April 2025

You hear right now, ‘why do you drive a Tesla?’ They’re actually saying ‘the group doesn’t like Teslas now, are you with us or against us?’ Disguised as activism for a cause (defeating Trump, a hopeless strategy for that). But it’s now a group conformity thing. 2/2

Both Left and Right teams are fighting for the same thing, without even realising. The idea that individuals make decisions through rational choice. The Right use that as the basis of free market fantasy. The Left use it as the basis of ‘the people’-driven democracy. /2

Fighting and debating actually requires fundamental agreement. Like all team sports, you need to agree to fundamentally basic assumptions, for the game to even begin. And the kicker here is, both teams are actually, fundamentally, wrong. /3

Rational choice theory is a fantasy, it’s not how humans operate, or have ever operated. Humans are *social animals*. Most of my Tweeting of the past few years is about that. To try to restore the most basic fundamentals of how humans, think, feel and act. /4

Humans form groups, and they do that using the actual most fundamental human act. By imitating or copying others, of higher status. That then gives them a social identity. It makes them somebody, rather than nobody. Membership of a team. /5

These teams form status hierarchies. Societies are networked, clumpy. The hubs are the status networks, always shifting. They are not, ever, a huge amorphous population-sized mass both Left and Right call ‘the people’. /6 https://t.co/OPooPL3A5n

Both Left and Right campaign to this fictitious ‘people’, also Hitler’s beloved ‘volk’. How’s that for bedfellows. It’s a con. They just want to form more powerful status hierarchies, led by them, under the pretence that they’re merely voicing the ‘will of the people’. /7

I’m sorry, it’s horseshit. Not because they’re betraying the will of the people, but because there is no such thing as the people, and there is therefore no will. There are only status hierarchies. People can be led to believe opposite things from one day to the next. /8

With shifts in status. Dutton is going to an election with a policy of Soviet-style government energy generation. The party of ‘small government’. It gives his team status, by enlisting those who don’t know a single thing about nukes. But who hate ‘Greenies’ and ‘Lefties’. /9

Until we have a politics that focuses only on the actual material needs of societies, decoupled completely from status games, all that we’ll produce is what we have now. Those material needs used as fodder in status games. Now on social media, that’s its business model. /end

And now, yesterday. He’s not a fascist dictator. He’s a conman, making dodgy ‘deals’. /end https://t.co/gFCxqEqkBi

All societies are really feudal aristocracies. Not because ‘the people’ are always duped or screwed, but because that’s what most people want. Hierarchy. Hierarchy comes from status, which is the currency of all societies. People crave it more than anything else. /2

Because status is also identity. It makes you somebody, rather than nobody. Nobody wants to be nobody. This is the basic behaviour, social behaviour, of humans as social animals. All of our politics ignores it. /3

What we even call politics is this same behaviour, re-badged and misunderstood. Elections are massive popularity contests, long ago hijacked by status games. And there’s also nothing wrong with status per se. /4

Recognising something as better than something else - hierarchy - is the most basic moral and ethical behaviour. The choice isn’t between status hierarchy societies, and democracies, the supposed ‘groundswell’. /5

There is never a groundswell. No groups of people, of whatever size, ever act as a single agency. They’re always led by about 5% of the members of any group. That’s a figure I got from the analysis of Korean POW camps. /6

Where deliberate removal and killing of that 5% amongst American POWs rendered the rest of the prisoners helpless. They just died, in record numbers, offering next to no resistance. I did a thread about it: /7 https://t.co/xs9uVL1sY8

The choice is between different types of status hierarchies, as Will Storr’s brilliant book on status discusses. The massive gains in social life in the past few centuries had a lot to do with making that progress itself a status game. /8

The Republic of Letters was that status game. Success games, as Storr calls them, where status was allocated to the scientific and other work directed at social progress. Victorian England was one manifestation of those new status games. /9 https://t.co/sh93E3uo37

Not a ‘groundswell’ change led by a fictitious ‘the people’. ‘The people’ is a myth made popular by fascists in the 20th century, Hitler’s ‘volk’. All human life is led by status. All hierarchical, because hierarchy reflects a deliberate distinction between good and bad. /10

If you need a plumber, you want a good plumber. Not the most popular plumber, selected by ‘the people’. You want a plumber who knows how to do plumbing. Sometimes those are the same thing. But there’s nothing that makes that anything other than fortuitous. /11

American democracy is dying because of the mythologies it lives, about democracy. It’s simple, democracy is not and has never been, nor ever could be, a movement of ‘the people’. It’s governance *for* the people. But not BY them. ‘The people’ is a count, not a thing. /12

It’s government via public institutions, that bypass all the popularity piffle of daily team sports. Those institutions only tend to exist and have authority to the extent the status games of everyday life are suppressed. /13

I’ve Tweeted often how they came to be in our lifetimes, via 4 catastrophic events of the first half of the 20th century. WW1, the Spanish Flu, the Great Depression and WW2. Those catastrophes destroyed status hierarchies. Allowing breathing space for public institutions. /14

Institutions set up to rebuild societies after those catastrophes, post-1945. What the Republic of Letters did for the Victorians, catastrophe did for us. That’s mostly how history works. Only rarely does status get aligned with social good. /15

The Republic of Letters was anomalous (but could be repeated). Mostly humans just play status games decoupled from the social good, until societies collapse. Mostly catastrophes create the only progress. Punctuated equilibria, the equilibria being human status games. /16

Those who sang about power to the people in the 1960s are now worth hundreds of millions of dollars. They’re high status. The great mythology of the people will destroy democracy. /end

You can see here the great resistance to EVs is concentrated heavily and unsurprisingly in 4WD and ute-driving social groups. Cars help define who you are, socially. They’re not tools, they’re status markers. Now…who’s driving those 4WDs and utes? /2 https://t.co/BCsJYzoUPC

Older people, mostly. The change to electric vehicles is a threat to their sense of identity, heavily wound up in the cars they drive. None of this has the slightest bit to do with the merits of any particular technology. Societies don’t run on information. /3 https://t.co/CsiElsf4Oo

You can tell this social grouping that their determined passion is costing them bucketloads of money (because it is). It’s unlikely to shift them, unless they’re financially desperate. Status dominates human life. /end https://t.co/YQJyIvvgf0

The worst thing you can be in the giant high schools we call economies, is either young or old. Lives, that previously progressed through inter-connected stages defined by age, are now lifestyles. ‘Living our best lives’. Permanent gap years, from reality itself. /2

We don’t have anywhere near enough children to even replace ourselves, and the ones we do have we’re now infecting repeatedly with a Class 3 biohazard, because doing anything else is too disruptive of our lifestyles. Our travelling. Our perpetual dining out. /2

Look and you’ll see it, our adult lives are now the old adolescent gap year, extended to the entire lifespan. We substituted an eternal adolescence, for a circle of life. /3

The old are tolerated while they can still emulate teenage life, like the Rolling Stones or Paul McCartney, doing gigs into their 80s. Talk to a hospital manager about ED beds clogged with the elderly who aren’t so lucky, waiting for aged care beds that don’t exist. /4

Talk to the parents of kids who now never seem to get better, infection after infection. Talk to the young living in their cars, because they can’t even find or afford somewhere to rent, let alone own. If they even have a car. /5

Look at the perversion that retirement now is. The concept of an ‘elder’, embodying hard-won wisdom after a lifetime of experience, replaced with the perpetual tourist, again on a gap year from reality, spending the collective wealth families desperately need to just exist. /6

The entire circle of life, flattened by high school culture, permanent adolescence. A cultural accident, we had no idea creating high schools would cause a replacement of adult culture itself, with high school culture. It’s obvious though, why, when you look. /7

If you create a separate space for children, decoupled from the adult world, then that’s the culture those children will grow up in. And when they leave school, they will remake the adult world, with that same culture. It’s all they know. Nobody leaves school now. /8

These platforms are structured to emulate that same high school culture. It’s why they’re social heroin, why people can’t look away. Why our entire lives, from the most intimate personal, through to the professional and political, are now transacted on these platforms. /9

All the same mechanism, popularity-based groups or teams, which give us an identity, and in conflict with other groups or teams. That’s the schoolyard. Not an analogy. The medium is the message. /10

Public policy has been replaced with what’s ‘trending’. Elections swing from the extreme Left to the extreme Right, inside 3 years. Both meaningless terms, just team names. The ‘Right’ in the current Oz election is running a Soviet-era energy program. /11

Again, look at the young and the old. Plummeting birth rates, and impoverished and infected kids. All of society’s wealth shunted to retirement, where it can be spent on a permanent gap year. Only the healthy adolescent lifestyle adult can exist. The kidult. /12

I’m so bored with politics, the team sports that plays out here every day, the cartoon fascists and Nazis. Like kids playing a board game, which is all that’s really going on. Social media has entrenched this cultural shift now. /13

The rush of new likes and followers, just like being at school again! Because we never leave school now. Shutting these idiot platforms down would the greatest breath of fresh air for all societies. It will never happen. /14

Nobody knows how to be an adult any more. We could shut the platforms down, but then what? Nobody knows what to do. The few who still labour away in public institutions, trying to keep the old adult life alive, are all retiring. Despised bureaucrats now. /15

And the global population now addicted to their daily ‘feeds’ would resist their social heroin being taken from them with real violence, I’m sure. It’s hard to replace a culture. Probably impossible. Once they’re down, they don’t get back up again. /16

And that leads to catastrophe, can you smell it in the air, on every issue? Only that changes human behaviour. /end

We have a ridiculous idea that democracy is millions of people somehow spontaneously running countries. When that turns out not to be the case and sociopathic idiots keep winning elections, what do we do? Say ‘the fascists are taking over’. /2

Leaving out how ridiculously popular these supposed fascists are. They romp home in elections. It’s not a coup, millions are cheering them on. The real problem here isn’t a fascist takeover. It’s our ideas about democracy. /3

If you’re going to vest ultimate power in a person who can win a popularity contest (election), then why be surprised when sociopaths keep winning elections? Bullies and sociopaths learn how to win popularity contests in primary school. /4

In the corporate world, it’s just marketing. There’s not one way popularity has any connection with the empirical problems in our lives. We don’t hire staff or CEOs using popularity, because that would be ridiculous. But we turn over total control of our societies to it. /5

Trumpism isn’t fascism. It’s populism, in its endgame. Which is just feudalism. He’s a King, not a fascist dictator. People love kings. His tech cronies are the King’s baron’s, not fascists. Trying to carve up the spoils, in collaboration and confrontation with the King. /6

These ‘fascist’ narratives reflect the complete impotence the people who write them know is their actual lot. We feel that if we use the darkest words and concepts, it somehow makes that impotence less. /7

But as above, this isn’t a fascist coup. Millions are cheering it on. The enemy isn’t fascist tech billionaires and their useful idiot Trump, it’s us. Thinking if we could just have one more election, we could elect away the problems the last elections caused. /8

It was Dave Graeber and Marshall Sahlins who first made me realise, this, in their book on kings. You can read it for free online. You don’t even need to get past the preface to see the argument. /9 https://t.co/jnbIMM9f48

Here it is. This idiot idea we have of ‘the people’ running democracies, what Graeber and Sahlins politely call a ‘curious and contradictory principle’. As they say, people want their kings. They’re impossible to get rid of. /10 https://t.co/2vJk7i8u1m

Until we stop seeing every idiot who wins an election acting in an ‘authoritarian’ way as the return of fascism, we’ll keep bellowing impotent hot air words that do nothing to address the real issue. We need to understand how people think, feel and act. /end

Activism politics loves this idea that if you mobilise people, they can force change. ‘Grassroots’ democracy, ‘power to the people!’ It’s not what really happens, and you don’t have to look hard to see it. ‘The people’ is a fiction. /2

There will always be some pre-weakening of the existing status quo, when an activist campaign seems to work. In this case, Rewiring made very little progress politically since its inception here. Certainly it had visibility, but very little punch politically. /3

What changed? The ‘cost of living crisis’, coupled with an election. The existing status quo, topped by existing parties, recognised a serious threat to themselves. Suddenly rewiring solutions were met with open arms. Not because activism forced a change. /4

But because the status quo felt threatened. It will happily chew up and spit out home electrification tomorrow, if it thinks votes are more easily had somewhere else. We saw this with Covid. Initially the status quo felt threatened, like everybody else. /5

So here in Oz we saw traditional public health kick in, and basically kick Covid’s arse. So well that the status quo thought, hang on, we could sell this whole thing as over pretty easily. /6

And that’s what they did, we were suddenly ‘living with’ a pandemic. Acting against a pandemic was doing scary things for the status quo, like freeing people shackled to their workplaces and daily commutes. And redistributing wealth through Covid assistance payments. /7

All of that had to be shut down immediately, to protect the status quo. We all saw it happening, we’re still seeing it today (still the same hysteria about lockdowns and WFH). Change never comes from the ‘bottom up’. Societies don’t have tops or bottoms. /8

They have status hierarchies, but everybody is part of those hierarchies, and mostly loves the battle to try to get a step higher in them. Only catastrophes (or the threat of) bring meaningful change. Rewiring is just the latest clear example. /end

Vehicles are a dominant marker of status. One of the clearest ways to see how what we call ‘technology’ is really just one more way we create social status distinctions. How we create identity. Identity flows from status. How you become somebody, rather than nobody. /2

The BYD Shark is a direct assault on the highest status part of our current vehicle culture. The dual cab ute, and off-roading vehicles more generally. It’s enraged many in that culture. They devote hours trying to prove that it’s worthless. /3 https://t.co/jGm3Kb7bRr

It’s part-electric. It’s Chinese. Those two things alone are grenades thrown into the middle of this comfy status hierarchy, where the ute has become the vehicle de rigueur for everyday Australians. It was always going to be a shitfight. /4

BYD are clever enough to have made great inroads into this status quo, in a very short time. But the status quo won’t surrender that easily. The majority of people who buy dual cab utes never take them seriously off-road or tow anything with them. /5

But those are the touchstones for credibility in the status culture surrounding them. Thus the now relentless wars, the imitative rivalry, around the Shark. Do we get tired of everything now being a fight? I do. BYD have created a real innovation here. /6

Electric or part-electric off-roading is still a work in progress. But grab a seat in one of these online wars and look at the comments. This isn’t about technical things. This is people fighting for status and identity. /7

We could sensibly say well done, BYD, this is a great leap forward. lol, yeh right. Read the comments. /8 https://t.co/jGm3Kb7bRr

This is all team sports, like everything in our culture now is. Everything is turned into a rivalry, with status and identity at stake. Social media dramatically magnifies this shift. Its business model and features are this status and identity mechanism. /9

And this is where spec culture comes in. Because these status games produce a proliferation of differentiated ways to distinguish status and identity. Spec or mod culture in utes is something to behold. It’s like grown ups playing with their GI Joe sets. /10

How you spec your ute helps further define you in your team, and vs other teams. We gloss over this sort of thing as ‘technical’. It’s nothing of the sort, it’s purely social behaviour. Creating and refining a status. /11 https://t.co/fz82pLoj8l

This has shifted into other vehicle categories too. Watch any of the major online review sites and you’ll see what I mean. A car review now is almost perverse. Every square centimetre of the vehicle is caressed and prodded. /12

The material even in the door bins is assessed for its ‘premium’ feel. Premium or luxury is now the expectation even in cheaper cars. A car with ‘hard plastics’ is like your dad wearing crocs, 10 years ago. A social gaffe. /13

Reviewers literally caress and prod every surface of the vehicle, to assess its premium quality. It’s like watching a forensic pathologist dissect a cadaver. This is the same social shift as the rivalry I’ve discussed above. Rivalry produces the demand for premium. /14

The growth of luxury products is clear to observe in many industries right now. This is a culture now overwhelmed by status games. Everything is a fight. Everything is premium. That’s our lives now. /15

Because we demand that there is no such thing as ‘elites’, and we think we live in flattened hierarchies we call democracies, we paradoxically generate a pandemic of the opposite. Status games now infect every aspect of our lives. /16

By constantly attacking our centralised status hierarchies, like governments and other institutions, we set free an orgy of status-seeking everywhere else. Take away our collective ways of having status and identity, and we will reinvent them, individually. /17

Leading to a society that is essentially gang culture. Competing gangs in every area of life fighting for status and identity. People set fire to and vandalise Teslas, while abusing their drivers, the brand now on the outer of social acceptability. /18

Without centralised, collective status hierarchies, gang culture replaces civilised society. Nothing but status games. Gangs have their kings, they have their markers of ‘premium’ status (often gold, watches etc.). /19

All this is now happening in car culture and car reviews. It’s brutal, it’s boring, but it’s also a window into what we’re becoming. Good luck if you’re tired of all the fights and the premium products. Houses turned into hotel rooms on competitive renovation shows. /20

You can’t unsee it. /end

We’ve had fads and fashions forever. In clothing, music, hobbies, food, pets, technologies, etc. etc. None of that mattered a lot, people even had fun navigating the perpetual shift of what’s ‘cool’. But then something much more serious happened. An extinction-level shift. /2

We allowed this social mechanism to infect the basic operating system of what we could call ‘essential services’. The most fundamental mechanisms of running societies. We allowed what is real to be hijacked by fashion. Our new ontology became, literally, what ‘trends’. /3

Of course even in science, the exploration of objective truth has always been highly socialised, highly dependent on the battle of status groups. Planck’s observation about it only progressing a funeral at a time. /4

It’s not in any particular field that our assessment of reality was protected from the fads and fashions of everyday life. This was Edmund Burke’s insight. It’s in institutions that reality-mechanisms are shielded from social whim. /5

Institutions - customs and traditions - that arise in response to threat, to catastrophe. Nobody sets up or supports institutions just on a whim, they’re killjoys in the world of fads and fashions. They demand an adherence to long-term things. /6

They’re the past and future of human society, acting in the present. They will always seem like ‘red tape’ to the fashion-following present, that just wants to follow a whim. The institutions that have created and regulated our modern relative peace, health and prosperity? /7

They emerged from the 4 catastrophes I often Tweet about, in the first half of the 20th century. WW1, Spanish Fu, The Great Depression, and WW2. It was in rebuilding the wreckage from those 4 catastrophes that ‘public’ life emerged. From institutions rebuilding societies. /8

The same institutions human status games, the world of fads and fashions, attacked from the 1970s, when societies were functioning pretty well again. They became dreaded ‘bureaucracy’. Red tape. Replaced with a ‘market’ of eternal fads and fashions. Societies as economies. /9

The economy is a political fiction. Free markets were invented to specifically destroy the institutions running societies. The idea that billions of individuals would spontaneously self-organise into civilisation. This bullshit fantasy has dominated our lives for decades. /10

But how did this shift back to perpetual status games, to eternal fads and fashions and whims, manage to infect the deepest engine rooms of the institutions that actually run our lives, society’s autonomic nervous system? Say hello to social media. /11

The whole idea of social media, embedded in how the platforms work, is to destroy trust. The institutional world we evolved from relied upon hierarchies of trust or status. We each did our own thing, and trusted that the basics were being taken care of. /12

We trusted that somebody, somewhere, was running things That’s what the institutions were doing (not the people we elected). But social media creates a social world where status comes only from popularity. From likes and followers. /13

And everybody is either on it or implicated in it. Science is here, engineering, politics, medicine etc. Watch Nobel prize winners here having to argue basic things with guys masturbating in front of a keyboard while eating chips. /14

Institutional life was the life where the Nobel prize winner had a priority say in how something panned out. That’s gone. Now the chip-eating wanker is just as likely to be able to assemble a war chest of followers, and determine an outcome. /15

We’re now ‘living with’ a pandemic, because that’s trending. The vast majority of people think the pandemic is over, because they use the metric they’ve always used. Not science. Just ‘what everybody else is doing’. In the past everybody emulated hierarchies of expertise. /16

Expertise working in institutions. Now they emulate whoever is trending, on social media. Influencers will make up whatever outrageous fantasy they feel like, provided it gets likes and followers. Reality is now literally only what trends. Reality is just fashion. /17

This is also not just confined to the loon fringes. ‘The economy’ for example is just a trend, not an objective reality. There isn’t a public issue today that isn’t just teams battling for status, in some latest trending outrage. Teslas, anyone? /18

This is also what makes public life now so flaky. Attention spans of toddlers. Entire populations lurch from one trend to another, sometimes within hours. There is no public policy now. You can win elections having no policies at all. Why would you bother? /19

When winning them is only about a victory in your current team sports. Not about making any material difference to peoples’ lives. Look at Trump right now. His *entire* agenda is a set of revenge retributions for social media battles he’s been engaged in. /20

Look around you, every day. If it trends now, it’s real. Not just popular. Everybody is now an expert in everything, because social media lets them be. It gives us a place where anything is real, provided we can get the followers. /21

And our entire lives, from the most intimate and personal, through to the professional and political, are now transacted on these platforms. They’re not ‘about’ the societies we live in. They are those societies now. /end

Human life is like a human body. The vast majority of it acts autonomically. Nearly everything a society does when it succeeds is an inherited custom or tradition. A habit. An institution. Emergent from the blood and death of history, as what allowed us to survive. 2/6

This is something populist (electoral) politics simply can’t understand. Nor the populist electors, who think human rationality solves society’s problems. Institutions (customs, traditions, habits) are what holds societies together. Again they’re society’s nervous system. 3/6

The dreaded ‘red tape’ of ‘bureaucracy’, but also our inherited customs and traditions, the origins of which we mostly don’t know. It’s like how nobody understands how animals became domesticated. Look it up, nobody really has a clue how it was done. 4/6

Always though it will have been a catastrophe of some kind that created the habit, the custom and tradition and institution. The domestication. Only the threat to existence interrupts present-focused status games. Creating institutional stability. 5/6

The original meaning of conservative, in Burke’s time, was somebody who understood this and therefore fought to protect institutions. Today’s conservatives are thugs. Reactionary revolutionaries, smashing things with abandon. Capitalising on the damage, for self-gain. /end

‘And yet it moves’ captures it. It’s a politics that says no matter how much humans fight each other for status, reality will be what it is, independent of them. And more, the outcome of those fights for status, our ‘debates’, will be decided by this same reality. /2

This includes even within science itself. It has no special relationship with reality, if anything it’s even more infected by human status games. Reality politics also recognises that we’re not mere observers of reality. We shape it, we’re part of it. /3

In that way our status games do create realities, they’re not entirely hot air. We’re living with a pandemic apparently, a case in point. But reality goes so far beyond humanity that you can go only run with a con like that for so long. We get found out. /4

Debates, the team sports of human status-driven life, don’t decide ultimate outcomes. Reality in that much wider sense always decides. “And yet it moves.” /5

This is also why I say only catastrophes really shift societies, creating meaningful change. History shows that to be true, and this is why. Those catastrophes are reality politics. Reality intervening in our navel-gazing status games. /6

Timescales are important. You can celebrate all manner of apparent victories in the daily fight for human status. The living with Covid folks have been doing that for a while, for example. But if you’re going against the reality of things, you will lose. /7

The brutal, desperate passion we have for our daily team sports, believing that victory in one of these status games will be the thing that will fix everything. Elections are the Premier League of these team sports. We’re so sure we can vote our problems away. /8

We’re groups of people arguing over whether a rock will fall when we drop it. That rock is going to fall, no matter how many teams argue otherwise, or reframe that falling as something else. Zoom out and look at all of our ‘political’ debates. (Really fights for status.) /9

How ridiculous they all are and seem, when you can reframe them in reality politics. The stupendous vanity of humans, to think their debates create reality itself. Reality could not care less about what we think, or about our status. /10

It tolerates us while those debates retain some sort of connection to the way things actually are, in reality. But status games always diverge from that connection. And then reality smashes us. Those catastrophes. That’s the pulse of all history. /11

It’s tremendously calming to step outside all of those status games, and be on the side of reality itself. None of us is a god, none of us really know what reality is, this isn’t a simplistic positivism. But you can still be on its side, by rejecting human status games. /12

You can still live calmly knowing that no matter which loons are currently winning the Premier League of human status, a catastrophe is coming to sit them on their arse. It’s an essential humility towards reality, and our lives within it. /13

To recognise that we don’t create reality. We are not gods. We’ve largely abandoned religion as a result of an earlier status game called the Enlightenment. That led us to create a cartoon caricature of religion as belief in supernatural beings. /14

But the essential insight of religion has always been more grounded than that. It’s just an acknowledgement that reality itself is always greater than any of our human status games about it. There is always a ‘higher power’, whatever you want to name it. Reality itself. /15

It created a humility towards life. An acceptance of our mortality and finitude and limited understanding. You won’t find even the tiniest shred left of that humility now. Especially not in our new social media world. /16

Status games are now everything. From the most intimate and personal, through to the professional and political. Everything is an argument. A fight. Because everybody is fighting for status. To be top dog. /17

Join me, step outside of the bubbles of our status games. Open your eyes to reality again, feel it. Relish not knowing, not caring what others think. Embrace humility again, towards life itself. Watch it smash the status seekers. Enjoy that show. /end

Climate change, transport, education, health care, aged care, energy, public health, defence, demography, etc. An objective look at the *material realities* in these areas will show all of them on their knees. With no meaningful plans or identified resources to fix them. /2

Yes people who run for office have some policies on these things. Band-aid solutions. None come within a million miles of addressing the scale of what’s required. Why are we so reluctant to see this, and call it out? Electoral democracy doesn’t work. /3

How did we ever think it *would* work? Why would adding a popularity contest as a thin controlling veneer over the top of all of these material realities not just make it all worse? Which is what’s happened. Elections use these problems as fodder to generate votes. /4

There is not one way a popularity contest has any connection with the material realities of our lives. If you grant ultimate status and power in a society to the most popular, the only thing you will then do as a society, is try to win that popularity game. /5

How is this not obvious? People are reluctant to see this because of a bizarre belief that ‘democracy’ *is* these popularity contests. That ‘the people’ (never defined) drive democracies via the vote. That people will vote for what will fix material realities. /6

Because (the thinking goes), that will be the most popular thing. Horseshit. Humans are social animals, and what drives them above all else is status. Humans vote the same way they do everything (literally, everything). To maximise their social status. /7

Alan Kohler has written some excellent columns in the past year highlighting the absolute chasm between what needs materially doing in Australia, versus what political parties are offering. No amount of voting will fix that, because we don’t vote to fix material realities. /8

We vote for the same reason we do everything else. To maintain a continuous status game. To get our team over the line, like Premier League football. Not an analogy, it’s the same social mechanism. Voting causes the problems we try to fix, with voting. /9

‘The people’ is not a thing. Look at what the belief in it produces. In electoral democracies, it produces a proliferation of competing teams or gangs, endlessly fighting one another for top status (election wins). A highly stratified, hierarchical system. /10

The exact opposite to what belief in ‘the people’ aims to achieve. Look at actual outcomes, not at what people say. The same for social media, which is a technological implementation of the same ‘the people’ ideas. /11

These platforms aren’t some gloriously ‘flat’ social structure, free of hierarchy. They’re intensely stratified, hierarchical networks with ‘influencer’ hubs that drive most activity. Again, look at the reality, not the spin. /12

Everywhere ‘the people’ ideas pop up, they produce the exact opposite. It’s reality telling us the ideas are bullshit. Humans create status hierarchies, it’s what social animals do. They will turn everything into these hierarchies. /13

Some ask ‘so what’s an alternative’? Bizarrely, an alternative is what we already had. Our democracies never were run by ‘the people’. They were always run by public institutions, regulating. Regulation = democracy. A hierarchical system, but oriented to the public good. /14

The fundamental act of a democracy is to PASS LAWS. To LEGISLATE. To regulate social life, for the public good. Not to vote. Voting is destroying democracy, by allowing populist status games to bypass our regulatory systems. /15

Democracy is millennia old. Universal voting is about a century old. It’s an idea that has failed catastrophically. Democracy won’t survive voting. /end

Australia has a federal election this week. Elections are the foundational team sport, now the foundational ur-hierarchy from which all other status hierarchies cascade in society. A generation or more ago that role was taken by the church. The Protestants and Catholics. 2/6

And in fact it’s an open question if football may have usurped politics. Probably not in Australia, yet. A case could definitely be made in the UK. 3/6

Life isn’t neatly organised into independent bubbles like politics, sport, work etc. Culture respects no boundaries in that way. Look at the near obsession in the UK and elsewhere for the various football leagues. This isn’t sport, this is the culture itself made visible. 4/6

Nested hierarchies of status hierarchies. Look at how many seemingly level-headed public health scientists went batshit crazy over Covid. Because their deeper allegiance to particular political status hierarchies conflicted with their scientific status hierarchies. 5/6

It’s all status, all about our place and therefore identity within the various social hierarchies of our lives. But it’s the same basic socio-cultural pattern, in all parts of our lives. Imitative rivalry. /end

As Girard found, the only thing that stops up and downswings is a mechanism for short-circuiting status games. Girard believed Christianity’s invention was that, Christ assuming the scapegoating function. It’s what gave us a couple of millennia of slow social progress. 2/2

In the 19th century and before, there was no real space or culture for children. They were just little adults, sharing life and work in the adult world. Here they are, you can see it directly with your own eyes. Human life was just adult life. /2 https://t.co/DJF2w4ksf6

And then the thing happened, which turned our culture upside down and inside out. We invented compulsory, universal schooling. And that created a ‘child’, for the first time. Suddenly our world had adults *and* children. /2 https://t.co/sEsj9IXVjM

Our societies then had two separate cultures, adult culture and child culture. Schools created an entire cultural world, for children. They were separated from adults and their work. They weren’t just learning reading, writing and arithmetic. /3 https://t.co/ErHoNXKRFl

All of their social reference points were now other children. This is what creates a culture. We all know this culture, we’re all now products of it. Think about your time at school. The complex social worlds they are. This is how we now learn to live, as humans. /4

And then, as this model ran for decade after decade, something happened to society again. We’d gone from having an adult-only culture, to a child culture + an adult culture. And then, phase 3 happened. /5

The child culture replaced the adult culture too. In only a generation or so, we’d completely reversed our entire culture. From adults-only, to permanent child culture. When all these children left school, to enter the adult world, they brought their culture with them. /6

It’s all they knew. What else could they have done? What we call the countercultural revolution of the 1960s was this collision. We’re now nearly 70 years into the implementation of that revolution. Adult culture as we once knew it is terminal. /7

Have a look around now at what passes for adult life, and you’ll see that pretty much all of it is behaviour and a way of seeing the world we picked up at school. We see our adult ‘political’ lives as a battle between Left, Centre and Right. /8

Really these are just social teams, like schoolyard groups we belong to. In practical reality terms, the categories are meaningless. Our ‘activism’ is always ‘mobilising’ big groups of people to go into battle against other groups of people. /9

Classic schoolyard. Gang culture. Or we whine and complain about things ‘we’ all should be doing, like a collective “are we there yet?” We don’t see that this constant appeal to higher powers to fix things is kids complaining to mum and dad, or teachers. /10

We think elections are democracy, but universal suffrage and universal schooling were almost simultaneous inventions. The idea of running your society using a big popularity contest, where do you think that came from? Anyone? /11

Again, it’s the schoolyard. It’s how it runs. We stopped fighting a pandemic because it interrupted our eternal gap year travel, and gigs. The whining anti-lockdown narratives were teens complaining about being grounded. These aren’t analogies, this IS the culture. /12

Perceiving wider social life as some container we live inside governed by people whom we appeal to when things go badly. We never left school. That’s school, again this is not an analogy, it’s a cultural mechanism and model. /13

We’re happily letting the chronologically old die from Covid right now, and infecting kids repeatedly with the same virus. The idea of life having phases, from childhood through to adolescence, adulthood and then elders, is gone. /14

Everything is now adolescence, a culture of ‘living your best life’, and performing identity-based rituals in the ruins of catastrophes, to further your individual status. Team sports, status games. Trying to be somebody in the school, in a group, battling other groups. /15

We think these are analogies because the adult world we live in we mistook for an actual adult world. It never was, not in our lifetimes. If you look you will find an adolescent mindset now driving every facet of our societies. Re-badged as an adult life. /end

That belief in turn comes from schooling, which has upended adult life in the past 75 years. We remade adult life as a high school. We don’t need any particular people to win elections. We need to remove the popularity detour entirely. 2/2

The checks and balances of modern democracies, that Trump for example is attacking, were never introduced as protections for the people. They were introduced via that truce, as a way for the barons to keep monarchical power in check. /2

Democracy is just feudalism, re-badged. Its origins are monarchical, and to this day we still live in feudalist, monarchical societies. We just call the Kings Presidents or Prime Ministers, and the barons ‘oligarchs’. Sometimes we even still have Kings, directly. /3

Societies are always led, they are always hierarchical status hierarchies, with a King or equivalent at the top. That King will always have a ‘court’ of barons, like Trump’s current gang of billionaires. These aren’t analogies. /4

Overwhelmingly the undoubted progress in peace, prosperity and health we’ve seen in the past century didn’t come from any of this. Not from the checks and balances. Not from voting. Not from activism of any kind. /5

That progress came from catastrophe, the 4 horsemen of the apocalyptic first half of the 20th century. WW1, Spanish Flu, the Great Depression and WW2. Those catastrophes smashed the feudal status hierarchies. Societies were nearly destroyed. /6

Rebuilding them required a collective ‘we’ to emerge, a ‘public’. That public isn’t ’the people’. It’s an administrative construction, from the institutions set up to do the rebuilding. A continuous calculation of collective need, to guide the rebuilding. /7

That work was deemed more or less done by the 1970s, which is why at that time the status games exploded again, this time under cover of ‘economic’ fantasies. That societies are really economies, markets, of freely-acting individuals. It was and still is a con. /8

It was status games, back at the centre of our societies, as they always have been, for our entire histories. The idea of an economy deliberately gives permission for every single person to attempt to gain as much status as they want. ‘Aspirational’ politics. /9

Free of any idea of public/collective anything. That was all re-badged as red tape, bureaucracy. In Gruen’s chat, ancient Rome and Greece are said to have tried to avoid ever having that monarchical, hierarchical, King-led structure. /10

That’s codswallop. The Romans tried the people-led (Senate) thing. It was their period of most intense violence and bloodshed. Only when they then shifted to Emperors (Kings) did they enter Pax Romana. 200 years of relative peace and prosperity. /11

In our team sports times of continuous status games, people read something like this and immediately try to figure out what ‘team’ you’re on. ‘Oh you’re an authoritarian’, etc. I’m not on any team. I think societies have objective material realities. /12

Material realities that are oblivious to any of our status games, our debates. Humans are social animals that function in certain objective ways, and they will function in those ways no matter what other order you try to impose. They will form status hierarchies. /13

Topped by a king or equivalent (at every scale, from gangs to countries). With an aristocracy of barons, a cascading series of hierarchies throughout the entire society. The only thing that will ever disrupt this objective material reality, is catastrophes. /14

External or even internal events, that destroy existing status hierarchies. Only that opens up a space where a collective focus can flourish, for a while. None of the guff about checks and balances or ‘the people’ does it. That’s just status games. /15

Rene Girard said only Christianity gave a more permanent alternative, where Christ (or some higher power or principle) supplanted all status games and their scapegoats. It’s not a coincidence that the Holy Roman Empire more or less built civilisation as we know it today. /end