November 2024

Scott Morrison knew that the federal government had very little constitutional role in fighting a pandemic. That role belonged to States, and their health departments. He desperately needed a way to deal himself into the equation. National Cabinet was that way. /2

Under cover of platitudes about all working together and being consistent, the real function of National Cabinet was to give Morrison a seat at the pandemic table. A spoiling seat. Suddenly he had a say in everything going on. And often the Premiers pushed back. /3 https://t.co/vaqfmVltNc

That’s how federalism is designed to work, to enforce the checks and balances of multiple levels of governance, rather than the risk of a bland groupthink unanimity. But that’s where the LNP had rat cunning. Because it understands human groups. /4

It knew that once it established National Cabinet, the group solidarity there would gradually rupture the checks and balances of federalism, undermine the constitutional design. National cabinet became a team. People who follow me know what comes next. /5

As the pandemic went on, National Cabinet found solace in each other, in the face of genuinely massive and stressful challenges. Their team bonding grew. And once that social mechanism kicked in, it was game over for our constitutional governance arrangements. /6

Premiers, who constitutionally work with their health departments and their CHOs to manage disasters, were gradually decoupling themselves from that arrangement, and siding with their team instead. National Cabinet. They even moved to sideline CHOs in legislation. /7

Victoria held on, which is why the federal LNP fired such continuous vitriol in that direction, it was upsetting their plans. WA too. But eventually all succumbed. CHOs and their Health departments are now rarely seen, or heard. /8

Instead we had Premiers posing for ‘smiles are back’ videos. Team National Cabinet. Today who even knows what that group does. It’s a constitutional abomination. Team sports had won the day. As it is winning everywhere else in our societies. /9

Of course our Covid inquiry (cough) didn’t look at any of that. I doubt the people hand-picked to run it know the first thing about federalism. That’s the point. Politicians establish inquiries to determine something they’ve already decided. To shut something down. /10

Vigorous, skilled health departments acting in each State to fight local health emergencies is what the system is designed to do. Through National Cabinet instead we ended up with meaningless, lethal slogans applied generically. ‘Living with the virus’. ‘Just like the flu’. /11

In other words, no public health response at all. A political response, to shut that public health response down. Morrison had an election to go to, and also the Coalition today has a deep-seated contempt for public administration more generally. /end

Just as who wins your local football league makes no difference to things like climate change and Covid, who wins these elections doesn’t either. The UK had euphoric election victories, a huge landslide, only months ago. 2/8

There’s little indication of any meaningful change likely to happen to the status quo there. There’s a not insignificant difference between what the rival parties do, when they’re elected, of course. But none of it really disrupts the status quo. 3/8

Status does not allow challenge from elections, or anything else. Not without a fight. And that’s not even to imagine evil people plotting our domination in dark rooms. Status hierarchies form our customs and traditions. ‘What we’re used to’. Few like that disrupted. 4/8

We entrenched status back in the centre of our societies, where it was for most of human history, in two ways. Firstly with elections. Popularity will always select high status individuals. And secondly, with ‘the economy’. 5/8

Really just a spreadsheet of indicators that reflect a stable operation for the existing status quo. It’s easily seen that nothing meaningful will happen if it disrupts any of those indicators. 6/8

You’ll ’spook the market’. Really meaning you’ll upset the status quo. That ‘the economy’ is a fictional construct to protect the status quo is something I don’t expect to be widely understood in my lifetime. We’ve taken a means, and turned it into an end. 7/8

So root for your team in this week’s election. And here in Oz at the imminent federal election. It feels like just like going to the football! Because it is just going to the football. That’s all it is. /end

Trump’s whole campaign is a royal court, peddling favour and influence. These aren’t analogies, these are the ways status hierarchies work now that our public spaces have been destroyed. 2/2

In all of the Anglo countries, this is the hot demographic that conservatives are targeting. Women of all ages mostly don't vote for the Handmaid's Tale version of reality conservatives are selling. /2 https://t.co/YuqSP17GyF

But young men are being seduced by these narratives. Often 'tradies' i.e. the old blue-collar workers, people who historically often voted for the 'Left'. But conservatives figured out how to land these fish. /3

Mostly by turning them into a 'team'. A group told that their rights and freedoms are under threat. From women. Greenies. Government. Etc. 'Toxic masculinity' is as much a political invention as some cultural baggage. A deliberately engineered anger. /4

We've all grown up seeing most politics targeting the biggest voting bloc for most of our lifetimes. Boomers. But they're being slaughtered in the millions now by Covid, and we're allowing it. Telling us their demographic is now political road kill. /5

Conservatives in the US, UK and Australia are targeting young men. They don't hide it. Politics isn't even a thing. It's a name for the battle of competing status groups. A social battle. /6

These ridiculous modern utes for example, hopeless as utes, and as road vehicles, and and for towing, are now an epidemic. They're young men's GI Joe toys. One of the main glues that binds their status group together. /7 https://t.co/DJPdIFtFvL

Several leading Australian politicans have referenced the ute and the tradie explicilty. Again, they're not hiding what they're doing. We see in the current US election this playing out even within relationships. /8

Women encouraged to vote differently to their men. A probably large determinant of victory in the election will be how many women come out to oppose the tradie/ute group and their angry passions. And how many will 'stand by their man' instead. /end

Societies are not economies. Economies don’t exist. Think about just how ludicrous the idea is that societies run as a sort of objective economic machine, with tweaks to things like money supply and interest rates, and budgets. /2

As Gabriel Tarde saw, all economic relations are driven by the interplay of human desires. They’re as social as anything else. And the root desire, socially, is status. People want status, which gives them an identity. /3

What we call an economy is really the dynamic, continuous interplay of rival groups, battling for status. Economics interestingly almost recognises this, with its obsession with competition. /4

That battle of status groups is competition, absolutely. But economics sees that competition as more of that objective machine rubbish, a mechanism to keep prices low via the optimum allocation of resources etc. That’s an hilarious, disastrous mistake. /5

Competition, really the imitative rivalry of status games, reaches no equilibrium. No matter how much status individuals and groups achieve, they always want more. The billionaire is never satisfied to just sit back and enjoy their wealth. /6

They then want to ‘philanthropically’ run the world too. This process will never end, on its own. Status games will continue until the fundamental material conditions of life can no longer sustain them. That’s what a cost of living crisis is. /7

That’s what wars are. We keep playing status games until a catastrophe stops us. Nothing else will. Often the catastrophe is caused by the status games themselves - wars. A cost of living crisis is a mid-level catastrophe. /8

Not catastrophic enough to critically disrupt the status games. But a step along the road to that catastrophe. Our current cost of living crisis is a combination of two things. One the disruption of the pandemic. /9

All pandemics are catastrophes. We’re pretending the one we’re in now isn’t, but it’s now just doing us more slowly. And economic politics since the 1970s has also decoupled status from public life again. That’s what the idea of ‘the economy’ was created to do. /10

For those post-war years we had focused on collective, ‘public’ life, relatively free of status. But once we’d fixed a lot of things, status was back. The economy was what did that substitution, to return us to the feudalism of status. /11

Just look at the ideas. ‘Free markets’ are really just a model of society where the existing status groups, like governments, are increasingly pushed out as ‘inefficient’ market players. It’s an obvious con, to strip existing status hierarchies. And replace them. /12

With whoever can garner wealth and power, then set free from any pesky regulation and restriction. It’s (not an analogy) the old nobles, finally free of the pesky King restricting their baronial ambitions. /13

That’s what today’s proliferation of billionaires is. The new nobles, set free of Kingly power to try to make themselves the new King. They battle among each other. This is a pattern as old as history. It *is* history. /14

It’s why we had Popes, and Kings. To try to control these status games, by establishing relatively stable status hierarchies. We don’t have that now. So it’s a shitshow of battling rivals. We peasants can only look on, our ‘cost of living’ the result. /15

The absolute obsession with ‘low taxes’ of modern economic politics, how do we not hear the cry of barons down the ages, decrying the King’s robbery of their wealth with new taxes? These are not analogies. The same social patterns are still with us. /end

Voting is not democracy. And it’s failing and continuing to fail globally, as a mechanism of governance. It’s team sports, masquerading as government. /2 https://t.co/tdSnTlUCh3

It’s the status games that define all social life, across pretty much all cultures, at all times historically. Winning an election is just being the most popular person at school again, for adults. /3 https://t.co/t4uPW8vEID

All societies, no matter where they are, will revert to status hierarchies, usually headed by a God/King or their equivalent. Unless catastrophe forces a collective effort at social repair. /4 https://t.co/ClIFavtws1

This isn’t bad news or good news. It’s us following the same patterns we have for all of human existence. Lost in the belief that we’re doing ‘democracy’ when in fact we battle in teams for our preferred King/Queen. /5 https://t.co/mvEAz1S2nl

The way out of this alternating euphoria and disappointment is to develop (relatively) stabilised status hierarchies. That’s why humans invented Kings and churches, in the past. That’s what they were. Ways to stem the violence of continuous status battles. /6

Electors are trying to restore that stability now. They mostly don’t like elections, where given the option many don’t even bother to vote. Or they vote for the most King-like candidate. They want their Kings and Gods back. That’s history, all of our history. /7 https://t.co/20Eevx6YZd

We’re fighting that default form of human civilisation, and it just keeps reasserting itself through the fog of new names we give for old things. Great calm comes when you see that, I find. /end

We’re living with a pandemic now in the same way legacy car makers are pretending we still want combustion-engined cars. Reality will win. The status quo will fall. 2/2

People aren’t stupid, as a whole. Nor are they lazy. They just have their own lives to get on with. Despite all our rhetoric about ‘the people’ running democracies, they just don’t. They were never meant to. /2

Representative democracies were invented explicitly to take that job away from ordinary people, and delegate it to others. We waste so much time and energy reading the most extraordinary nonsense into the tea leaves of polling and elections. /3

For most people, if life is going OK, they’ll give the incumbent another go. If life isn’t going OK, they might vote for somebody else. That is *literally* about as far as their attention to politics goes. And that’s entirely rational behaviour. /4

How much do any of us know about how most of the things we encounter in life are done? How food arrives in our supermarkets, how medicines are researched and made, how electricity arrives at our homes. So many etc’s. Hardly at all. We delegate, to others. /5

That’s absolutely healthy. We’re not Robinson Crusoe, living in a DIY-everything society. That’s what progress is. Why would politics be any different? If it’s not delivering for our lives, very few bother to figure out why it isn’t. /6

And nor should they. The mechanism is designed to give them the option to just try somebody else who might be able to. Simple, quick. The reason our lives are spiralling into the toilet *is* the belief we all should be running societies. /7

Hugely encouraged by platforms like these. Where people spend all their days and nights feeling like mini-Presidents, striding the world stage sticking their noses into every issue. Issues most of us know nothing about, really. /8

Epidemic busybodyness. That’s what social media is. Not a way to connect, it’s a way to stop anything meaningful happening by burying it all in a continuous barrage of ignorant vitriol and complaint. If you work in government, you’ve seen it. /9

You can’t get a thing done now. Even the tiniest initiative is immediately swamped by tidal waves of complaint and violent anger, coming from an endlessly proliferating number of identity-forming teams. /10

If we stopped thinking the people run democracies, all of this would go away. Getting rid of social media would be the quickest way to achieve that. It wouldn’t create utopian perfection. Nothing does. But it would let us all get back to our own lives again. /end

A politician who slaps themselves on the back for winning an election doesn't understand they were voted in to fix the material conditions of peoples' lives. When they don't do that, retribution is brutal. 2/5

Voters pay almost zero attention to the details of politics, which populists don't understand. Those details are gossip items between politicians and the people who report on them, mostly. 3/5

Very little about material reality changes, as the result of elections. Elections are popularity contests grafted onto those material realities. Nothing should terrify a politican more than a landslide victory. Find one of those that ever ended well. 4/5

Landslides mean material conditions are seriously bad. /end

‘It’s the economy, stupid’ was a Bill Clinton phrase. This headline indirectly refers to it. Has anybody stopped to contemplate what the phrase means? /2 https://t.co/Cl09qB2gmp

I don’t think the economy is even a thing. But the insight behind Clinton’s phrase is mostly accurate. He was saying that the material conditions of peoples’ lives determine elections. Not the popularity of this or that team. /3

And to add to Clinton’s insight, it’s not specifically the material conditions of our lives. It’s peoples’ perceived STATUS within society. If they feel their status is steady or has improved, they’ll tend to vote for the incumbent. /4

If their status feels threatened, they’ll tend to vote for somebody new. It really is as simple as that. All the analysis about how this or that policy or statement by the competitors defined the election ignore that most people pay no attention to politics at all. /5

They vote, as Walter Lippmann once noted, according to just a generalised gut feel as to the relative health of their status in society. And this leads to an even more critical reframing we need to do. /6

Politicians, commentators and their team sports are the tiniest thin veneer of hot air over the top of this materially-based status game. They attribute wins to the winner, and losses to the losers. ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ is lost on them. /7

There are two almost completely distinct mechanisms in play here, always conflated. The ever-shifting popularity games of what we call ‘politics’. And the material realities and status games of our actual lives. These have almost zero connection, to each other. /8

A ‘landslide’ victory is nothing to do with the winner of an election. It reflects a society whose material conditions of life and perceptions of status are critically broken. People clamouring for change. /9

A populist leader who celebrates a landslide victory is a fool. People cannot name one such landslide victory that has ever ended well. The social problems they inherit are likely impossible to solve. This is the hilarious irony of our election bubbles. /10

The things that seem like the greatest success within the bubbles, big election wins, in reality represent a total disaster. For the winner more than anybody. We refuse to focus on the material realities of life and choose to focus only on the populist team sports. /11

Wailing and gnashing teeth when our team loses. Euphoria when our team wins. Ask Keir Starmer how his euphoria is now going. This was only months ago. Or Boris Johnson. He didn’t even last a single term. /12 https://t.co/4coph1g6sn

How do we not notice these obvious things? Because we’re so deeply hypnotised by the team sports of popularity battles. ‘Politics’ is our all-year football premier league. /13

Reality continues alongside all of this ridiculous team sports, sometimes momentarily deflected by it as winners shape it in various ways. But well beyond their capacity to make any fundamental change, except to break things. /14

Well-meaning souls claim that by voting for people who won’t break things, elections still have an important role. But elections just breed more elections, not solutions to anything. Popularity has never in our lives solved a single problem. Did it at school? /15

No. So why would it in adult life? That fierce battle for ultimate status is focused only on itself. The purpose of winning elections now is to win more elections. Albanese at his victory put 2 or 3 more victories top of his priority list of things to do. QED. /16

He may still be a one-termer. He may lose to the obviously, comically incompetent LNP. If he does it won’t be because (as they will claim) they were better suited to run the country. None of them are running the country. /17

It will be because the material conditions of peoples’ lives, and therefore their perception of status, are broken. It’s the economy, stupid. /end

Graphic from https://t.co/F0HuFENwsP

Picture from https://t.co/qEOZN17nj6

Politicians don’t run the world. Their officials do. It’s why countries keep running just fine during caretaker periods, while the Miss Universe competition (sorry, elections) are carried out. Politicians know nothing about running countries. It’s never been their job. /2

Their job is to act as a liaison point between the people who do run countries - the officials - and the public. Anyway, populism is when they develop delusions about actually running countries. And here we are. /3

I thought about this when reading about Ford’s EV plans. Trump of course rails against things like renewables and EVs. Promises to get rid of them (except Elon’s now), etc. But that horse has bolted. Massive investments already locked in. /4 https://t.co/WYlgYXpyhD

Trump is now entering a territory you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. The territory where the populist nonsense of the just completed Miss Universe pageant (sorry, election) collides head-on with material reality. /5

I wish people could see, by being a little closer to the actual operation of government, how much that top electoral layer is literally just hot air. It has almost zero relevance to what happens in a country every day. /6

As I Tweeted yesterday, a popular ‘landslide’ Miss Universe (sorry, election) win is a disaster for the incumbent. They’ve won a popularity contest, where the voters are desperate for help in their lives, and the winner’s understanding of their problems is zero. /7

History shows time and time again what happens to those leaders. It’s invariably brutal. Anybody seen Boris Johnson lately? Now the US is fired up for its very own Brexit. Make some popcorn, sit back and watch it all fall apart. /end

People vote mostly according to the material reality of their lives, and not according to the characteristics of any of the teams battling to rule them. ‘The economy’ is not only not helping those lives, but is actively undermining them. 2/3

Until we see that, we’ll keep wasting our time trying to understand elections by what made this or that team popular. Fix the material realities of peoples’ lives. The teams are irrelevant. /end

It’s partly a cultural thing too, to take a long-duration view of the events in our lives. I saw a demographer argue on the weekend that ‘we’ in the West need to take a more preventative approach to public issues, rather than reactionary. /2

Always that ‘we’ people use. The West doesn’t have a we. It had one between the end of WW2 and the late-1970s, at which point its robber barons swiftly replaced it with ‘the economy’. The idea that we’re all just individuals interacting in markets. /3

And that interaction will magically generate new innovation and wealth and social progress, optimally efficient. Of course the robber barons don’t actually believe any of this Invisible Hand nonsense. It’s just convenient cover for hijacking the State. /4

Our politics since the 1970s has been overwhelmingly and proudly anti-State, pro-economy, ‘small government’ politics. Because we think politics is a thing, all sides of politics either agree with that framing, or use it as a baseline. /5

In reality we’re only reliving the battles earlier feudal societies lived, between nobles and the King, for ultimate power and status. We have lots of nobles now, a proliferation of the billionaire class. But no King. Kings keep the nobles in check. /6

The Chinese meanwhile maintain a proud State-focused society. With all its planning and ‘picking winners’, as our robber barons would say. The Chinese approach of course has its faults. There are no utopias. But *all* societies are more or less equivalently social. /7

They all use mechanisms to regulate status. Except the West now, where status games are endemic and epidemic, a daily ruthless team sports struggle for supremacy. So nothing meaningful gets done. Except trying to win elections. So that the winner can win more elections. /end

It’s universally common to describe the world as made up of nations. Ever since Westphalia in the 17th century, we’ve framed the world as competing States. That was the global team sports carve-up of human life. Nearly all human history precedes it. /2

To this day we try to create global unity by getting these nation States to agree with each other. That’s literally like trying to put Humpty together again. We have it completely backwards. /3

Framing the world in this team sports way misses all of the material ways that world was already profoundly connected, before we carved it up with maps. Through processes like trade. Fast forward to today, and to China’s manufacturing revolution. /4

China is often called ‘the world’s factory’. And it really is that. But why don’t we fully allow what that means to sink in? That fact alone allows the West for example to pretend it runs ‘free market economies’ without significant State planning. /5

But that planning is still happening. It’s just being done in China, for us. We outsourced it. We live lives replete with cheap consumer goods trading in ‘free markets’, because China makes those cheap goods. It does all the massive planning that makes that possible. /6

Our market democracies are a fantasy. They’re still doing all the same centralised planning we mock in communist countries, in fact the communist countries took over that role, for us. So that we can pretend the cheap goods trading in our markets happen all by themselves. /7

All nation States are really functionally equivalent, in social terms. Human life is carried out in pretty much the same ways, worldwide, with only relatively minor variations. None of the -isms are real. The world isn’t some capitalist States, and some socialist States. /8

It’s people living in social ways pretty much equivalent everywhere, wth the same sorts of material needs. Redraw the world map *materially*. Ignore the hot air of the ‘political’ and nationalistic team sports. /9

You could see the world as one giant State, materially, with each country contributing different things. For years China for example has been planning and building the renewables infrastructure to fight climate change. /10

That’s why the prices of renewables plummeted, due to that astronomical effort. That’s exactly what the world said it needed, and China did it, because it’s the ‘world’s factory’. It’s doing the same with EVs. Materially (rather than politically), it’s getting on with it. /11

If you swap the filters and start to see the world materially (what I call reality politics), all the nation State team sports appears for exactly what it is. Hot air. Games we play above the actual material reality of the world. /end

‘Popular sovereignty’ is the system of government of modern democracies. A system of government where ‘the people’ are sovereign. The problem with that whole idea is that it’s both a logical and physical impossibility. /2

Groups of people, of whatever size, simply don’t, and can’t, think, act or feel as a single entity. And yet this is the nonsense we hear every day, as ‘democracy’. The idea that ‘the people’ has replaced the sovereign (King, or whatever), at the centre of societies. /3

It’s easy to understand how an actual sovereign can govern something. They give orders, which are then carried out. Cascade down through all the levels of society, and that basic ‘centralised’ direction is easily visible, in business, in any human organisation, in families. /4

But not anywhere will you find a group of people, whether the tiniest sporting club, or an organisation, or an entire nation, taking on that directing role. Because it can’t logically, or physically, be done. /5

Groups of people are not ‘of one mind’. They never, ever, simultaneously arrive at the same decision, or even think or feel the same things. You will always if you look find an origin for how groups of people seem to act. And it will always be led, by a tiny number of them. /6

Who others in the group then emulate/imitate. Not because the rest are stupid, but because seriously, how did we ever believe an entire group would simultaneously all become one deciding mind? We’ve all been in groups. We *know* that’s not how they work. /7

Even at school, when given a group assignment. We know that the group doesn’t all sit down and suddenly, like possessed savants, start automatically thinking and writing the same things. Somebody has an idea. Others mull it over, and accept it, or not. Or modify it. /8

Individually. The perversity of this libertarian political idea is that it worships the individual, and then enshrines a ludicrous model of group mesmerism as a governance model. All change is led. In all groups. There is no popular sovereignty. /9

Just look at what we call democracy. The only actual thing ‘the people’ do, is vote. That’s the only way anybody has any meaningful sense of what this supposed group is thinking and wants. The people they vote for then rule. But have no sovereignty. Oxymoronic. /10

Those who actually rule have no sovereignty, while those ruled do nothing, but have (supposedly) all the sovereignty. Who believes this nonsense? /11

‘But the people get to choose who lead, that’s their sovereignty.’ There’s almost a glimmer of logic there. Except, as above, the people isn’t a thing. Groups don’t think, feel and act. /12

What happens instead is what we’ve seen this past week. Whoever is most popular, wins. There’s no collective group activity here. Millions get behind their most popular candidate, who leads them, and whom they then emulate or imitate. /13

The whole thing is as intensely hierarchical or ‘top-down’ as the actual sovereign, monarchical model it supposedly replaced. That replacement was a con. Removing the King or equivalent left a void at the heart of societies, which now any grifter can fill. /14

I share this often, because it’s exactly what the Trumps of the world are doing, and why they win. They’re occupying the role of the sovereign which our claptrap about ‘the people’ makes perpetually vacant. Humans create status hierarchies. It’s what societies are. /15 https://t.co/tdudQum7UA

Not because we’re all sheep, but because a status hierarchy reflects that we can’t all do everything at once. We need expertise in all fields of life, to lead us. That expertise has status, in each field of life. Look around you, you’ll see it for everything. /16

Plumbing, cooking, dentistry, singing…whatever. All status hierarchies. Just as governance of an entire nation is. Our democracies are being destroyed by a type of Freudian hang-up the founders of the US had, about monarchs. /17

Stung by their exile from Europe, by monarchs, they were determined to never succumb to one again. But that’s led to the most obscene abomination. /18

The pretense that nobody is leading, that we’re all doing it. A DIY society! Like all of us doing our own plumbing, flying our own planes, doing our own root canal work. How do we not see this actually happening? Everybody now ‘doing their own research’? /19

And each of us now running the entire country! Again, who believes this rubbish? Sadly, most believe it. Meaning every tinpot Napoleon-wannabe is now free to lord over us, while claiming we’re actually in charge. /end

ReThinkX used obesity as an example of how decades of moralising and education and advocacy achieved diddly squat. New drugs might finally be targeting the actual problem. But what fun is that, if you can’t moralise about how wrong other people are? /2 https://t.co/6gsJDNZ0yq https://t.co/eb8YhqW6rF

As they say, the *immediate* response to that from within the advocacy/awareness framing will be ‘that’s just a technological fix’. Technology has always been not only social, but the MOST social part of societies. Bruno Latour always tried to make that point. /3

I’ve done a lot of threads on the intrinsically social nature of engineering and technology. About how the most stable cultures in history put engineering at their centre. /4

To create and maintain a technology requires a level of social coordination that far surpasses any approach to human life that involves people arguing with each other in battling teams. That’s, as I always say, just team sports. It solves zero problems. /5

Many have made the case that engineers could end Covid in pretty quick time, for example. It’s not a problem of mass stupidity or capitalism or all the other team sports nonsense you read here and elsewhere. They’ve torpedoed pandemics before, with public works. /6

If, as Ed Conway talks about in his wonderful book, we focused on the material conditions of life, most of our political problems would disappear in the pointless puff of hot air that they are. Our politics thrives on dysfunction, because dysfunction fuels team sports. /7 https://t.co/ES6UAjqj8N

Advocacy is boring, sorry. Pointless, and boring. People who love it love the rationale it gives them to form a group and go into battle. We could redirect that energy to the calm materiality of problems. The material world *is* the social world, in its most intense form. /8

Fixing material problems also unifies people, socially and culturally. That’s what the Romans knew, and why their empire lasted for so long. The Victorian empire was exactly the same. Engineering at its core. /9

One of the reasons I never go to conferences is because I think it’s ridiculous to think that talking to one another solves anything. A very large proportion of the most successful organisations in history were run by engineers. /10

Not because they implemented ‘technological fixes’ to more complex social problems. But because they looked at all the hot air belly-aching of a social problem, and said ‘hmm, you know if you actually just did this…’. /end

Family members would actively lobby for an ‘allowance’ to live on, from the heir to the family estate. We’re moving towards that model again now, with most wealth concentrated generationally. /2

With parents ‘helping out’ children to do even the basics, like have somewhere to live. This is us returning to the status-driven societies Christie was living in, pre-wars. Where status was concentrated in families too. /3

Usually in the first-born male heir. We’re seeing children even murdering parents, for their inheritance. (There are significant numbers of these stories, globally.) /4 https://t.co/vsIuUhlV3H

The post-WW2 period up to the late-1970s were historically anomalous. Probably the only time in human history where collective life was focused on the collective good. Only the total devastation of the first half of the 20th century freed us from status hierarchies. /5

Now even those who would deny that’s important to them fight tooth and nail for their identity in status games, every day. If you don’t ’know your place’, you will invent one. That’s what most social media now is. /end

Those grievances are really fights for identity. For status, in society. The ‘there is no such thing as society’ political movements of our time led to this directly. That collective sense of identity is now mostly destroyed. /2

‘The public’. Gone. Which is why we’re left with an endless proliferation of complaining groups, trying to forge a replacement identity in the ruins. I will continue to try to reframe this chaos for what it is. Not politics, and certainly not economics. Not ‘capitalism’. /3

Just the absence of a stabilised status hierarchy in societies. Without that, everyday life becomes nothing but a fight for status. For identity. For recognition, as something rather than nothing. /end

Asia is the hub of world manufacturing and trade. Used by the West for decades as a cheap production arm of Western life, intra-Asian trade is now surpassing exports to other regions. /2

57% of global GDP growth between 2015 and 2021 originated in Asia. In 2021 Asia contributed 42% of world GDP, more than any other region. /3 https://t.co/A8Ry06naaI

Asia and Europe have formed coordinated manufacturing and trade blocs, which dominate the world. The circus now overtaking the old Anglo powers is classic imperial-decay delusion. Keating saw this coming. /4

AUKUS is a last-ditch desperation Judaeo-Christian wet dream. Big militaries is the only thing keeping the Anglo powers in the game. /end

"Events like these are often described as moral panics. Whilst this is surely correct in some cases, our investigation suggests an alternative possbility: that much of their explosive energy can derive not form panic, but desire for acclaim." /2

"They happen when games suddenly find ways of generatingh out-sized volumes of status for their players. When a rich seam is discovered, more and more individuals are attracted to the game, with a precondition for play being acceptance of its beliefs,..." /3

"...no matter how unlikely. Status is earned with active belief. As the games grow, and suck in satellite games around them, their beliefs come to seem increasingly mainstream. More players playing means means more status being generated, and so the game's..." /4

"...sucking power becomes more monstrous still, and so on and so on in a runaway process, the whole thing becoming self-sustaining, self-expanding, with it eventually becoming sufficiently massive to be felt right across the culture." /5

"In such scenarios, the status on offer can become vast and almost irresistibly seductive. Individual players transmute from being ordinary people living ordinary lives to becoming mighty and noble changers of worlds." /end

Older Silicon Valley leviathans also have also always had as their core mission to disintermediate social processes. To have their tools and services replace existing tools and services. To insinuate themselves into every facet of life. /2

And then to monetise it. One of the reasons these companies make such enormous sums of money is that they succeeded. They became 'obligatory passage points' (a Latour phrase) for modern life. They captured societies. /3

They've always had utopian visions for societies, this wasn't just about offering tools for existing social models. They wanted to remake societies. With them at the centre. I don't mean to be rude, but this is also a very American thing to do. /4

To on the one hand have a political system that proudly sells 'freedom' to the world. To be continuously and aggressively hostile to society and social things, as a type of 'socialism'. While rapidly organising and monetising the resultant chaos, to create tech-society. /5

'The Nerd Reich', as Duran calls it. I see it as a competely predictable evolution of the libertarian fantasies at the heart of American life. Societies exist. They need to be organised. In the absence of government to do it, corporations will do it. /6

And they will then export this anti-institutional Freudian hang-up everywhere their products go. Silicon Valley hardware and software now runs the world. Which means it owns the world. That was always the intent. /7

Cybercrime is a pestilence, a complete pandemic of clusterfuck. That's the world you and I have to negotiate now every day. You'll be lucky if anybody helps or compensates you for losses. /8

And the amazing irony to conclude this story? Who created SIlicon Valley? The US Navy. Government. /end

In even the most ‘objective’ of knowledge and information domains, science, the battle for status is the obvious underlying structure. Planck’s observation that progress in science comes only from the death of the current status hierarchy. /2 https://t.co/FWzj6jbOUq

The world looks like a chaotic and depressing mess right now, to many. In many ways it is. But the structure of that mess is actually extremely simple. It all looks and feels messy because we don’t have stabilised status hierarchies. /3

The problem isn’t that ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ are polluting some default peaceful and ordered life. Societies don’t run on information. They looked a bit like they did only in one period of history. /4

From the end of WW2, until about the late-1970s, with remnants surviving until the end of the 20th century. When the catastrophic death and destruction of the first half of the 20th century, 2 world wars, a pandemic and a financial crash, smashed status hierarchies. /5

Allowing an historical focus on collective life, for the first meaningful time in history. Driven by the emergency need to re-build that collective life. Only those catastrophes allowed that focus. By the late-1970s the work was largely done, and status games returned. /6

Today the world seems a chaotic mess because when those status games returned, nothing stabilised them. Historically monarchies and the church had stabilised these status games. Nothing has replaced them yet. /7

Today the nobles, the barons, the rich and powerful of feudal times and their modern corporate equivalents, both proliferate and battle for position at the top of our status hierarchies. The Nerd Reich has now stormed the parliaments, and is sitting at the tables. /8 https://t.co/9GMJAHZ8Ik

It won’t work. Barons and nobles have never had either the desire or ability to stabilise whole societies. Their interest is their own fiefdoms. They have zero appetite for the complexity of whole societies. /9

How do you restore a stabilised status hierarchy? We can’t just anoint new Kings and Popes, those models don’t resonate with enough people now to function. ‘Influencers’ are joining the robber barons to try to fill the gap too. That of course won’t work either. /10

We too often talk of history as if we have some superior vantage point, that can install this or that system, to fix things. It’s not how history works. New status hierarchies unfortunately come from ongoing fights and battles. From death and destruction. Last man standing. /11

Read history. The history of Kings and Popes is a history of continuous battle and war. Which did lead to a semi-stable hierarchy to structure all of society. Sociality is violence. Intrinsically. Social media should make that clear. Only status calms the violence. /12

The idea we could use social media to fix the world is (sorry) just tragically funny. Nothing will drive us further away from a stabilised society than the perpetual team sports we see here. Give up the idea that this is ‘the people’ democratically fixing anything. /13

The people is not and never has been (nor ever will be) a thing. It’s an abstract concept used by the victors of status games to rationalise their victory. No amount of activism fixes anything, Tha’s just more team sports. The fight for status. /14

Or to be fair, status hierarchies stabilise by lots of fighting. But the ones formed on social media are just insane. Welcome to the new Trump presidency. We are in history again, people, after a few decades of pretending we were at the end of it. /15

Lots of fighting and bloodshed and catastrophe to come, to stabilise status hierarchies again. I wish more than anybody it wasn’t necessary. But wish-fulfilment isn’t a way to live. /end

They went to jail because status hierarchies involved in dealing with the case lined up to convict them. The insanity of what they were accused of shows the power of status over any facts. Nobody challenged the status hierarchies. 2/6

"Children from their day-care center accused them – variously – of serving blood-laced Kool Aid; wearing white robes; cutting the heart out of a baby; flying children to Mexico to be raped by soldiers; using Satan’s arm as a paintbrush; burying children alive with animals;...3/6

"...throwing them in a swimming pool with sharks; shooting them; and resurrecting them after they had been shot." Like living with pandemic viruses, your first response should rightly be wtaf?!! 4/6

It makes 'living with' a pandemic even seem sensible. But no. The Kellers spent almost 22 years in jail. Many involved achieved national or even international status for their roles. That was the driver for the whole tragic case. 5/6

Status runs all societies. It will countenance the most absurd and tragic insanities, rather than surrender status. The complete insanity of living with a pandemic and doing nothing against climate change is also status. The 'status quo' is dependent on those insanities. /end

The belief says that ‘top-down’ means directions or orders or power descend from the top of a hierarchy, and are then followed by everybody below. And ‘bottom-up’ says groups of people direct action and thought, *as* groups. /2

This misunderstands how groups of people behave, and the physical reality of social interaction. It misunderstands the relationship between individual and collective, most fundamentally. /3

Just as there is no top and no bottom to any group, there is also no individual and no collective, as two distinct things. Our entire politics and even much of our intellectual life wallows in these illusions. /4

Groups are made up of individuals. But once in a group, individuals don’t suddenly become automatons, shed of all agency. Individuals CHOOSE to be in groups. It is the MOST fundamental social act humans do. /5

They choose what I call a team in social team sports, or what Will Storr calls a ‘status game’. A group or team is still just individuals. But individuals *delegating* certain things, to some members of that group. /6

Delegation is not surrender, it’s an active agency. Individuals give authority to some member(s) of the groups (up to about 5% usually, max), who then have higher status than the rest of the group. A simple empirical example. /7

If you join the local football club, say because your kids play football. That club will usually have a governance structure. A president perhaps, a treasurer, a secretary, etc. Those positions are filled by other parents usually, people just like you. /8

A small handful of people. Like I say, about 5% max of the entire group. They become the ‘top’ of the group. You’re now the ‘bottom’. But do they just give ‘top-down’ orders now, which everybody else blindly obeys? /9

Hilarious. Every single group any of us has been a member of doesn’t function like that. Much of it is a constant pushback at decisions made. The ‘top’ positions are under constant assault. Their *delegated* authority (from us) is always provisional. /10

But don’t fall for the ‘democracy’ fantasy that this means the rest of us in the club, the ‘bottom’, are some coordinated agency acting against the ‘top’ either. We’re all still just individuals. Opposition to the top is always driven by other individuals in the group. /11

Challenging the status of the current top. ‘The people’ is a nonsensical myth of groups of individuals somehow spontaneously thinking and acting in simultaneous concert. How did that ever become a belief? It’s not physically or even logically possible. /12

Within every group there are rivals for positions on the group’s status hierarchy. Provisional victories are achieved, that hierarchy can stabilise. But it’s a dynamic stability. Always shifting. It’s why you can never really predict elections. /13

Animal Farm was a meditation on this process. Of how those who speak for the people are always just trying to establish some new status hierarchy. But beware. This absolutely is NOT to say we should have status-free groups. That’s the myth of ‘the people’ again. /14 https://t.co/tS0QkwXCCf

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with status. It’s quality, we have better or worse pilots or teachers, or whatever. Those values create hierarchies, and should. It’s social progress, it’s how we don’t always have to do everything ourselves. That’s what delegation is. /15

Our modern age has an intrinsic hatred of the whole idea of hierarchy, because we have these deep misunderstandings about tops, bottoms, individuals and groups. Hierarchy does not, ever, separate authority from ‘the people’. /16

We are all of us, always, in charge. The people who lead us are just one of us, too. Delegated authority, by us, to do certain things. There are no tops, there is no vantage point that allows you to control others. That control is always delegated, to a leader. /17

And that’s not some ‘the people’ acting, that’s all of us as individuals acting. There’s no binary here. Individuals form groups, which are made up of nothing but those individuals. Groups are individuals acting in particular delegating ways. /18

It’s quite accurate to see a group like a phase of matter. Water is still water when it’s liquid, ice or steam. Similarly groups are a (literal, physical) phase of individual life, individuals acting in group-like ways. Delegating. But always as individuals. /end

Picture credit: https://t.co/DQ9lWBiXnu

Surely it’s obvious that the magnitude of the problems we face with an ongoing pandemic, climate change, housing, ageing populations etc. are never going to be fixed by popularity contests (elections)? Surely? Who seriously thinks electing people will fix this? 2/3

Being the grown up in the room is reading history. Looking at how this same pattern has repeated throughout history. Everything will need to collapse before anything is done. There’s no joy for me in that. But a calm of recognition at least. /end

The team sports or status battles that dominate societies now are all connected. The daily wars over Covid and Gaza and whatever else is ‘trending’ is rival groups (teams) battling for supremacy. Elections and ‘politics’ are the Grand Final. /2

Now political analysts ponder why people win landslide elections without even having policies. It’s because none of it is about doing anything, materially. It’s team sports. Winning a game of football won’t fix climate change. Elections are just football. /3

The entire status games/team sports culture is a veneer of hot air overlaid upon the actual material conditions of human life on Earth. The two have no necessary connection whatsoever. One is a popularity contest, the other the actual material conditions of life. /4

It is possible to couple the two, status and material progress. The Victorian empire did it, everybody from the Queen down celebrated the complete material re-working of social life. The Chinese do it right now. The Romans pioneered it. /5 https://t.co/l5YUJQXVl8

Here in the West there’s an almost total disconnect. Status has broken free from any material foundation, it’s a virulent and desperate daily battle for top dog, in every area of life. ‘The market’. ‘Competition’. Not to produce anything meaningful except status. /6

Permission for status games or team sports to be all of life, all day, every day. That is literally what the social and cultural reality of ‘the economy’ is. Humans have been here many times before in history. /7

Unless those status games are stabilised, the only outcome is ever increasing violence. What stabilises them is hitching them to the material conditions of life. So that high status is attached to fixing basic material problems. /8

Try that in the West. Productivity Commissions will come for you with venomous cries of ‘picking winners’. How dare we channel status towards some needed material outcome! If ‘the market’ wants novelty rubber ducks instead of flood mitigation, that’s what it should have! /9

I’m so bored with the daily team sports, here, all the way up to what we call ‘politics’, which again is nothing but the Grand Final of the team sports here. We affect disdain for it, but the 3 years between polls is foreplay leading to our great electoral orgasm. /10

People LOVE it. Never believe they don’t. And they never give up hope that this next election will be the one that finally fixes everything. You can’t vote your way out of the mess voting causes. Popularity/status can’t and won’t solve a single material problem. /end

Just as they’ve been attracted to tax-free super here, turning it into an astronomical tax avoidance scheme. In the UK this drove up the price of rural land enormously, as the wealthy ploughed (ha) their ample spare dollars into England’s verdant green. 2/5

And in true 21st century fashion, this re-focusing, which will reportedly impact only a few hundred tax avoiding ‘farmers’, has been re-cast by them as an assault on ordinary farmers. Crocodile tears about the nobility of ‘growing food for England.’ 3/5

Who hasn’t seen this same strategy used everywhere now, the actual elites portraying public administration as ‘elites’ robbing ‘ordinary people’? You’d think we’d call out this shit by now. 4/5

It’s the sort of thing that eventually emptied the thousands of aristocratic villas in the French countryside, as they were led off to the guillotine. /end

Whenever a group reaches a certain intensity of rivalry for status, the status game ‘tightens up’, as Will Storr says. Meaning the status hierarchy is replaced by an angry crowd or mob. Elias Canetti won his Nobel Prize analysing this form of social life. /2 https://t.co/HqgKhnhms6

The crowd or mob is now no longer following a hierarchy, but rather discharges the pent up anger and frustration at the chaos of their lives, created by status games. To discharge that anger, it finds a scapegoat. /3

A sacrifice, to release the crowd anger. Because social media dramatically accelerates social mechanisms, you can see this happening every single day. ‘De-platforming’, ‘cancellation’. Swarms of crusading zealots, seeking total reputational death for the chosen victim. /4

Storr brilliantly points out that these crusading swarms are mostly made of people who are themselves socially marginalised. This is their revenge, their solidarity, turning the exclusion usually focused on them back upon the unbeliever. /5

Girard’s belief was that Christianity’s genius was the direct targeting of this scapegoating mechanism. By crucifying Christ, who defused scapegoating to take all of the anger and sin of the world upon himself. /6 https://t.co/v4MuFbUng3

Our education is too narrow and shallow now to see the role Christianity played in the West in particular, in actually building our societies. By first creating a stabilised status hierarchy, through the church, to control status games throughout society. /7

And then to defuse the scapegoating mechanism, these lethal swarming destructions of death. Our views of religion are still bogged down in a more recent status game, The Enlightenment. Which can only see religion as a rival for science. /8

Go beyond that and I think the function of religion has always been to control violence in societies. By targeting status games in all of their dimensions. By placing the arbiter of status disputes outside the collective. Transcendent gods do this in many cultures. /9

Until we recognise that societies run on status, we’ll be trapped inside multiple bubbles or teams every day, fighting other teams, thinking that’s important somehow. Fighting for our actual identity, which is what status is all about. /10

Joining the mob-swarm, to cancel the unbelievers. Just look at the vitriol on these platforms every day, sociality is violence. We fight in teams, and then we ‘tighten up’ and swarm, to ‘cancel’ the unbelievers. /end

Gelfand does something that is similar to my passion for 'reality politics'. She finds a much more realistic, material explanation for these differences. And what she found has dramatic implications for things like pandemics and 'politics'. 2/5

Gelfand says the degree of control a society exhibits is a manifestation of the magnitude of the challenges it has faced, historically. That fighting these challenges can semi-permanently change the culture, the social behaviour. 3/5

So for example countries we see as authoritarian today often had catastrophic challenges to overcome in history, such as plagues and natural disasters and wars, which required intense social cohesion to defeat. That intense cohesion can survive for centuries. 4/5

The implications of this research are huge. More to come! /end

3) Big subsidies are given out for house purchases, conversion and maintenance. 4) Big spending on socially deprived areas. 5) Young engaged couples offered interest-free loans to start their lives together. /2

6) Huge subsidies for theatre tickets, concerts in factories, construction of lots of new theatres. 7) Organisation of new operas and plays. 8) Workers offered heavily discounted holiday packages, 75 percent off rail tickets and 50 percent off accommodation. /3

9) Heavily subsidised cruises organised for ordinary people. 10) A massive winter aid drive raised hundreds of millions for the needy, providing them with food, clothing and fuel. 11) Car companies commissioned to create affordable vehicles for ordinary people. /4

12) A wide range of advanced public health measures are introduced, including restrictions on asbestos, radiation, pesticides and food dyes, and world-leading occupational health and safety reforms. /5

13) Aggressive public health campaigns are introduced against smoking. 14) Unemployment was reduced from over 30%, to 0%, in 5 years. Anyone? /6

This was Germany under the leadership of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party, pre-WW2. Hitler was probably the most popular democratically-elected leader in history. You can see why. All fascism begins with popularity. Fascism is endgame populism. /7 https://t.co/8sfSWMB9oN

If you make popularity the source of ultimate power in a society, as we do with elections, you will always end up with fascism. Which is a hopeless concept. What you really end up with is a monarchy, or pope. A King. That’s the most popular thing, always. /8

The only alternative to that is a public administration, which only follows periods of utter catastrophe, as we all experienced post-WW2 in the re-build. Without catastrophe to sweep away status hierarchies, we always revert back to Kings. History’s default state. /end

Many of these family dynasties were maintained by inter-marriage between blood relations. Up to 10% of marriages in the world to this day are between blood relations. What weakened this form of status hierarchy was the Catholic Church, with its campaign against incest. /2

Joseph Heinrich, a Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology, and colleagues, have amassed amazing evidence of the impact of this breaking down of familial lines as the status hierarchies dominating societies. This led to the rise of the now common ‘nuclear family’. /3

Where children are expected to leave the family unit and establish independent families of their own. No historical change is neat, of course we still see significant use of familial lines to create and maintain status. /4

‘The bank of mum and dad’ is in some ways a returning to that model. We’re heading backwards in history in multiple ways in modern ‘economies’, towards older social forms. That’s what ‘the economy’ remains, a social mechanism to displace modern States. /5

Returning us to older social forms. Monarchy, churches, and the use of status hierarchies more generally to dominate collective life, in a way the public life led by public officials post-WW2 suppressed. /6

Humans as status-loving creatures (nothing drives us more) always actually hated public administration, as the continuous calculation and implementation of a public good. The social model that gave us public health and social welfare. The darling targets of modern politics. /7

What we call a ‘cost of living’ crisis is really the collapse of the social model of the nuclear family. Also a collapse we see in the epidemic of domestic violence. Many children now live with their parents again, well into adulthood. /8

Will we see a return to inter-marriage, to incestuous family lines in the medieval way? To generate and protect status? There is no necessary direction to history, anything is possible. Many such lines still exist, in watered-down ways. /9

Societies are 100% social. I’m hoping people can see that the childish, simplified framing of societies using our traditional political categories like Left and Right explains almost nothing at all. Always look for current ways to generate and hoard status. /10

That’s what society is really all about. The team sports of rival status groups, or status games. Imitative rivalry. Every ‘issue’ you see debated daily is really a battle for status. Information doesn’t run societies. You’re watching rival social groups. /end