destruction of our public health systems, particularly in schools. Human shields for economic zealots. Who was never, not once, asked about Covid and schools? /7

Teachers. Not once, in the 4+ years of this pandemic. Professionals from other fields swooped on education in their useful idiot uniforms, craving the public attention a public emergency gave them. Lecturing educators on how infection was good for them and the kids. /8

Societies run on status. Education has no status in Australia. We’re a settler culture, vulgar land-grabbers as much today as we were in the 19th century. Get-rich-quick is the entire culture. Property development. Gambling. People are back prospecting for gold. /9

The few kids we still have are lumbered with enormous university debts, when they can’t even afford somewhere to live. Society is collapsing. As history shows every single time, it will take the total collapse of existing status hierarchies to change anything. /end

Sometimes these waves are seen as the rise and fall of population immunity. But it’s much more likely to be (for Covid) the development of a disease hub, spread from that hub, and then petering out of that spread. Until the next hub forms. /2

It’s at the lived experience of people level that this is most important. If people see many situations where people take high risks and aren’t infected, it will reinforce the sense that the crisis is over. They then drop their precautions too. /3

It also encourages the idea that this is everybody’s problem, all the time. But public health has been working away our entire lives with most of us not even noticing or needing to do much at all. It’s been hijacked by social media team sports. /4

A pathogen with low dispersion means most people don’t pass it on. But those that do, pass it on to lots of people. Most of us should need do nothing, to control it. Our lived experiences are informed by political narratives of Covid being everywhere, all the time. /4

Which as I’ve Tweeted about before, helps both Covid minimisers (‘there’s nothing we can do, its everywhere’) and those advocating for public health (‘we all need to mask and to ventilate every building’ etc.). Social media loves the universalising narratives. /5

Infection and disease patterns tell us a much calmer, more positive story. The work that needs doing is targeted, and manageable. 4+ years of the rival teams on social media slugging this out have led to nothing being done, anywhere. /6

Some quiet, targeted, specific work, for example in schools, could cripple Covid. There needn’t be any fanfare about it. A smart politician could do it under the banner of basic school maintenance. /7

But politicians are living in the same populist team sports bubbles as social media, which are taking over our entire societies. The emergency phase of the pandemic, ‘lockdowns’, is over. But we jumped straight to ‘now pretend Covid is gone’. /8

Missing entirely the disease control stage. That’s basic public health. The stuff happening 365 days of every year already, with few of us even noticing. Because the action is highly targeted. Covid is even *more* amenable to this, than most of the pathogens we grew up with. /9

The pandemic could be ended with very little interruption to our beloved lifestyles. That should be an easy sell to all sides. But we’re trapped in the bubbles. Desperate for our teams to win the battles. /end

The sense of agency ordinary people have had in the West is the wake of catastrophes that befell our societies. At no time did our societies suddenly begin to actually care about the fate of ordinary people. /2

Their needs were suddenly met because the safety and status of the higher status members of those societies was suddenly threatened. Whether cholera from common untreated sewage, or the need to get a workforce up and running after the world wars, the motivation was status. /3

It wasn’t us all electing lots of governments that created this shift. Elections change almost nothing. It was higher status members of society feeling genuine existential threats. Only that will ever shift the locus of collective activity, towards ordinary people. /4

Fast forward to today and scroll your timeline here as an example, every day, and you’ll see and feel that sense of lost agency, from ordinary people. That disbelief that obvious corrective actions aren’t being taken for massive threats, like climate change and Covid. /5

So often hitched to an idea that politicians and other leaders are letting us down, not doing their jobs. That was never what they saw as their job. It was never our democracies that lifted the tide for all of us. /6

It was catastrophes that threatened high status members of society. It is the *only* thing that will make status hierarchies shift. That or totally destroying them. I wish campaigning to politicians would fix Covid, or anything. It won’t. It never has. /7

We’ve all grown up in a historically unique time. That first half of the 20th century, with a world war, followed by a pandemic, followed by another world war, was calamity upon calamity. At least 150 million people died, in just a few decades. That’s our foundation today. /8

We who grew up from the second half of that century grew up in the middle of a unique historical project. The invention of ‘the public’ as an idea. The rebuilding of societies, in ruins after those early century calamities. Their status hierarchies killed or smashed. /9

It was only that which led to the feeling we’re being looked after, our needs met. That all of those elections and political leaders were looking after us. They were just running popularity contests over the top of the material realities of the re-building. /10

The massive public institutions that re-built and then maintained these repaired societies, freed from the status games. Over 150 million had to die, to get there. The whole world had to go to war. TWICE. And be decimated by an influenza pandemic. /11

‘The public’ is a construct of those institutions. Not of parliaments and elected leaders. That’s just us never leaving high school, cheering on our teams. When you ask that ‘we’ fix things like Covid and climate change, you’ll realise it’s a void you’re screaming into. /12

Nobody is there, listening. There never has been. You can’t vote the problems away, that’s just the team sports, the thin veneer of performative battle over the top of our actual material realities. We got to the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries. /13

With some of that institutional re-building momentum still in place. Attributing it hilariously to the people we elect. But you’d have to have been living under a rock to not see that all politics since about the 1970s has been an assault, on those institutions. /14

People wanted their status games back. Once the institutions had provided relative peace and prosperity, they were cast aside, in favour of the team sports battles, for status. What we call ‘the economy’. And that’s us right now. Social media is that shift, on steroids. /15

It’s not cynical to say it. When at school did the high status ‘cool’ kids ever say ‘ok, we’ve had our go, now the rest of you can be in charge?’ Hilarious. When is fashion ‘just wear whatever you like’? How often do politicians attribute successes to others? Heh. /16

All societies are 100% social. Not political, not economic. They’re the battle for status. In teams, led by leaders or ‘influencers’. The cool kids will let you fight Covid, when they feel threatened by it. Or if they’re wiped out by an asteroid. /end

The proposal that Covid will be endemic to Western nations as well just reflects the globalisation of work i.e. now nobody cares who gets sick. There will always be other workers available, is the unsaid. The triumph of status over public governance. /end

We absolutely don’t need social media to retain social networking. Social media is the hijacking of social networking by (mostly American) libertarian zealots. 2/3

Social networking is also not an intrinsic good. To connect people is to multiply violence in societies. Ask anybody who organises events why you always need ‘crowd control’. /end

Social media platforms, like societies themselves, are not for the exchange of information. They’re places where SOCIAL things are negotiated. The battle for social status. In the case of social media, the outright assault on all of our mechanisms of *trust*. /2

The problem with social media isn’t misinformation or disinformation. Societies never run on information, ever. They always run on trust. There is far, far too much information needed for anybody to try to be on top of everything happening in a society. /3

Which is why we have hierarchies of trust, where we delegate responsibility for doing different things, to different people. Not because we’re sheep, but because we can’t do everything ourselves. It’s just logistics. /4

Do we not actually look at what’s on these platforms? It’s not the exchange of information, it’s people rallying around information, building empires of followers and likes, to increase their status. People do the most insane things, like encourage us to live with pandemics. /5

So long as that insane thing builds them likes and followers, and therefore their own social status. And social media is socially lethal, because it’s society stripped entirely of any of its existing checks and balances, that normally assess claims. /6

Replacing all of that, with popularity. Likes. Mediocre, ambitious non-entities are suddenly leading public ‘debates’ on things like public health, something they know exactly nothing about. Social media is strip mining societies of all of their hierarchies of trust. /7

We have to (but won’t) give up this idea that societies work by people processing information every day. Of course the information processing industry want us to believe that, the ‘tech giants’. That substitution allows them to own the world. /8

We should at the same time abandon the related belief that connecting people to each other is intrinsically a good thing. On social media those connections bypass entirely any real world test of the wisdom of a given connection. /9

It’s not just that some of those connections are blatantly unhealthy, like people being groomed or recruited for terrorism, or any of the more obvious nasties SM enables. It’s that societies don’t function as permanent unfiltered crowds. /10

Social media is turning them into permanent football games of mob violence. Connection without context or consequence just leads to violence. That’s what a mob is. Anyway, I know all of this is a lost cause. Populism is social heroin, the dopamine of team sports. /end

I call it our ‘Covid offset program’. The deaths we allow so the rest of us have to do nothing. Like planting a few trees so you can still fly to European holidays guilt-free. Offsets are meaningless status quo fiddles. /end

I used to think I was weird in having no love of travel. In actively disliking the displacement it causes to my being. I’ve always had the deepest desire for place, not movement. It leads me to a very different understanding of what Indigenous Australians try to tell us. /end

South Australia shows what actual governance can achieve. Look at that wind power (green) overnight, the extraordinary success the Nats travel the country trying to sabotage. Significant storage not even required. /end https://t.co/NI1XS1Xz7x

You can’t really be for the control of Covid and also for the hypermobility of travel culture. That’s a square peg in a round hole. We blame politicians and minimisers for destroying public health. They definitely led that destruction. All change is led. /2

But across the entire spectrum of political belief, people rushed the gates of the airports as soon as they were allowed again. The entire culture is culpable here. It’s hypocrisy to want one and not the other, infinite freedom of movement for people, but not pathogens. /3

We’re the pathogen hosts. It’s our infinite freedom of movement that makes the pathogens spread. At the same time our own politicians win election after election restricting the movement of *other* people. This is bog standard imperialism. /4

The infinite freedom of movement of travel culture is just ours. The rest of the world has to stay put, to serve us in the theme parks we turn their countries into, for our ‘experiencing’ enjoyment. Revenge travel. What a culture. Fills me with disgust. /end

As the letter says, Covid needs to be *curbed*. But curbed so it can be controlled, so that spread is reduced to a minimal level, most days. With occasional outbreaks. Like most other infectious diseases that are controlled. /2

But tools such as masking and ventilation have become ends now, instead of means. One of the reasons we're not making progress with them is that there's no endgame in the suggestion. We don't mask and ventilate and allow Covid to continue spreading. /3

We mask and ventilate to control spread. To reduce it to minimal levels, after which normal life can return as much as possible. Masking for example may then cease. Ventilation is always good to have. /4

But just masking and just ventilating is not disease control. They're rallying cries in the team sports. They're two components of a control strategy. A strategy to reduce spread to minimal levels. /5

I suspect in public consciousness there's an idea that Covid is a sort of constant presence, but ventilation and masking can protect us from it. It's only a constant presence because it's not controlled. It falls in a heap pretty easily, when controlled. /6

To me it's an easier sell to say that the aim is disease control, and masks and ventilation are just steps along that path. That it has an endpoint, of 'normal' life. It feels sometimes like we've extracted these tools and have made a fetish out of them. /7

The benchmark isn't, 'is everybody wearing a mask?', or 'is every building ventilated?' It's 'is the disease under control?' That question focuses atention on the highly specific, and quite limited, action that's needed. And its endpoint. One everyone would like. /end

The Cotswolds, designated as an AONB in the UK. Those who follow me won’t be surprised to learn when the AONB idea was invented. In 1945. At the end of that wave of 3 mega-catastrophes. WW1, the Spanish Flu, and WW2. (Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC BY-SA 3.0) /2 https://t.co/8E4uFmqkDp

This was the time much of the world was stumbling through the wreckage of their societies, looking to re-build. It created an enormous yearning for a different kind of life than the one that had led to the catastrophes we’d just endured. /3

AONBs are like mini-national parks. The Brits began eulogising their countryside, like democracies over the centuries often look back to ancient Greece as some sort of foundational utopia. There are many fascinating things about this. /4

The UK countryside is one of the major tourist destinations in the world now. Millions travel through it every year. It’s become a theme park, an image people live inside. Which tells the story about how successful this ‘back to basics’ has been. Not one tiny bit. /5

The UK countryside today is overwhelmingly home to the rich, and often the rich from other countries. It’s a status object. The exact same cultural pattern that led to the great catastrophes in the early 20th century is back, even stronger than ever. The battle for status. /6

Here in Oz we’re seeing the same. There was an exodus to the countryside during the earlier pandemic, as people looked for a bucolic fantasy life. It’s gentrified a lot of these places now, rendering them unaffordable to locals who have lived there their entire lives. /7

Expensive restaurants and coffee shops draw in the tourists, sometimes with celebrity chefs. The towns are now theme parks, like the UK countryside. ‘Sights’ to be seen and ‘experienced’. The usual tourism nonsense. Travel inside our own heads. /8 https://t.co/5HDwo3mNUQ

‘Experiencing’ our own idealisms and images, not the locations themselves. Getting lots of selfies to embed that itinerary through our own fantasies. I think we’re seeing this now with work too. /9 https://t.co/qvOMSsutHu

Anybody working particularly in essential services must have felt the widespread lack of enthusiasm for the return to ‘normal’ life since 2021. It’s not just the ongoing risk of Covid, which most ignore. It’s that ‘lockdowns’ interrupted habit just enough to do something. /10

To make many of us question what the point of the old normal life was. This is a standard part of the punctuated equilibrium model of societies. First catastrophe punctures old status hierarchies. Then people question how to live better. /11

Unfortunately status-seeking through imitation is so deeply entrenched in us, that the options we choose to create a new life just reproduce the old one. AONBs and tree-changes are the old status mechanism, magnified many times over. /12

The end result is higher status people taking over new territory, previously belonging to the quite disadvantaged in the ‘regions’. They turn old farming and mining communities into the new Tooraks and Vaucluses. /13

Watch shows like this, it’s all there in the title. ‘Escape to the Country’. Running away from normal life, to make a new life. But really just extending that old life, into new places. Turning villages into theme parks. /end https://t.co/79OQ69kVv9

AUKUS is a rearguard Anglo Judaeo-Christian crusade, in that older meaning of the term. Asia is quickly becoming the dominant force in the world, don’t believe that the concern is really economic or even political. It’s the threat to an entire worldview. Status. /2

You can see this everywhere, if you look. Like PLC’s $85 million sports centre. In a supposedly secular State, millions are shovelled into these religious schools. And to be clear, this isn’t to say secularism good, religious culture bad. /3 https://t.co/YKddCF5BxY

There are very good historical reasons to say secularism is an abject failure. Stripped of any mechanism to regulate status in societies apart from popularity, it leaves everything wide open to the worst travesties of governance. We’re seeing that right now. /4

We’ve hit complete governance rock-bottom. We’re living with a pandemic. Because doing nothing was made popular. Not one iota of morality or human decency or common sense has been allowed to impinge upon populist secularism. /5

I’m not arguing for any form of governance. My interest is different. It’s to try to highlight that the currency of all societies, of every kind, is status. Societies are social, all the way down. /6

Gaza should once and for all be showing us that the idealistic nonsense we talk about democracy is a complete fantasy, it’s not how societies operate or could ever operate. High status individuals and groups act with impunity. That’s the root law of all history. /7

Only catastrophe reins them in, by destroying their status hierarchies. Replacing them with brand new status hierarchies. Revolutions always end with even greater tyrannies. The French Revolution gave us Napoleon. /8

While we pretend that societies operate from the ‘bottom up’, by ‘mobilising the people’, we will be impotent. And sadly sick or dead. Status hierarchies are delighted to perpetuate this myth of the people running societies. It allows them to act without restraint. /9

Attributing their actions to this same people, when really it was them doing it all along. Every politician that wins an election exercises the farce of promising to ‘govern for all’, and says ‘the people have spoken’. Meanwhile they’re busy working for their team. /10

Notice there never really is a ‘people’ mobilising, it’s always a proliferation of teams. Western democracies rarely get majorities in parliaments now. Lots of independents. Seen as a victory for democracy. Really just another window into what’s actually happening. /11

Multiple groups all battling for the same thing. Status. At a time when no one group is dominant enough to sweep the others away. This is basic history, repeated through millennia. If you look. /end

It became a thing from 1947. There’s that post-war period again. The emergency re-building of societies, after 3 catastrophes in quick succession, WW1, the Spanish Flu and WW2. Only catastrophes create real change. /2 https://t.co/n00LVYClXl

Look at every major shift in how we live, whether public health, housing, education, urban planning, communications, etc. You will always be able to trace it to some massive disruption to existing status hierarchies. To the status quo. The status quo NEVER changes by itself. /3

Societies are entirely social. They’re not economies. They’re not made by politics either, politics is just basic social behaviour re-badged. The fight for status. I know I repeat this a lot. To me we’re stuck inside status games, not seeing why nothing changes. /4

Our cultures are almost ahistorical now. You don’t need to read very much history to see the mechanism I’m talking about. Everywhere, at all times. No amount of activism or building awareness or mobilising people will change the status quo. /5

Only massive disruption will. Usually natural disasters, but also the total collapse of ‘economies’, or wars, or just maybe something like Chinese industrial power completely gutting our existing industries. That’s what’s happening with renewables btw. /6

And why the status quo mounts continuous daily attacks on that transition. Ditto for EVs. Left to planning and targets and any other gradualist mechanism, nothing will change. All of that will be gamed. ‘Offsets’, for example. A farce. /7 https://t.co/sU5vGXy3dS

None of this is because people are intrinsically bad, or even because of a handful of evil actors, like ‘capitalism’, or ‘corporations’ or the ‘MSM’, or ‘Big Oil’. It’s because our entire cultures always have been and always will be games of status. It implicates everybody. /8

The people on this platform fighting the good fight every day are also building their own status hierarchies, often without realising it. It’s how human culture works. We need to see it, to change it. /end

Most of the pressure came from the West, who proudly let the pandemic breed and then spread internationally. Particularly the great old Anglo powers in the US and UK, led by libertarian halfwits. China implemented a public health response WE invented, in the West. /2

It tried to control spread of the virus. It managed to control that spread a long time. Meanwhile the libertarian halfwits kept pumping more and more virus into global circulation, using a new ‘save the airlines and our recreational travel’ public health approach. /3

As with Australia and NZ, China showed Covid was quite easy to not only control, but even smash entirely. But that effort is pointless, if the rest of the international community is pumping out infected travellers, and prioritising its ‘economies’ (i.e the status quo). /4

Sure, the young in particular in China sometimes rebelled against pubic health restrictions, fed a steady diet of social media. That’s what social media will do anywhere, entrench adolescent worldviews of freedom. /5

And ‘welding up doors’ is ham-fisted, absolutely. But China is not yet a rich country. It knew letting a novel lethal pathogen spread would decimate many of its poor communities. Act first, ask forgiveness later is often the thin line between survival and catastrophe. /6

I highlight China because the West in particular is collapsing under an ideology of market-driven societies. The deliberate absence of leadership of any form. The idea that just letting everybody do whatever they like will spontaneously generate optimum outcomes. /7

It’s an ideology of the privileged, who in reality don’t know how to make a ham sandwich, and have lived for too long in cultures where the hard, nasty work of survival has been hidden from view. /8

Where most of the hard labour is done by cheap imported workers, and outsourced industrial capacity in distant invisible lands. Like China. We’re the ‘let them eat cake’ cultures, thinking our lifestyle lives are some default state of nature, or a product of our democracies. /9

We’re just the children of the most recent empires, that’s all. Living off our earlier conquests. That’s shifting rapidly now, Asia is resurgent, while we wallow in ideologies from another age, attributing our lovely lives to our democratic ideas. /10

All while distressed and puzzled every day about why our politics is a sewer and populist sociopaths keep winning elections, while we ‘live with’ pandemics. We’re Rome in its dying days, all empires do this. /11

I also shared this today. Our ideologies even have full-time institutional bodies to ensure the status quo never shifts, like productivity commissions, and Reserve Banks. Our productivity commission would call the Industrial Revolution in China right now ‘picking winners’. /12 https://t.co/Dxv997R1Ln

The last Industrial Revolution, several centuries ago, ushered in the Western empires. We haven’t noticed the new Industrial Revolution underway in Asia, already years-old. Think about this. What China is doing with renewables and EVs may *save us from extinction*. /13

From catastrophic climate change. And that saving would be called ‘picking winners’, by our ideologies. The magnitude of the stupidity we’re living under, it beggars belief. We’re a cult of freedom and markets. There are no markets, all change is led. /14

Silicon Valley for example, the engine room of about the only industrial activity the West still retains, was created by the US Navy. Not by any market or spontaneous effort from a fictitious ‘people’. Market economies never existed, except in our heads. /15

They were always only kept afloat by imported slave labour and offshore factories. Like I often say, meaningful change comes only from catastrophe. Without catastrophe, social status games dominate life. Asia is the least damaging catastrophe that can save us now. /16

It beats letting pandemics rip or runaway climate change incinerate us, as methods to collapse our status quo. Internally all sides and all serious commentators will mindlessly drone on about ‘the economy’, that great fiction of our status quo. /17

None of that will change anything that needs changing, it’s designed to prevent any change. Nor can we vote any of these problems away, elections are a laughable status game that are just football for governance. The massive disruption from China may save us. /18

Even that may not be enough. But it’s easily the most palatable option facing us right now. It’s no accident our status quo is ramping up Yellow Peril politics more every day. It knows the threat to its existence. /end

‘Democracies’ are also strong social status hierarchies, hidden behind grand fictions about ‘the people’ running things. Stable societies have strong status hierarchies. Weak social status hierarchies are countries run by drug gangs. Competing hierarchies with no dominance. 2/2

Secondly, a large portion of China’s emissions go towards producing goods for the West. So in reality they’re Western emissions too. Again, the data tells the story. 2/2 https://t.co/eOjqWMm6pP

China’s threat to Western automakers isn’t just their offering of cheap, quality EVs. As the article notes, even before we had EVs, Western car manufacturing was completely dependent upon Chinese industry. Nearly everything we use in the West is. /2

We talk about a ‘globalised’ world, but then act as if it doesn’t exist, playing the team sports of national sovereignties. You could see China and the West as the same international society. China builds all our stuff, and we play aristocrats, living lifestyle lives. /3

Reality politics. Focus on the material realities, ignore the hot air of the team sports. Somebody, somewhere, has to build all the stuff we use in modern life. That somebody is mostly China. We’re at war with ourselves. /4

We accuse them of being the big carbon polluters, not even noticing many of those emissions are to build OUR stuff. And the enormous drop in prices of renewables and EVs is all them. The things we desperately need. We’re not building them. /5 https://t.co/8CJDnKZHbv

We get stuck in the idiot team sports of sovereignty, pretending each country has a ‘system’ of government, in competition with the other systems. The ‘authoritarian’ communists versus the ‘free market’ democrats. All adult fairy tales. There are no systems. /6

Go back to the material realities of running any society. More or less equivalent, across the world. Requiring more or less the same action, everywhere. The world is just people acting socially. Nobody really lives via an ideology, material realities determine how we live. /7

If we don’t build the advanced, cheap goods we all live with today, somebody else has to, for us. That somebody else is nearly always China now. We never stopped being an international community. If you focus on actual material realities, not hot air ideologies. /end

Nobody is forcing shoppers to go with the Big 2. This is the fact few will accept. Society is social. This is social behaviour, with social explanations. You can see here that marketing knows why this is happening. It’s not economics. /2 https://t.co/nzgzqlozw8 https://t.co/CiIPae0qtj

Nor is it collusion or price gouging. Even if these things are happening, they’re not what keeps the Big 2 the Big 2. Quote: “This research distinguishes between rivalry between firms (inter-firm brand rivalry) and rivalry between consumers (inter-consumer brand rivalry).“ /3

“1) outside actors like firms can promote inter-consumer rivalry through inter-firm rivalry and 2) promoting such conflict can actually provide benefits to consumers as well as firms.” Rivalry. There it is. Status, team sports. /4

Those who don’t see Coles v Woolies as exactly the same social behaviour as Ford v Holden, or NSW v Queensland, or Labor v Liberal, or nuclear v renewables, is missing the exact same social behaviour in each case. Two main opposing teams. It’s how we run everything. /5

Years of branding deliberately generates this, to tap into this deep social need. People are Coles people, or Woolies people. For all their own reasons. Nobody is forcing them to be. And quite a few aren’t. They shop at Aldi. Or IGA. Or Costco. The cheaper options are there. /6

Which in the idiot economic view of the world is competition already happening. Which should drive customers away from the Big 2, to the cheaper options. Except it doesn’t. Because societies don’t run on price, just as they don’t run on information. They run on status. /7

Branding knows this, have we not been paying attention to the enormous shift in business towards branding activity? Away from all the nonsense about markets and competition? Even the anti-trust-like ‘break up the duopoly’ stuff is team sports. /8

Certain teams use that as their rallying cry, like The Greens and consumer groups. Never mind that economies of scale is what actually brings prices down, not competition. By far the cheapest option for consumers is always ‘single payer’ government-owned systems. /9

But we maintain the fiction of the economy, with our productivity commissions and competition and consumer commissions demanding we do all the market things that don’t work, and which nobody actually wants. All because we refuse to see societies for what they are. Social. /end

They only change when disaster strips away the existing status games. This is what wars have always done, taken irreconcilable differences and bulldozed them away. Not resolved them. Whether one of the teams fighting is more right than the other doesn’t change the outcome. 2/3

There’s no ledger that keeps score in history. Differences escalate to the point of explosion, to literally level the playing field. Then it all starts all over again. /end

Difficult things are unpopular things. I don’t know why it’s hard to see that if popularity is the sole route to power, difficult things won’t get decided or done. All that will be decided or done is things that protect votes, for the next election. /2

Politicians are acting entirely rationally, within the system we all embrace. They’re focused on popularity and votes, because without those they have no power. And in the meantime nothing of consequence is done, out of fear of losing votes. /3

Or worse, the most extreme and toxic things are done, because somebody found a way to make those things popular. Popularity is the loophole bad faith actors employ to hijack governance. They can’t believe their luck, that it’s that easy. /4

You can’t get the most junior job anywhere, based on popularity, let alone be promoted or be hired as a CEO. A parent who raised children using popularity as the method ends up with spoiled sociopaths. And yet for control of our entire societies, it’s our ONLY method. /5

Elections are not democracy. They’re a method of selecting leaders grafted onto democracies only in the past century. They’re destroying them. Governance should be identification of basic social need, and addressing of that need. Routing it through a popularity contest? /6

Why? Why are we surprised that the social needs get ignored and populists end up running everything, to their own advantage? When you hop on a plane, do all the passengers vote for who’s going to fly it? Or are experienced pilots pre-selected to do that, for you? /7

You can’t vote your way out of the problems voting causes. Every person you vote for will be forced to operate inside this same insane system, of having to make things popular, to get them done. And fighting bad faith actors who make social destruction popular. /8

The difficulty changing any of this is that it taps into the core DNA of how all social groups operate. The battle for status, in groups or teams. Social conformity, driven by status (we conform with what we perceive to have status). /9

So when I say we need to ditch using popularity as the doorway to ultimate power, I don’t expect it to actually happen. People won’t surrender the status games. It’s why one of my common themes is the historical observation that this is only ever resolved one way. /10

By catastrophes, internal or external, smashing existing status hierarchies, to make room for change. Again, we lived through an anomalous time in history. The relative peace and prosperity of many of our lives up until this point didn’t come from democracy. /11

It came from 3 mega-catastrophes, in probably historically unique quick succession. WW1, the Spanish Flu, and WW2. That conga line of catastrophe smashed our status hierarchies, globally. The peace and prosperity that followed was born from the need to survive. /12

The re-build after the last of these 3 catastrophes was relatively free of interference from status games, because we needed urgent action to stop total social collapse. Institutions were set up to oversee our basic social needs. They governed us for 50-70 years. /13

And when their work had been done well enough that life seemed just spontaneously good again, our status games returned. Disguised as ‘freedom’ from these same institutions. Anti-establishment politics, driven by both the Left and Right of politics. Pointless labels. /14

Everybody wins votes ‘sticking it to the man’. Taken to whole new levels by inventing a substitute for society we call an ‘economy’, based on the fantasy that societies operate by individuals all doing anything they like, creating spontaneous ‘emergent’ good. Markets. /15

‘The economy’ is a society run entirely on status. All leadership and needs-based decisions are stripped away by the laughable idea that what’s good for us collectively will just spontaneously emerge, in markets. Everything else is ‘picking winners’. /16

If you don’t pick winners, if you don’t LEAD, then drug gangs eventually become the winners, and run everything. Like some South American governance. That’s the endgame of economy-based governance. In many Western countries we’re on that trajectory now. /17

Societies splintered into an enormous number of groups (teams), all battling for ultimate status. Our traditional politics the same, with the growth of ‘hung’ parliaments. Seen as a good thing! Social media is the accelerant for this process. It accelerates it massively. /18

People form teams here and do things like use the health of your kids and their teachers as footballs, to drive likes and status. I wish none of this happened, that we’d identify empirical needs, with empirical solutions, and just do it. /19

As the fantasy fake debate about nuclear power and wind and solar farms in Oz shows us, it’s not going to happen. Everything will be turned into a new fight, to fuel the team sports. So, we await catastrophe. To bring the change needed. /20

China’s industrial might with renewables and EVs is the least dangerous of catastrophes that might save us. With climate change at least. They also build pretty much everything we use. So their disruption really can upset our status hierarchies. Let’s hope that’s enough. /end

Individuals and groups will co-opt any issue, any content, to further the status quo of themselves and their teams. You can see that right now in climate debates. The quite funny interest pro-pollution folk have discovered in the health and safety of birds, for example. 2/8

These are people with no historical interest in birds or wildlife of any kind. It reveals what’s really going on. Similarly the passionate fake interest Covid minimisers have shown in children’s education. Something they had exactly zero interest in, before the pandemic. 3/8

It’s also why climate deniers are often also Covid deniers, anti-EVs and renewables, pro-free speech etc. Not much connection between many of those things. Except status. Each reflects a threat to the status of themselves and their group, in some way. 4/8

I call it team sports rather than use the term groups, because ‘teams’ much more precisely captures the rivalry in play. Imitation is the heart of all societies, people imitate what they perceive to have status. Imitation and status are two sides of the one coin. 5/8

The single clearest explanation for why anybody thinks, acts or feels in any way is that everybody else thinks acts or feels the same thing. Or at least everybody else in the group(s) they’re a part of. It’s social conformity. Which protects their status. 6/8

There are no economies. There are no -isms. The Chinese are no more communist than we in the West are capitalist. We’re ALL just groups of people, acting in status hierarchies. We call those hierarchies different names, that’s all. 7/8

Societies don’t change through any of these status games. Status games are about maintaining a status quo. They change when underlying material realities get so far out of connection with status games that they destroy the hierarchies. Only catastrophes change us. /end

The control guidelines for measles are extensive. They include things like isolation of people. They openly talk about outbreaks, as below. Sterilising vaccines don't remove all other public health work. They're an integrated part of that control. 2/4 https://t.co/AhOauCBCDt

Most of our lives this other control work has been invisible to most of us. It's why it was so easy to refuse to do any control, for Covid. Many didn't even realise how absurd that was, it seemed like the world they were already living in. 3/4

Most disease control is about slowing spread of disease. Not entirely eradicating it. To restrict it to sporadic outbreaks, controlled using tehniques at the micro level we initially apply at the macro level, for a pandemic like Covid. Exponential decay does the rest. /end

He’s a bit of a revhead, has always loved his cars. So him buying an EV at all was remarkable. I’d been talking about it with him for a couple of years, and suddenly he just up and did it. He’s completely blown away by the car. Astonishing performance and premium comfort. /2

He shared the news with friends on social media. And that’s where I got to see again what these platforms have done to our collective life. The pile-on was swift and brutal. Even his closest friends trotted out all the anti-EV factoids that circulate on SM. It was nasty. /3

Zombies, thinking this was their own considered opinions on the engineering of vehicles, when really they were just regurgitating all of the same sponsored propaganda fossil fuel interests promote online. And it’s not just about facts. It was vicious. /4

That’s the team sports I talk about. They were defending their team, under threat. Social media turns our entire collective life into this tedious, continuous battle between teams. Look at energy again this week. Nuclear power. /5

Nobody when I was growing up paid ANY attention to the electricity system. Not for one second. Hideously ugly and polluting coal-fired power stations, and enormous transmission lines were built, sometimes right near towns, with nobody batting an eyelid. /6

Fast forward to today and you can’t build a toilet block without groups ‘mobilising’ on social media to turn it into some sort of apocalyptic crusade. Conservative politicians tap into this, generating fake fights on everything. There are no public policies, just fights. /7

It’s what Dutton is doing with nuclear. The whole thing is a total engineering and economic fantasy. He doesn’t care, he wants to start a fight. Fights create teams, teams generate votes. Social media is the greatest gift to politicians like this. /8

They can get a fight to go viral in days, nationwide. No longer the need to employ expensive firms to generate ‘messaging’ and work the levers to try to get that message out. Social media does all of that for them. /9

It’s exhausting, tedious and tragic that collective life is now what Robert Hughes once called a culture of complaint. Of fights. That’s all deliberately done, to win power in ridiculous populist governance systems. The life is sucked out of every possible joy. /10

And replaced with endless and vicious team sports. It’s not that we all need to be nicer to each other. It’s that we all need to go back to minding our own business. Do our jobs, and leave others to do theirs. Social media’s mission is to turn us all into busybodies. /11

To encourage the idea that ‘democracy’ is us all having ideas about everything, and then contribute to the democratic debates, on everything. That’s rubbish. Representative democracies were explicitly set up so that we had to pay no attention AT ALL, to most things. /12

That’s what gave us freedom to live richer lives, delegating responsibility for more and more things to other people to do for us. Now mass, mobilised ignorance creates pile-ons over every tiny detail of keeping a society running. And these platforms get rich doing it. /end

Instead we’re lazily applying one core part of that fantasy framing - ‘competition’ - to the problem. Which turns out to explain nothing at all, go figure. The entire concept of societies as economies continues on as the elephant in the room. Unchallenged. 2/2

I have no interest at all in any of the team sports framings of what’s going on. To me they’re all people, it’d be nice if they didn’t kill one another. But they will, to try to make their status preeminent. This is how societies have always and will always work. /2

Calls for ceasefires and diplomacy reflect our historical naivety. Those who live in peaceful countries are beneficiaries of earlier violence, to conquer that territory and drive out rivals for status. We didn’t use diplomacy to achieve our peaceful lives. /3

We killed extensively, wiping out rivals. And/or we let things like smallpox do it for us. I’m a broken record, but only catastrophe removes the fight for status, often seen in wars. Or natural disasters can do it for us. /4

The Romans created the framing of much modern life, much of the world we still live in. They did it by conquering first, diplomacy second. If you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow. A.k.a. only catastrophe will unify battling groups. /5

It’s not something I celebrate or advocate. It’s just how history works, always. It’s because human societies run on status, not on economics or politics. Status games never, ever, cease of their own accord. They have to be forced to cease. /6

Alongside the death and destruction in Gaza and now Lebanon, the conflict has spawned an explosion of team sports online and offline, about the conflict. Team sports generating even more team sports. This is why total catastrophic destruction will follow. /7

Nothing will stop the teams fighting, except them being forced to. There won’t be a logical or rational victory for one team over another team. As Planck said, even something like science progresses only when one generation dies, to be replaced by another. /end