June 2025

The same generation who launched and cheered on countercultural movements became the richest generation in all of human history. Most of their wealth came from stripping public institutions and replacing them with privatised grifting. 2/3

Why the idiot distinction between left and Right explains nothing. The Left and Right both cash in on the void it left at the heart of societies. It was the destruction of institutions that did the damage. Without them societies are stupid and lethal. /end

One of my constant themes here is to reject not only the notion of popular sovereignty, but more fundamentally the idea of ‘the people’ itself. That idea is destroying democracy. It’s a ludicrous fantasy. /2

Humans don’t act as groups, at any size of group, from a soccer club or committee, through to a nation State or the UN. It’s not physically or even logically possible for them to act in that way. We don’t think enough about how ridiculous the idea is. /3

That somehow groups of people act as a single will, a single group mind, called ‘the people’. Humans are SOCIAL creatures. and sociality itself is intrinsically and intensely hierarchical. It’s driven by status, the atomic root of all human life. /4

Yes humans form groups, collectives, but these are not a level or flat structure, they’re hierarchies of status. Members of the groups engage in rampant imitation, of each other and of higher status members. Imitative rivalry is status rivalry. /5

Humans copy. That’s all human life. And they copy to gain status, because to have status is to have an identity. To be somebody, rather than nobody. We’re not driven by status out of vanity or a lust for power. But as social animals, to be something, rather than nothing. /6

To go back to this modern American paranoid obsession with the avoidance of any ‘authoritarian’ impulse. To label any sense of people being led or shaped by individuals as ‘fascism’. This to me anyway is more a symptom of the sick and failed idea of democracy, in America. /7 https://t.co/bpbK3u5S9A

Totally out of kilter with the reality of humans and how they associate. We’ve seen multiple analyses of the ideas of Yarvin recently, and an entire industry focused on plotting Trump’s apparently fascist takeover of America. The vanity of it, for starters. /8 https://t.co/8tXNNyZknO

The idea that humans just install some sort of regime, like they’re installing an operating system on a computer. Not one pause to reflect on whether there are certain immutable characteristics of humanity itself that may drive how our societies operate. /9

People who follow me know that I believe, following the work of many scholars, that a sort of feudalism, topped by a King-like figure, is THE default state of human societies. It’s the model humans will create and recreate, always, just with different names for things. /10

So this idea that Yarvin and his followers for example might impose a monarchy on the US is just nonsense to me. The people of the US are appointing their own king. That’s why we have Trump. They were sick of the idiocy of ‘the people’ ideas. /11

Ancient Rome flirted with ‘the people’, with its Senate-driven republican process. It filled the streets with endless rivers of blood. It was only when replaced by emperors under the Pax Romana that relative peace returned. /12

Not because this or that person imposed this structure on the Romans. It was the natural evolution of their collective life. Gabriel Tarde once called democracy a pause between two aristocracies. Meaning the same thing, a brief pseudo-levelling, between two hierarchies. /13

A transition between hierarchies, rather than any sort of sustainable model in itself. And the most modern, complex democracies are intrinsically, deeply hierarchical. Voting deludes us into thinking otherwise. /14

Remember that voting merely gives people an option to choose which people will serve on the highest rungs of the *existing hierarchies*. Not to institute some impossible process of millions of people somehow running anything, as a group. /15

It’s time to retire all of the cartoon Nazi and fascist memes and grow up. I come from a family who grew up literally under the Nazis. Fascism is just the desperate movement to restore kings, that happens automatically in every society. /16

It creates Trumps, a useful idiot to our deepest anthropological behaviours. People want their kings back. They always will. Humans will always restore status hierarchies when they’re disrupted or broken. Often renaming the constituent parts so we miss the equivalence. /17

We should see the American paranoia about fascism as more a symptom of their own dysfunctional ideas of what democracy actually is. ‘The people’ is a lethal myth. Evoked by tyrants throughout history, to rationalise their ascendancy. Hitler’s ‘volk’. /18

Democracy is a status hierarchy where status attaches to the satisfaction of collective need. It’s not and never will be ‘the people’ running anything. /end

Germaine Greer did a brilliantly Quarterly Essay on reconciliation that recognised this historical behaviour. How we emulate perceived golden ages or cultures. Humans copy. It’s everything they do. /2

Greer argued that instead of seeing reconciliation as a recognition of two parallel cultures, we should look instead to the ways our ‘modern’ Australian culture is already a hybrid of settler and Aboriginal culture. How what we pride ourselves on as ‘Australian’ is hybrid. /3

It’s well known that Aboriginal Australian culture is literally orders of magnitude older than any other culture in human history. And unlike other cultures or civilisations, it’s co-existent with the present day. We’re living inside humanity’s most precious opportunity. /4

People marvel over archaeology and history programs giving glimpses into ancient lives. But those lives never went away here, in Australia. And they’re far, far more ancient than the cultures whose docos we’re transfixed by. /5

I suspect reconciliation never progresses in Australia because the framing of it is wrong. It assumes either a ‘these people were hunter gathering primitives’ narrative, or we invest the culture with a paternalistic numinosity that prevents us understanding it. /6

From understanding how much modern Australian culture is deeply hybrid already. Empires always ignore this, the profound shift in their own culture by their plundering of another. We always forget we’re social beings first and foremost. /end

We have the pandemic as a glorious empirical case study here. The ‘lockdown’ and mask wars. Not really wars, like everything today mostly a social media team sports battle between tiny minorities of loons online. Political libertarians prominent in these battles. /2 https://t.co/aoqYEH2yzt

How many of those are there? Not many. But social media magnifies the beliefs of tiny handfuls of people hugely, inside the SM bubbles we now all live in, creating an impression of ‘the people’ (everybody loves using that phrase) believing certain things. /3

In reality, and as I Tweet about a lot, all societies are always 100% social. Never ‘political’. What we call politics is just more social activity, but re-badged with various team names. Societies are built and maintained by imitative rivalry, between groups. /4

All the nonsense about ‘the Left’ and ‘the Right’, or the ‘Zero Covids’ and ‘Infinite Covids’, or pro and anti-maskers etc. Just the same team sports used in every facet of human life. Social groups trying to boost their status in relation to others. /5

The ‘content’ of what they talk about is irrelevant. This is also the catastrophic mistake in thinking the problem with social media is mis- and disinformation. Societies never, ever, run on information. They run on status. Groups battling for status. /6

In Australia the ‘Right’ at the recent election ran a Soviet-style policy of nationalisation of energy, to build and run nuclear reactors at vast public cost. The same party that has opposed (supposedly) public anything, for decades. /7

That policy was a way to allow that social group to maintain and build its status, against groups promoting renewables. Groups happily switch between fundamentally opposed beliefs in very short periods of time, if it gives them an advantage in status games. /8

Back to laws and regulation. The success of social groups promoting libertarian ‘freedom’ from law and regulation (‘red tape’) is well known, since the late-1970s. ‘Deregulation’ is used universally as a near-assumed good now. That social group won that battle. /9

Who are that social group? Mostly high-status, wealthy and powerful people, who run into what feels like the barrier of regulation every time they try to expand their influence. At the same time they always have a love of very strong regulation on other social groups. /10

Welfare recipients for example, or unions. Their declared belief in the evils of regulation are clearly self-serving. That’s social status games. They want you to believe societies are made up of millions of free individuals. Because that *is* mostly their life. /11

Being wealthy and powerful (high status) means that is how their lives mostly play out, free of restriction from most boundaries. But societies are never that. Societies are 100% social. They’re networked hierarchies of status. /12

And this is where the true function of regulation and law appears. It’s not there to *restrict* free individuals. It’s there to FREE those individuals from the oppressive yoke of status games. To give *permission* to people, to act outside the status quo. /13

The history of government and regulation/law clearly shows this. The Magna Carta for example, the foundation of much modern democracy, was really an instrument to give barons the freedom to act without arbitrary exercises of power from the King. /14

This is what regulation and government was always designed to do. To create freedoms for individual and groups, in relation to others who would otherwise use their status to oppress everybody. This is History 101. /15

The libertarian shift in politics in the past 50-60 years is just the highest status members of our status quo pushing to have even more status. ‘Market economies’ are a fiction. They’re societies with regulation removed to allow unbridled status games to flourish. /16

The market economy is a SOCIAL invention, a Trojan Horse con to restore naked status as the sole determinant of who gets what. Humans never, ever act as ‘markets’ or groups of ‘free’ individuals. Humans always live in status hierarchies. /17

When you saw these mandates in the earlier pandemic, were they oppressing you? Ridiculous. They were giving you and everybody else *permission* to act in a way that wasn’t the status quo. They gave you freedom. The freedom to protect yourself and others. /18 https://t.co/Rejq38VxhS

Without such mandates, people will just do what everybody else is doing, led by current status hierarchies. If those hierarchies find masking and public health onerous, it means nobody will do either. And that’s where we are, right now. /end

If a government needs money, it can ‘print’ it. It’s a mechanism of exchange, it has no intrinsic value. This only comes unstuck if the country doesn’t have the resources and expertise to convert the money into goods and services. 2/4

Rich nations aren’t generally short of the capacity to use the money, they’re just short of money because high status people hoard it. So ‘print’ more, and give it to lower status people. Like we did in Covid ‘lockdowns’. Was a boon for them and for the ‘economy’. 3/4

Money is a medium of exchange. We trade it like we’re still bartering with gold and other precious metals. If there’s not enough exchanging going on because high status people hoard it, give it to people who will use instead. /end

Probably more by accident than by design, but also intriguingly possibly via osmosis with its Indigenous population, Australian life is centred around none of the social groupings that make up traditional ‘politics’, like class. Australian life is created around community. /2 https://t.co/ZZqLAOlAXm

Australia is communitarian. That sounds a lovely warm hugs thing to be, but it deserves a more rigorous understanding. The atomic unit of Australian society is the community. The interactions of a wide diversity of people, in their communities. /3

Not some abstract nothingness like ‘the people’, a voting artefact beloved of promoters of democracy. No meat on the bones; a counting entity, nothing more. A practical, empirical, continuously constructed interaction between the diversity of people who live here. /4

Via the most mundane activities. Australians love sport, for example, and that’s often seen as a lack of a more sophisticated culture. But it’s a very particular type of sport that isn’t as common elsewhere in the world. /5

It’s community sport. Throwing entire communities together, children and adults, every weekend. Forcing people to learn how to interact and get along, with people they otherwise would have nothing to do with. These are the genius practical skills of social cohesion. /6 https://t.co/DjiMGXYalH

Not bloated political ideologies. Just practical community-making. Damien Cave when moving here with his family to work for the local office of the New York Times noticed the same process through surf lifesaving. /7 https://t.co/X5ajxSLt61

In each case a basic social need was identified, and a community grouping mobilised to fill it. This in time created ongoing institutions, like lifesaving, and the rural fire service. All intensely practical and focused on actual need. Free of team sports ideologies. /8 https://t.co/iB8YxVadCG

Australia has historically been resistant to the tribal warfares of European-based collective life, including US life. They find the team sports status battles of those abstract things tedious. Politicians who run with those are generally trounced. /9

Peter Dutton tried to run a Trumpian populist campaign in the recent Australian election. His party was not only decimated, he lost his own seat. Australians find most global politics tedious abstract bullshit. /10 https://t.co/1TXxdj2TYr

There’s a ruthless pragmatism to Australian politics and its entire way of life. A penal colony banished to the ends of civilisation, it had to find ways to survive. That pragmatism remains. But it’s under threat now. /11

Mostly from platforms like this. American Trojan Horses for an entirely different form of community. A thin veneer of community, of ‘interests’, shorn of the linkages to the physical everyday community lives people live. /12

Social media is a wrecking ball through every community, and it doesn’t stop there, it drives wedges between members of families too. It connects people in the most weakly imitative way, stripped of any real world connections to everyday lives. Sociality is violence. /13

Humans don’t naturally agree on anything, societies run on always shifting desire. When humans interact and connect, violence is nearly always a consequence. You need to channel that interaction through simple collective need. Not through abstract warring ideologies. /14

We saw the danger of social media with Covid. When the pandemic began, community-focused public health measures swung into action. Covid was smashed. But those social media tendrils to loon groups online had now entered the Australian community. Cooker culture emerged. /15

Which in the space of only a couple of years, took Australia from leading the world on public health measures, to now being almost dead last. The sense of communities mobilising to respond to a practical need gone. Replaced by the idiot ideology team sports of culture wars. /16

Or in my town, local politics, usually about rates, roads and rubbish, is now beholden to the same cookers. Prosecuting causes it imitates from far Right groups mostly in the US. There’s still resistance from communitarian Australia. But social media is winning. /17

Like most countries now, Australia is shifting its entire personal, social, professional and political life onto social media platforms. We’re not seeing that almost complete substitution. The owners of these platforms are not community-minded. /18

The entire civilisation now captured by a handful of billionaires, weaponising and monetising every personal and social and professional and political transaction. How, as social animals, were we stupid enough to allow sociality itself to be captured like this? /19

Because as social animals, it’s an addiction. To ‘connect’, to do the imitative comparison with others. The platform owners know this. We can’t look away or stop scrolling. /end

Americans tend to see any attempt to lead as ‘authoritarianism’ of one form or another. It’s a reflex action. The enemy is always within for them, their own institutions. They’re continuously re-animating that earliest Puritan shift. 2/3

The rhetoric is hyperbolic, always. Much of it is symbolism, mass performance. It rarely leads to any significant change there. Everything is Hollywood politics. I would still be confident the Trump years will just fizzle out. Though their end of empire is real. /end

‘Democracies’ are pauses between aristocracies, between Kings. They’re the seedbed of new status hierarchies, new Kings and their aristocratic courts. By far the worst Rome was the one run by the people/Senate, Rivers of blood. 2/3

Without stabilised and centralised status hierarchies, human societies are just violent. That violence is the battle for status, in the establishment of new hierarchies. /end

We’re in a period of history that history has seen many times before. Where previously dominant centralised status hierarchies in our societies have been damaged or destroyed. This has unleashed an avalanche of status games, at every level of society. /2

I’ve Tweeted how humanity has before tried to solve the problem of eternal status gaming, of imitative rivalry. That rivalry is inescapable for social animals, but it can be tamed. By creating centralised status hierarchies which all other status games are embedded in. /3

That’s what churches and monarchies are, the historical solution to that seeming puzzle. They’re instruments to manage status games. It’s why they and their Kings and Pope-equivalents dominate history. There would be no history without them. Just violence. /4

This is the terrible danger of the idea of ‘the people’, that I also Tweet about a lot. Letting entire populations do nothing but compete for status creates only violence and blood and death. The desire for status is unquenchable, without centralised status hierarchies. /5

To go back to tailoring vs designer fashion, tailoring is expertise, targeted at precise material need. Design can be that too, but generally it’s about status alone. We live in a world now where every mundane object and behaviour is loaded up with status/identity games. /6

A world of ‘branding’. Read Derek’s thread, Harry for example is much more a brand now, than a Royal. Watches, cars, clothes, phones, likes/followers etc. The world is awash with status games, which are identity games (status = identity, for social animals). /7

We need status to be attached to expertise again, and for that expertise to be focused on collective need. As Victorian England did. And Rome, the foundational society even today. We need a lot more tailors, in every sphere of life. /8

Compare these two cars, for example. Clearly the Ferrari will be the higher status car, but I would argue the Tesla is the much more *tailored* vehicle. Designed very precisely, to meet a large list of practical needs. /9 https://t.co/XDFDvFgktD

Functionality is not the opposite of style. As we see with tailoring, the greatest style can come from the greatest functionality. If the expertise is channelled towards that end. It’s not a surprise that tailoring declined as the monarchy did. /10

As in Victorian England, expertise harnessed to collective need requires a centralised status hierarchy that in turn provides a niche for collective-focused expertise. Engineers and scientists were the celebrities of the Victorian age. /11

Today ‘influencers’ couldn’t boil an egg, and vacuum up social status for no other purpose than to have it. The collective good is actually synonymous with style. Provided status is attached to ‘tailoring’ (expertise), focused on functional need. /end

Travel cultures are just imperial cultures. Recreational travel is the ‘Grand Tour’ aristocratic families sent their boys on, when they came of age, now emulated by lower status members of the population. Turning the rest of the world into theme parks to be ‘experienced’. 2/4

This is how societies always change. High status people do something, which is then emulated by lower status people wanting to be higher status people. Most travel is an itinerary through peoples’ social media feeds, imitative rivalry. 3/4

We never leave home. Our exotic travel locations are just new content and filler for our curated social media feeds, in status games. /end

It’s not that we alternate between good leaders and bad leaders. That’s the lie that makes us still believe in elections. It’s that we believe humans control reality. Rather than have the humility to respond to it. 2/3

Our electoral politics is a thin veneer of bullshit overlaid upon the material realities of our lives. We could choose to get rid of that veneer and focus only on those material realities. We won’t though, because status is our addiction. /end

The Elizabethans understood what all of the ancient and even semi-modern world understood. That power and authority comes from status, from the tiniest handful of high-status individuals. Societies are networked. ‘Power’ is the hubs in these networks. /2

Walsingham’s often brutal but targeted executions of enemies of the Crown were fundamental to Elizabethan England surviving. Nobody tried to launch education or awareness campaigns, under the delusion that it’s ultimately ‘the people’ who steer the car. They don’t. /3

No group of people of any size, from the tiniest committee to a full nation State or international organisation, operates as some sort of group mind. Groups are always led, by the tiniest number within them. Usually up to about 5% of the membership. /4

Also why I think we have Covid strategy wrong, not just in the public health sense but in the way those who want to see action think about it. Covid has the same networked structure as human society, because it’s *spread by humans*. It has hubs, which are what sustains it. /5

Those hubs are mostly places like schools, or any large enclosed crowds with a mixture of people. All easily identified and targeted, with very precise, ‘surgical’ intervention. But instead we all wallow in the apocalyptic ‘Covid is everywhere, all the time’ framing. /6

A framing invented by particular influence hubs, who want to destroy public health (and public everything). The well-meaning who agitate for us all to mask up and rise up are whistling into the wind. Groups don’t work that way. /7

Identify the anti-public health hubs, particularly online and on social media, and shut them down. Not actually a terribly difficult task. There won’t be many, and they’re easily traced because social interactions are made visible by social media. /8

Don’t waste time trying to ‘educate’ millions of members of the public to do public health. Public health was never designed as something the public did. Don’t wail about how stupid everybody is. Be a Walsingham, target the hubs. Forensic shut downs. /9

There isn’t a modern public issue that doesn’t follow the same social networked logic. Trumpism is almost entirely a creation of social media platforms and their networking structure. Again the ‘influencers’ are the tiniest minority. Quite easy to identify and shut down. /10

Twitter did it to Trump himself. And what did he do? He immediately set up another social media platform. He was telling us the source of his power. Social media platforms are like fossil fuel interests. Acting with arrogant and ignoring disdain for nations’ wellbeing. /11

Australia is one of the few nations to take them on. The influencers scream freedumb murder. Shut them down, send them thoughts and prayers. They’re conning us. /12

Renewables another obvious case. Furious rhetoric from influencers has led to the perception we need more ‘community consultation’ before rolling out renewables. We did that, it was called an election. The anti-renewables crowd were pulverised. /13

We don’t need to bog it all down now in endless waffle-fests of consultation. The anti-renewables crowd know they can poison that well every day of the week. We just need to forensically shut down the anti-renewables hubs. Many set up by opposing political parties. /14

As always, they will be very small in number, representing tiny numbers of people. Time to call out the con, and act. /end

Nothing but team sports, in a total lack of self-awareness. People emoting into the collective void that used to be filled by an institutional ‘we’. Yes Covid is deadly. We can post all the data about that every day. It won’t change anything. /2

Yes Gaza and the Middle East in general is a mess. We can post about that all day too, in our teams. It won’t change anything. People refuse to see it as the same human status games, joining teams and battling other teams. /3

Yes climate change is a catastrophic calamity. Which team are you on for that one? When’s the next game? When are we going to get tired of the total impotence of all these team sports? Never. Status games are default human. /4

And the business model for these idiot platforms. People still laughably think they’re ‘connecting’ through them. And talk about how their lives would fall apart without them. You can’t get a more clear exposition of how the platforms captured our entire societies. /5

Not noticing it seems that everything they desperately need to get from social media, is something social media culture took away from them in the first place. That’s what Cory Doctorow’s concept of enshittification means. How many familiarised themselves with it? /6

But even Cory I think pines for a true collective ‘people’-led revival. ‘The people’ is a myth, the myth that again sustains these idiot platforms. Humans never, ever, act as a unified group mind in that way. It’s not even physically or logically possible. /7

It’s the mythology that is now destroying the US, with its perennial obsessions with ‘authoritarian’ takeovers that are really Americans trying to repair the place socially, to counteract its idiot ‘there are only individuals’ politics. /8

You don’t need to study much history to see all of what’s happening today as re-runs of what’s happened before, forever. The battles for status, now unleashed from any institutional restraint. Restraint that was set up after previous catastrophic status battles. /9

The current status battles may break things enough to lead to the creation of more institutional restraint. And so the cycle goes on. /end

Again, those disruptions were: World War 1 Spanish Flu The Great Depression World War 2 When human groups face existential threats, it causes them to mobilise as a ‘we’. Only threat creates a ‘we’. This was the birth of what we call the ‘public’. /2 https://t.co/QX8kMY0nnN

The public is NOT, ever, just a group of people. Like a crowd at a protest, or rock concert. That’s a populist trick. It’s easy to mobilise a crowd. Usually by activating grievances of various kinds. To create a threat to peoples’ status. /3

A public, like the public in public health, or education, or transport, is mobilised in response to a threat. It’s the response TO threats. That ‘upswing’ of ‘we’ you can see between 1900 and 1960 was that response. /4 https://t.co/AzrMgPRUG5

Which then devolved back to “I” societies - societies driven by battles for status (identity) between individuals and groups - as those threats receded. This is the dynamic of all history. When threatened, we act together. When not, we fight each other for status. /5 https://t.co/hpPNRVONQc

The world we’re currently living in is bewildering to those who remember that ‘we’ focus of the past half-century. Our social media culture is a culture of rampant status games, of a proliferation of identity politics. /6

So many assume we don’t do smart things like public health now because people are dumb. It has nothing whatsoever to do with our individual cognitive capacity. We don’t do public things, because a public only exists in response to a perceived existential threat. /7

While objectively many thought a pandemic should have that effect, our vaccinations took the acute edge off that encounter enough to normalise it. Things are not catastrophic enough, yet, in other words, to force the re-emergence of a ‘we’. /8

Coming here every day to post in our team sports status battles is not going to change that. We think we’re only exchanging information and debating our way to some truth. It’s only status games. Jostling for higher rank in our status hierarchies. /9

Like animals and plants, human societies evolve in a punctuated way, in response to existential threat. They don’t run on information or thought, or economics, or any of the -isms. They have a cyclical dynamic, between status games, and collective responses to catastrophe. /10

This is reality politics. Reality always wins, and we have no humility towards it when in our team sports status-battle bubbles. So then it smashes us. Then ‘we’ emerges. Then social progress occurs. /end https://t.co/9wjbVQIkUb

Where we can all be make-believe experts. In everything. It can even make you rich (high status). We’re even in the middle of a DIY public health response to a pandemic. Guess how that’s going? /2

Expertise is intrinsically hierarchical, and to kidults that’s the worst sin. Their populist societies affect outrage at any sort of hierarchy. Everything becomes DIY. ‘Do your own research’. Don’t TRUST anybody else. /3

I’m currently having my bathroom renovated, it was very old. One of the great pleasures of that process has been paying people with real expertise, to do it. Fuck all that DIY nonsense. I’ve seen too many homes with appalling but slick-looking DIY legacies. /4

To watch them come in and glide effortlessly through tasks that they’ve spent a lifetime mastering, to a level of fit and finish a DIY person will never get close to. True expertise is the greatest counter to the bullshit social media world we now live in. /5

Where ‘influencers’ with no clue about anything achieve even high-ranking positions in government. Including leader of the free world. I love expertise as a counter too because it bypasses all of the status games humans play. /6

It’s about the *material* skill of doing something. The material realities of our lives. The kidult invasion was most fundamentally a war on trust, not knowledge. The default response now is distrust, conspiracy. /7

DIY everything, you can at least trust you, etc. A con perpetuated by genuine elite status hierarchies who wanted to bypass all of those pesky checks and balances experts in their institutions bring to human life. Let’s celebrate genuine expertise. Worship it, even. /8

It’s a wonder of the world, to see somebody who’s mastered something over many years of hard work. Rather than a keyboard warrior googling half-truths. /end

Where the puppet regime installed in Stage 1 is turned into a cartoon evil, becoming the justification for continuous plundering of treasuries at home to fund weapons manufacturers. Anglo elites get stonkingly rich in both stages. /end

Just as ‘the people’ is not a thing, groups never have active agency in that way, they also don’t collectively percolate ideas in some delusional ‘free market’ way, to sort the wheat from the chaff. We all know those who speak loudest for free speech already have it. /2

They’re invariably already the megaphone voices in our public spaces, hogging all of the oxygen. They love the status of being heard over the din of the mob. They just want even more. Status is an unquenchable thirst. /3

@JamesSurowiecki did his wonderful book on the wisdom of the crowd. That was never about some magical way groups of people all suddenly thought with a group mind. It was how, in highly specific conditions, individual thought could aggregate to create collective leverage. /4

Almost none of what we call ‘the people’ thinking and acting fits any of the conditions for that wisdom. It’s pure imitative rivalry, as Rene Girard saw. A tiny handful of people with a tiny number of ideas ‘influence’ millions of others. Including the free speech zealots. /5

Most of what passes for debate here and elsewhere is the team sports I Tweet about often. Battling teams of people where members have aligned with their influencing ‘hub’ person or set of ideas. You can see it clearly, “oh, he’s from the Left”, “she’s a transphobe”, etc. /6

No real engagement with ideas, it’s positioning on a battlefield, recognising friend and foe. Ideas are banners the groups march under, they don’t interrogate them. There are hot topics I don’t even bother joining in on, here or elsewhere. The team sports is too feral. /7

You make no progress in those hotbeds of identitarianism. Because that’s what team sports is really about, imitative rivalry is about achieving status, and from that identity. We are social animals. Status *is* identity. “I Stand With [insert cause]”. “#[insert cause]” /8

Those fake debates quickly degenerate into the policing of rules of team memberships. Nobody can be pure enough, in the end. What does change societies then, if not debate? What is democracy? /9

‘Influencers’ do. And catastrophe does. 5% of any group leads what the group thinks or does, in all fields of human life. Catastrophe forces all groups to shift, it destroys them. /10

Catastrophe is the real progress in societies, because it represents external empirical reality imposing reality upon us. Without it we just play status games, all day, every day. Team sports. /11

Rarely we align those games with external reality, like the Victorians did with things like public health. Or the Catholic Church when it institutionalised a meta-level of status, to take the fuel out of human status games. Christ’s sacrifice was that, as Girard saw. /12

A way to place the ultimate status and the scapegoating that always goes with status games out of reach of mortal humans. It built Western society. Of course it was flawed in all sorts of ways too, status games entered the church itself. There are no utopias. /13

The best you can do as an individual is be an influencer with at least one foot in reality, rather than in status games. That’s extremely rare, despite nearly everybody assuming that’s them. /14

To introduce reality into status games makes a person deeply, violently unpopular. If you don’t see that or haven’t experienced it, you’re still playing status games, even though you may feel you’re fighting the good fight, for truth. The truth is never popular. Never. /end

Activist politics is what I call ‘the people’ politics. The belief that populations have some sort of agency. Many know I don’t think ‘the people’ even exists. It’s a catastrophic misunderstanding of how humans think, feel and behave. The belief is destroying democracies. /2

Cory describes research showing that ultimately rich people just get what they want. But this isn’t really about money, though of course money helps. The currency of all human life is status. You can have high status, and thus power and influence, and little money. /3

As he gloriously concludes, the only way we can get meaningful change is by convincing oligarchs to do it. That’s the first law of all history, though. All human groups and societies are driven by status. And because we’re social animals, that status is also our identity. /4

I can’t share Cory’s passion for ‘antitrust’, that American delusion that if you level all of your institutions and organisations, a great ‘democratic’ levelised community of ‘the people’ will rule at last. As Graeber and Sahlins said, ‘popular sovereignty’ is an oxymoron. /5

Yes there’s some pushback from creaking and groaning older institutions against oligarch culture, with antitrust action. It won’t last. I’ve Tweeted many times about how people have even forgotten the origins of the ‘checks and balances’ of democratic governance. /6

They even got a snapshot of it, in 1215. Notice ‘the people’ are nowhere to be seen. Those checks and balances were about the barons (oligarchs) placing limits on the power of the King. The Magna Carta, the root DNA of modern democracy. It was never about ‘the people’. /7 https://t.co/hWMMYfHSG4

It was about the highest status members of a society apportioning their power between themselves. And remember, ‘the people’ isn’t a thing anyway. They all want to be oligarchs and Kings too. They spend all day every day striving to increase their own status. /8

Trump is dismantling a lot of the old checks and balances, and the oligarchs aren’t objecting because he’s also lavishing them with gifts. They’re also too stupid to know the history. But they may re-enact 1215 unknowingly, if they think Trump is in their way. /9

They may go into battle against him with some new form of checks and balances on Trump’s Kingly power. Again they’re too stupid to understand this is what the checks and balances of democracy already were, they see those as ‘red tape’. /10

Overall it’s this belief in ‘the people’ that is killing everything. This refusal to understand that societies are 100% social (not economic, not ‘political’). And that the currency of social life is status. Societies run on desire. And the deepest desire is for status. /11

Because, again, we’re social animals, and to have status is to be somebody’. It’s our actual identity. The explosion of ‘identity politics’ is only this. The destruction of our old checks and balances, and their replacement with uncontrolled status games. /12

Everybody battling to be somebody, to have some form of status. Now mostly through social media, where we transact the personal, professional and political now, almost exclusively. With its structure modelled on high schools, of likes and followers. /13

Because kidult cultures never leave high school, they remake adult life, *as* a high school. Compulsory schooling did it, decoupling the world of children from that of adults. We did this, by accident. With the best intentions. Now only catastrophe will shift things. /14

Because history shows time and again that only the ‘punctuated’ catastrophic disruption of our status quo (it’s in the name) creates real social change. Natural disasters, wars, plagues. Only that creates a ‘we’, which people confuse with ‘the people’. /15

Without that disruption, humans just play status games. All day and night, every day and night. They’re social animals. The only other alternative is to create master centralised status hierarchies in societies, to control status play. /16

Humans did that, with great success, with institutionalised religion and monarchies. That was their actual function, to control status games. Of course there are no utopias. Nothing lasts. But those are the proven options, and why people lap up Trump the wannabe King. /end

The two will always be in collision. Social life is dominated by imitative rivalry, the formation and maintenance of status hierarchies. You see that every day in a playground, with shifting allegiances between groups. The classroom stands in direct opposition to it. /2

Education is dying in the same way public life is dying, mostly through the belief that it’s about information, or ‘content’. The role of the teacher is a social, cultural role. Not a provider of information. We wouldn’t need pedagogy if education was about information. /3

Education is about transforming a child embedded in social status hierarchies, into an adult connected to generations of institutionalised learning. It’s a social process. A ‘raising’, not a transmission. /4

The kidult society we now live in that I tweet about often is marked by the total marginalisation of teachers. In the pandemic fake debates about Covid in schools, nobody even asked them. Instead show-pony health pros promoting their own social status opined regularly. /5

Opinion has replaced knowledge. Opinions aren’t knowledge, they’re banners the different teams in the team sport battles for status march under. They’re the playground decoupled from the classroom. From the guidance of teachers. /6

The social role of the teacher is best understood by life now in adult society, where teaching is completely ignored and abused. The army of opinionated kidults that now dominate freedumb life are societies pulverised by the absence of teaching. /7

Teaching and teachers are the way we civilise humans. They shape people, fundamentally, into functioning, civilised adults. The insolent, proud ignorance of the social media kidult is the school kid who hasn’t had a pedagogical clip around the ear from a good teacher. /8

Most of the despair you see at the collapse of basic civic life is the destruction of the role of teachers. Teachers know knowledge and civilisation itself can’t tolerate ‘each to their own’ horseshit freedumb ideas. It matters what’s wrong and right. /9

And much more than that, it’s a FIGHT, to make the right the done thing, not the wrong. Every instinct of kids coming off the playground for more lessons will be to resist. Teachers used to lead that fight. It’s far more brutal than cage fighting. /10

Without supporting them in that fight, our civilisation is over, quite seriously. And we don’t support them, despite all the weasel words about the work they do. They’re childcare for working parents, at best. In a Covid soup right now, because we don’t give a shit. /11

The transformation of adult life into giant high schools I also tweet about has meant the playground won. There was no way playground culture was going to have anything but utter contempt for classroom culture. Playground culture is social media society. /12

Next time you look around at the great masses of ignorant violence, remember the playground. That’s what you’re seeing. Absent the teachers to discipline, punish (up yours Foucault), and transform children into adults. /end