September 2025

Salganik, Sheridan Dodds and Watts (https://t.co/9kBy4ZGtld) set up two distinct ways for a large group of students to assess unknown musical tracks. One allowed only individual judgment. The other allowed that judgment to be informed by what others had liked. /2

Where the participants had some data showing the preferences of others for the unknown tracks, much greater agreement occurred as to which tracks were ‘good’. The Gini coefficient showing a subsequent much greater inequality of outcome i.e. some tracks dominating others. /3 https://t.co/8Oc091lS5U

Ponder that. Almost universally it would be assumed that peoples’ taste in music is ‘subjective’. But you can see clearly that taste is driven overwhelmingly by social influence, where the group can see others’ preferences. The research had another fascinating twist. /4

The more participants could see what others had ‘liked’, the more *unpredictable* what counted as a ‘good’ song was. In other words, the more the decision was socialised, the more there was a disconnect between any objective measure of quality, and success. /5 https://t.co/3uDhyVnEqO

Clearly in the socialised condition, ‘likes’ were driven by social status. Objectivity itself became that status. And status of course creates hierarchies. Thus the greater inequality of outcomes, in the socialised conditions. /6

Status runs societies, and creates inequality and violence if unchecked. A society that socialises its core social transactions, as we do by shifting them increasingly onto social media, will become ever more unequal and violent. /7

Our personal, professional and political lives are increasingly occurring inside social media. It’s not a communications technology, it’s a social technology. We’re living inside it. And it’s tearing our societies to pieces as a result. /8

Trump is the social media President. His dismantling of institutions that have been the autonomic nervous system of societies for generations is generating nothing but inequality and unpredictability. Fads and fashions, what’s ‘trending’ replaces public policy. /9

Socialise everything and any objective measure of sanity and quality will be sacrificed to great viral waves of popularity. To what’s trending. You won’t find one area of public policy where that isn’t the new norm. Trending driven purely by the pursuit of social status. /10

Unless we understand and address status, we’re lost. Not by getting rid of it, that’s impossible. Status is also quality. But by engineering our societies so that what attracts status is also that which promotes the collective good. /11

As Victorian England did, with its Republic of Letters and celebrity engineers and scientists, developing the things we’re now losing - public health, transport and education, for example. Those were high status activities, in the 19th century. /12

Now supplanted by whatever ‘influencers’ can get to trend on the socials. Trivialities mostly, and violence between social teams battling for status. /end

obviously a heavy dose of /s

Graeber and Sahlins wrote about the notion of ‘popular sovereignty’ we use as the basis for our own delusional thinking. It’s an oxymoron. Replace the sovereignty of the king or emperor, with ‘the people’. The political science equivalent of an Escher print. /2

The people can’t be sovereign over the people. How is that not obvious? It’s completely meaningless. Even the most basic look shows you that Western democracies really just make a handful of elected people sovereign. Or they even retain the old sovereign, constitutionally. /3

Everything is ALWAYS an ‘autocracy’ in human life. A status hierarchy. It’s not even impossible for things to operate in any other way, you wouldn’t *want* them to either, if you pause and reflect on it. /4

Hierarchy and status reflect quality, not just power. And division of effort. You want there to be a hierarchy of builders, plumbers, engineers, pilots, teachers, child care workers, etc. You don’t want to have to do everything yourself. You can’t do everything yourself. /5

And you particularly don’t want to have to govern the whole chaotic mess, yourself. As a member of the lauded ‘people’. You (and I, and everybody) don’t have the first clue how most of it even fits together. Nobody does. That’s the point, that’s why we have hierarchies. /6

We’re so brainwashed by our own cultural revolution, the countercultural shift mid-20th century, thinking that society and everything in it should be some obscene form of DIY, free of the shackles of ‘the establishment’. Welcome to Trump’s world. That’s how we got here. /7

Our great delusional fantasy that here in the West we ‘the people’ run societies, and everywhere else is reactionary authoritarians, is the reason our own societies are now falling apart. Western culture never stopped being hierarchical. ‘Authoritarian’! /8

We just placed hereditary succession with elections. How is it not obvious our own societies are intensely hierarchical still, even in their most ‘democratic’ structures? Elections just swap the faces at the tip of the hierarchy. That is ALL they do. /9

And no, again, we don’t WANT no hierarchy. That’s the countercultural fantasy. As our electoral democracies have been in free fall since their invention, and everybody scratches their head as to why, here’s a thought. /10

If you replace the King with elections, people will move mountains to game those elections, to ascend to the throne. Again, look around. Isn’t this exactly what happened, across the 20th century and now into the 21st? /11

The leader of the free world is a Twitter President, ffs. Populism is rampant, because without any of the checks and balances of traditional hierarchies, the most popular wins the prize. And popularity is easy. It’s just marketing. /12

It never ends well, because popularity couldn’t take the lid off a milk carton, practically. So we arrive where we are today, endless ‘trending’ waves of mass enthusiasms that wax and wane. If your view of history zooms out from just the daily trending news cycle… /13

The clear governance pattern appears, throughput human history. All of these allegedly ‘autocratic’ regimes today were previously kingdoms, led by Kings or emperors. That’s true for the West as well. THAT’s the model re-asserting itself now. /14

What we call democracy was just a holding pattern, between two aristocracies, to paraphrase Gabriel Tarde. The calamitous first half of the 20th century interrupted the status quo of history - Kings and emperors - just long enough to invent a delusional alternative. /15

The idea that populations would govern themselves. Governance bootstrapping. Cut the head off the King, and some populist idiot will replace them. Again, welcome to Trump’s world. /end

Acknowledgement to @AukeHoekstra for the graphic.

Fascism is also a monarchy, but without a court i.e. no aristocracy. Without an aristocracy the status hierarchies in a fascist State are too simplified to be able to function in ways that sustain a modern country. Why most fascist regimes last only a handful of years. /2

The role of the aristocracy is to embed the King-led status hierarchy throughout all of the complex aspects of the nation’s life. The barons’ job is to actually oversee the work of the nation. The tension between that work and the King is what creates checks and balances. /3

There is no binary battle here between democracy and fascism. Just varying degrees of monarchical rule, with more or less developed aristocracies. Trump is clearly re-enacting the King form of governance. His aristocracy right now couldn’t boil an egg. /4

So most of Trumpism will indeed be a type of fascism. Also what will mean it won’t last for any meaningful length of time. But again, fascism is just a King without a functioning court. All human societies are functionally equivalent, in social and cultural terms. /5

Replace something actually called a King and court with some proxy for that same hierarchical methodology, and people forget it’s really just the same show, with the parts played by understudies. At no point do ‘the people’ become some functioning agency. /6

No group of people of any size becomes that. It’s not possible, it’s not just that they get it wrong. There is no such thing as the simultaneous emergence of a collective will or mind. Somebody always leads, and most follow. /7

With the somebody then retrospectively attributing their higher status to ‘the people’. The chaotic mess of most of the world right now is directly proportional to the lack of awareness of the basic social model for all societies. /8

They’re all led by Kings, who have courts of varying levels of size and sophistication. They won’t all be called Kings explicitly, but the functional role will be exactly the same. This for those whose understanding of governance is virtually nil. Which is most everybody. /end https://t.co/pmOS5xS2ED

And it won’t be an argument against having strong restrictions to fight infectious disease, which will be the moral many freedumbs (kidults) would take from this. I’ve Tweeted before about the distinction between horizontal and vertical communities. /2

Horizontal being the older geography-based communities. Your town or city. And vertical being communities formed online, around interests and beliefs. What lockdowns did was create an enormous shift towards vertical communities. That became where more or more people ‘lived’. /3

Where they now ‘identify’ as their real ‘home’. If you work in the governance of local towns for example, you’ll see the result of this every day. People who still live alongside each other in that older horizontal way. But who are like battling, incompatible universes. /4

Many towns are not much more now than battling social media groups. Without the moderating impact of horizontal town life, the continuous negotiation of co-existence in the same space. It’s a battlefield of the righteous. Vertical communities are SO righteous. /5

Because they’re engaged in open, naked status games, all day and night. The purest form of sociality, not tempered by the empirical reality of living together in a horizontal community. Sociality is violence. The continuous battle for status in social hierarchies. /6

Towns in the way we think of them as horizontal communities are the counterbalance of sociality. They’re not extended sociality, they’re the suppression of sociality, for collective outcomes. A ‘we’ to counter the extreme status games of ‘me’, which is sociality. /7

Lockdowns aren’t the cause or enemy here. It’s the purveyors of these online vertical communities, who make little attempt (or are openly hostile to) the integration of vertical with horizontal. The platform owners. /8

Their actual business model is the smashing of horizontal communities. Their disintermediation of every institutional creation of horizontal human life, the taking over of all businesses, governance, expertise and even basic social life, to drive rivers of revenue to HQ. /9

Just look around you. How every aspect of your personal, professional and political life is now shifted onto social media. These aren’t information platforms. They’re actual social and cultural spaces that we now live inside. We are living *inside* social media. /10

In a world of eternal status battles, of pure sociality. Which is pure violence. Civilisation itself is the suppression of sociality. The ‘we’ of public life has nothing whatsoever to do with the alternative social media culture offers us. /11

Where towns or cities are replaced only by what trends. By the constantly shifting victories of every variety of social group or team, battling for status against other teams. The nostalgic souls I see here every day asking why ‘we’ aren’t addressing critical problems. /12

There is no we! It was pulverised to ruins by the social status games unleashed by social media life. In turn deriving from our massive countercultural shift post-WW2, the endless war against ‘the establishment’. These cycles repeat throughout history. /13 https://t.co/v01GaDI0Db

Catastrophes suppress status games long enough for some form of collective we to emerge, maintained by public institutions. To survive, as a society. But then things seem better, and the status games are back. And those very same institutions become the enemy. /14

How do we not see this as the obsession of populists like Trump? Smashing institutions. The home of the ‘we’. But both ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ (meaningless, childish teams in the status games melee) do the same. The ‘’establishment’ is always the enemy. Institutions. /15 https://t.co/shNeSq9b8e

We refuse to see that our culture remains the counterculture of that post-WW2 time. The ongoing assault on the institutions of public life. We don’t live in societies now, we live in ’economies’, in ‘free markets’. Or so the guff goes. /16

Really just cover for reinstated status games. The rampant culture of ‘me’. Where we all fight one another for status, in our teams, because our status is also our social identity. The Chinese and Russians are still living their revolutions, and we’re still living ours. /end

Social media is not a communications platform. It’s a substitute for society itself. A social and cultural space we’re now living inside. Its business model of ‘connecting’ everybody independently of existing hierarchies of experience and expertise is destroying societies. /2

This isn’t just the usual historical churn of replacing some status hierarchies with others, in sometimes healthy ways of removing dead wood. Social media targets ALL structure. Anybody who ‘wins’ through it is quickly demolished by other winners. A revolution without end. /3

It’s a libertarian attack weapon, mostly out of the US. Parachuted into every society on Earth, to cause the sort of catastrophic damage to basic social operating systems we’re seeing in the US now. The libertarians are stupid enough to see this as a win, for them. /4

But they’ll be swept away on the tide of trending violence and chaos too. Like all populism, there’s nothing to moderate the status battles. It’s the technology of social media that is the enemy here. Its belief system is bullshit. /5

That some fictitious ‘people’ will self-organise into a healthy and prosperous and peaceful society, if you can just strip away ‘elite’ institutions apparently oppressing them. Sociality is violence. Battles for social status. Social media unleashes pure sociality. /6

Which means it’s burning whole nations to the ground now. With impunity. Look at the breathtaking arrogance of the platform owners, when confronted by existing institutions. They know they run the world now. When Trump was banned from Twitter, he set up his own platform. /7

He was telling us directly the source of his power. But it will swallow him whole as well. Nothing can survive permanent revolution. Incidentally, an interesting twist in the current Nepalese situation, to bolster another argument I make here. /8

The social stability of Nepal has been collapsing since 2008. What did they do in 2008? They abolished their monarchy. You might think that’s a great thing, our countercultural DNA always applauds that sort of smashing. /9

But a King of some kind will be back. King and court is the dominant social model for all societies, throughout history. Trump is the US’ wannabe King right now. Without a court, so he’s unlikely to last long. /10

But this iconoclastic smashing of existing institutions always leads to some form of populist resurgence behind some new King-like figure. Who might get called something else, but it’ll be a king in everything except name. /11

And in the case of Nepal, it’s not even taking long for this to happen. All societies run on status, regulated by status hierarchies. A SOCIAL mechanism. You can smash existing status hierarchies. People will replace them with others. /end https://t.co/wVvXNIzSq3 https://t.co/vCc3ZTa8GL

America has always swapped collective life, with social life. Which means it has always been violent. The continuous fighting for status, by every individual, in the social melee. The fight for ‘identity’. Mass shooters for example mostly just want to be seen. /2

To be noticed, to be somebody rather than nobody. In a nation that is openly hostile to forms of identity founded in collective life. The progress of all civilisation is the control of social life. The creation of a ‘we’ that trumps social status games. /3

As I Tweet about, in turn this only occurs when the current status quo (the existing state of play in social status games) is catastrophically disrupted by mostly external threats. Wars, plagues, natural disasters. Only existential threat creates a ‘we’. /4

Like those communities suddenly threatened by bushfires, or floods. Where people who normally have nothing to do with each other or even despise one another, suddenly find a camaraderie. We’ve all seen this mechanism in action. /5

It never lasts long. Great orgasmic movements of togetherness fracture quickly, often the money raised for disasters is rorted or mismanaged, or even stolen, for example. Or more often the colossal disconnect between intent and implementation ends the love-in. /6

If we reverse all of our ideas about public life and recognise that left to themselves humans will only ever do one thing - compete against each other for social status, in imitative groups or teams - then the world will make a lot more sense. /7

Left to themselves, humans are ALWAYS ‘polarised’. That’s what social life is. The open fight for status. If you make them live inside social media, whose business model is this imitative rivalry, this violence will escalate exponentially. /end

It’s a fiction. The institutional checks and balances and ‘free and fair’ elections that define them don’t have their origins in any movement towards ‘self-governing’ popular sovereignty. The idea of popular sovereignty is itself a logical impossibility. /2

‘The people’ governing themselves can’t work. Not because it’s hard, but because it’s like a square circle. The people - not actually a thing anyway - can’t govern itself, because it’s bootstrapping logical nonsense. Think it through for a moment. /3

‘The people’ governs ‘the people’, meaning nobody is actually governing anybody. We’re giving ourselves directions? In reality Anglo countries just took earlier monarchies, and replaced the tip of their hierarchies with elected folk. An entirely hierarchical process. /4

The elected are a tiny number of people, who then govern the rest of us. That’s what governance has always meant, and can only mean. We replaced monarchical succession with a popularity contest. Really they’re still monarchies, run by popularity. /5

The ‘checks and balances’ of these Anglo democracies themselves derive not from ‘the people’ doing anything, nor for any concern for them at all. They derive from things like the Magna Carta, an agreement between a King and his nobles for the distribution of status/power. /6

Really the growth of what we call democracy, in the 20th century, is just the self-promotion of the world’s then most prominent empire. The Anglo empire. Who took the fabulous wealth of empire, and used it to paint a picture of some great cultural break from human history. /7

Studies of inequality will show you that high-status people in Anglo societies happily squirrel away the majority of that wealth, if left unchecked. Just like every other society. The mythologies of democracy would have been exposed much earlier, if not for one thing. /8

The catastrophic disruption to Anglo life in the first half of the 20th century. Two world wars, a pandemic and an economic collapse. Catastrophes that force these societies onto a survival footing, to fight and then rebuild. That suppressed/destroyed status hierarchies. /9

Leading to the birth and explosion of *public institutions*, from the mid-20th century, whose central role was to govern a new ‘public’ life, for the greater good of all members. Not because humans suddenly became more noble. This was a battle for survival. /10

Only that created a ‘we’. And from the 1970s onwards, that shift has been in constant reverse. The countercultural revolution laid siege to these institutions, which it called ‘the establishment’. Right through to Trump today. His stated enemy is that establishment. /11

Naked, hierarchical status games are back, flagrantly back. King Trump presides. The monarchies are coming back, together with their rivals, the churches. Fighting it out for status supremacy. Just look at the US right now. These are the main players. /12

The great Anglo sleight of hand is over. It lasted less than a century. It tried to hide its continuing monarchical/hierarchical social structure behind fantasies about ‘the people’ governing themselves. It’s PR. Hot air. /end https://t.co/wAWRA01VcP

After a while this grated on the others, who felt the band needed to be more democratic. So McCartney said OK, that’s fine. Let’s try that. 2/4

And then…nothing. Nothing was happening. Ringo Starr is then reported to have turned to McCartney to ask if he was going to lead them again. Humans never spontaneously self-organise. ‘The people’ is a fiction. They’re always led. 3/4

Even within this nucleus of the countercultural fantasy, we could see firsthand the nonsense of the ideas. And The Beatles themselves of course collapsed not long afterwards. It’s taken countercultural societies many more decades to catch up. /end

The battle here isn’t between democracy and populism/fascism. It’s between stabilised status hierarchies in a society, and uncontrolled status games. The entire history of civilisation is finding ways to stabilise status games. Mostly through churches, and Kings. 2/5

That’s the collective role of religion and monarchy. To create a stabilised, central status hierarchy, to control otherwise rampant, endless fighting for status throughout the rest of society. That’s what the ‘identity’ politics of today is. Uncontrolled status games. 3/5

And no, the answer isn’t quickly installing new Kings and churches. Those evolved over millennia. The populist quick-fix versions are a catastrophe. Trump. Very dangerous times. Perhaps the best we can hope for in the interim is two things. 4/5

A better opposing populism to the one Trump leads. Rather than just opposing due process to him, which he eats for breakfast. And allowing engineering disruption to bypass the populists. Letting the Chinese industrial juggernaut steamroll our identity-politics bullshit. /end

You won’t find a major issue today that isn’t bogged down by the same status games. We already gave up fighting pandemics, one of humanity’s greatest killers. Activism is also status games, so even those trying to fix the world are playing the same game. 2/3

Human life, like evolution, is changed almost entirely by external threat. The status quo will never, ever make fundamental changes to things. Chinese disruption is our only hope outside total catastrophic collapse. /end

Peace, prosperity and health seem the natural order of things. They’re ’let them eat cake’ cultures. So successful at mobilising the vast engine room of material provision for their societies, mostly with origins in brutal conquering violence, that few notice it’s there. /2

In other nations with chronic problems of poverty and disease and war, they condescendingly say those problems are ‘endemic’ there i.e. they wash their hands of them. Many of those problems derive from the earlier days of the empire, pillaging those same nations. /3

Mostly end-of-empire cultures just play games. Actual team sports, the more gladiatorial the better, but also games of identity. Enriching the number of different ways to be. They celebrate the ‘diversity’ of these status (identity) games, like some great innovation. /4

Really they’re just rich. Their material needs are mostly looked after, freeing them up to turn life into a lifestyle, a stage production with an always growing number of players. So they’re brutally blindsided when the material underpinnings of these lifestyle lives fail. /5

Most of the population has very little idea of or even participation in the material realties of their societies, in these cultures. So when the shit hits the fan, as it’s doing now in the West, they have no clue what to do. /6

It sparks an even more intense identity-based culture, performing its diverse granularity of self-obsession in the growing ruins of its material well-being. Most end-of-empire cultures don’t recover. The chasm between lifestyles and realities is too vast. /7

Too many precious identities need to shift to shift the status quo. No culture willingly does that. It’s like love, I think it was Proust who said we don’t fall out of love, we fall in love with somebody else. /8

Significant social change comes only from catastrophic disruption. Mostly it means the old status quo disappears entirely, dead through age and/or conquest. Look around at us living inside our social media bubbles now in the West. Tell me this isn’t us. /9

Nothing but endless performative games, for status and identity. Nothing celebrated except the diversity of these games, which produce nothing in a material sense. /end

We so desperately cling to the idea ‘democracy’ is ‘the people’ running countries. There is NO SUCH THING as ‘the people’. It’s a fiction, groups of people of whatever size do NOT think and act. /2

Anybody who wins in politics loves to *evoke* the people as the cause of their win. Their ‘mandate’. That’s the con. It’s a retrospective attribution. In reality the winner persuaded enough people to vote for them. /3

But that’s not the people acting. It’s persuasion acting. The distinction is fundamental. The same people will vote for somebody completely different, given half a chance. /4

The working people voting for populists like Trump have been persuaded to do that. Trump and his ilk TARGET them relentlessly. They know that’s their weakest link. So they sell them narratives about their exclusion, about how they too can be successful. /5

The critical point here is all the movement is at the TOP end. All change is led, its is never, ever spontaneously generated by the people, because it is impossible for groups of people to act in that way, even if they wanted to. There is no group mind. /6

Instead all people act the same way, and have done for the entire history of human life. They form status hierarchies. Populists like Trump offer people a status hierarchy they want. Somebody a bit King-like at the top. /7

It’s easy to persuade them the due process, checks-and-balances daily operation of actual democracies is failing them. All that supposed ‘red tape’. Even the persuaders often believe it, when they’re not just cynically deploying it. /8

And was I’ve Tweeted about before, we’ve forgotten that due process and checks-and-balances didn’t derive from some democratic urge anyway. They were the outcome of barons and Kings fighting over their respective authorities. That’s what the Magna Carta was. /9

The ‘progressive’ teams in modern politics to be successful must offer an alternative King. Not wallow in due process and checks-and-balances, which are vital to democracy, but didn’t originate in any concern for the people. /10

They only have power when the royal court, the barons and nobles around their king, in our day the billionaires surrounding Trump, demand limitations on the authority of the King. Right now they’re all on the same team, happily shredding every check and balance. /11

Eventually they will fall out, as Kings tend to always become delusional megalomaniacs when unchecked. But waiting for that day is a very slow burn to resolving the critical issues we have facing us today. /12

Change will more likely come by the near total collapse of the societies the populists run, due to their inability to run anything except their own PR. And increased, enormous pressure from China, and its industrial juggernaut. /end

That is in itself the danger. Not that this or that team might introduce authoritarianism (seriously the stupidest and most overused word of our time). The danger is the team sports themselves. There is no arbiter of collective good except last team standing. /2

The danger is not ‘authoritarians’ taking over our democratic freedoms, defined as ‘the people’ calling the shots. The people are calling the shots. They wanted Trump. He won two elections. /3

As Sebastian Hafner ruefully noted living through the growth of Nazism, it was the sudden shift in the entire culture that created the catastrophe. The loss of social reference points, all hierarchies replaced by a single rush towards anti-authority. /4 https://t.co/Wmw8fPikDW

As a culture this gutting of all hierarchy has been our culture for more than 60 years. And we’re suddenly surprised we’ve arrived at Trump. The ultimate populist, channelling this hatred of hierarchy, to create a master hierarchy. It’s how it’s always done. /5

I feel the danger Lawrence wrote about every day. But not because I play childish Star Wars type games of thinking ‘authoritarians’ are invading our previously functioning democracies. I feel it in the idiot adolescent culture we’ve all been living for decades. /6

Where nobody defers to anybody else. Everybody is righteous, turned up to 11. Where FOI requests in public institutions cripple their capacity to do any meaningful work for the public, bogged down in endlessly righteous campaigns of ‘exposing’ the institutions. /7

All trust collapsed, and that collapse celebrated, *as* democracy. Where the closest members of your own family spew chapter and verse Trumpisms at you, because they’re living inside social media bubbles isolating them from their own communities. /8

Even in small regional towns thousands of miles away from Trump, increasingly the elected are really living inside social media, emulating him. The town is only where people plug in. Most towns are now rival social media groups at war. All attacking local institutions. /9

Lawrence’s dark currents of social life are not in the fate of any of the idiot teams currently fighting for supremacy. They’re in the total surrender of social life to those team sports. /end

It shows something fascinating, which I’ll link to the ideas about how status runs all societies, in every way. American is under-policed, and over-imprisoned. What that means socially/culturally is a key that unlocks the US catastrophe. /2 https://t.co/BRSUk1pPEg

As Lewis and Usmani describe, the US does policing differently to much of the rest of the world. Policing is more at arms-length, reactive to events as they unfold, rather than preventative and visible. I think the reason for this is that key. /3

It’s the same fundamental hostility to institutional, ‘public’ life that the US was founded upon, in its Puritan-led escape from Europe. US life is fundamentally hostile to collective institutions, which are consistently portrayed as restrictive to ‘freedoms’. /4

The individual and his (nearly always his) God is pre-eminent. His rights and freedoms. Everything else is an ‘authoritarian’ attack on these freedoms and rights. Which is why most of the current authoritarian hysteria about Trump is a bit of a yawn. /5

Yes the Trumpian movement is transforming America into a more authoritarian society. But it’s not the taking over of a previously ‘democratic’ society, by Trump. The society was already, in its deepest DNA, Trumpian. It’s why he’s so hugely popular. /6

Trump tapped into the deepest passion of the US, as a nation. All sides of political team sports sign up to it. Trump is destroying institutions. But his opponents run campaigns to defund police, for example. Down with institutions! /7

Which takes us back to Lewis and Usmani. I suspect the reason the US is under-policed is pretty simple. Visible policing in the way the rest of the world takes for granted is a direct assault on the culture of ‘freedom’, the hostility towards public institutions. /8 https://t.co/BkPCGQFVHA

So instead, the US throws astronomical numbers of people into jail, for astronomical lengths of time. Just look at that line. The absence of basic ‘keeping the peace’ policing means everything boils over into unchecked violence and criminality. /9 https://t.co/pX92mmFN9L

Leaving the US no other option but to lock the offenders up, after the horse has bolted. Or execute them. Which in turn is entirely consistent with man-and-his-God moral life, vengeance rather than basic public order. /10

I think America is much more easily understandable by noticing its absolute obsession with ‘authoritarianism’. To American culture, the bar for that is almost hilariously low. Even the most progressive pursue anti-trust politics, to bring corporations to heel. /11

The enemy is always collective, institutional anything. The outcome is always supposed to be restoration of the freedom of the individual, with or without his God. The US is collapsing right now not because it’s being taken over by fascists. /12

It’s at war with itself. It always has been. Until Covid, its own Civil War was easily its most lethal event. Public health action against Covid ran aground on all the same freedom nonsense, so overtook it. The culture itself is the problem. /13

Now magnified exponentially by the merging of an anti-establishment counterculture going on for 60 years, with a technology (social media) that gives this culture a framework to extend into every tiny nook and cranny of life. /14

No need to have a society at all, if you can all ‘mobilise’ your glorious individual freedoms on social media, to form your own mini-societies. We live inside social media now. That cancer has spread globally. /end

The feels. Goodies and baddies. Adolescent culture. There is no ‘system’. Just status games, and ordinary humans will play them even more, without institutions. We need to manage status games. Giving high status to collective need. Like Victorian England did. /end

I see 2025 as like Restoration England, in the 17th century. Where a momentary revolutionary overthrowing of the monarchy with the execution of Charles I was brutally reversed. What we call democracy is just a transition between monarchies. Tarde said that. /2 https://t.co/NoJl0RSwBq

Not a burst of ‘people power’ overcoming hierarchical, ‘authoritarian’ rule. Just a brief (in historical terms) interlude where one hierarchy is replaced with another. We’re in another Restoration now. Trump is the most visible manifestation of it. /3

Where ‘populism’ is promoting a whole range of rulers to power whose whole modus operandi is monarchical. Absolute power. Populism is just the means to an end. Elections are pure populism, and our cultures gamed them to restore our natural hierarchies. /4

Of course Trump is a useless King. But many Kings were. He’s still a long way even from Henry VIII in terms of brutality and ‘authoritarianism’. But this is humanity’s most stable governing cultural form, restoring itself again. Ask the French. /5

They had a revolution to get rid of King and aristocracies. What replaced them? An emperor with absolute power. Napoleon. The Romans the same, their brief flirtation with Republican ‘people’ rule was a violent abomination. /6

Followed by the Pax Romana (the ‘Roman Peace’), the most peaceful time in Roman history, led by new emperors. If we zoom out of the daily news cycles and social media team sports, history shows us to be repeating an old pattern. It’s the new Restoration. /7

Humans and their societies run on status. Hierarchies of status. In stable societies, those hierarchies are led by Kings, and sometimes churches, with an associated ‘court’ of distributed nobles. It’s a connected network of status hierarchies. /8

Call Kings Presidents or Prime Ministers, or whatever. They’re all Kings. Call the nobles ‘elites’ or ‘billionaires’ or the plutocracy, or whatever. They’re still the King’s court. Call the whole lot ‘authoritarianism’ and you’re saying nothing at all. /9

Humans as social animals will always form status hierarchies. All of them, not just elites. They’re fractal, at every level of a society. Sporting clubs, schoolyards, workplaces - all status hierarchies. All ‘authoritarian’. All LED by the highest status people. /10

To finish by going back to the data. As people surged to vote in recent years, the ‘democratic’ outcomes have been in free fall. Because somebody offered people a new King. They liked that very much. Now they just need a much better King. /end https://t.co/RV8d8rdluC

That ‘nation of freemen’ IS the problem. That’s ’the people’, the idea I often criticise. The idea populations somehow spontaneously self-organise civilisation. All human groups, of whatever size, only spontaneously organise one thing. Hierarchies of status. /2

Through imitative rivalry, as Girard said. Humans copy one another in teams, which ‘unites’ them, and then fight other teams, for status. They even fight within their own teams, for status. /3

Lincoln is expressing very clearly the complete fantasy at the root of American society. That we are all ‘free men’, spontaneously self-organising our civilisation. This is why everything looks like ‘authoritarianism’, to America. Every tiny hierarchy terrifies it. /4

But those hierarchies will always form, because humans will always pursue status. Status IS identity, for social animals. Without it they are literally nothing and nobody. By enshrining anti-hierarchy at the heart of American life, only one thing happens. /5

An endless war, for status. Uncontrolled, rampant status games. By denying it should even exist, American opened the Pandora’s Box of forever status-driven violence. It’s easily one of the most violent nations on Earth. It has never understood why. /6

This is why. By denying status and hierarchy, it leaves social life completely exposed to perpetual wars, for status. History shows us throughout thousands of years the horrendous error this is. History itself only exists because these status wars were tamed. /7

By centralised, managed status hierarchies. Monarchies and churches, mostly. A way to control and channel status games. ‘Freemen’ will just continuously re-enact B-grade Westerns, where every gunslinger in town tries to be top dog. /end

Like ‘Left’, Right’, ‘capitalism’, ‘socialism’. ‘authoritarianism’, ‘democracy’, etc. etc. To me all of the -isms and political categories are just names of teams, in a continuous battle for social status. They’re all doing exactly the same thing. /2

All fighting for social status for their team. Humans are a species with some very simple characteristics. The idea that they splinter into a bewildering array of distinct ‘systems’ is fantastical. Occam’s Razor. It’s much more sensible to address human commonalities. /3

If the teams want to call their status-seeking something, like capitalism or socialism, or Left or Right, good luck to them. It’s still just status seeking. They just want to be pre-eminent in society, like everybody else. /4

And they all reproduce the same outcome, despite their systems beliefs. They reproduce hierarchical social systems, with a king at the top. That king may be called something else. We can even pretend it’s ’the people’. But functionally, it will always be the same. /5

I was re-reading Graeber and Sahlins’ wonderful book on Kings on the weekend. A short passage gets right to the heart of what I’m saying here. There it is. Always hierarchical. And that hierarchy descends from a god or ‘meta human’, through a king figure. /6 https://t.co/6lGAJBmtVG

Humans are social animals. Social animals operate via status, it’s the most fundamental currency of their thought, belief and action. Because status is also identity, for a social animal. It makes you somebody, rather than (literally) nobody. /7

The wallies who ride under the banner of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ every day are affirming their team, and thus their identity. It’s tempting to think it matters which team wins, because of the different belief systems the teams espouse. /8

It’s irrelevant, because what always wins is the battle for status. No matter what team wins at a particular point in time, what remains constant is the ongoing battle. Their belief systems are branding. They have no empirical reality. Their beliefs are just trending. /9

The empirical reality of most societies, when you look, is mostly the same. The same sorts of public infrastructure, the same material necessities of life, solved in mostly identical ways. Material, empirical reality is indifferent to human status games. /10

As victory shifts between various teams, they attribute progress against material problems to themselves. But such progress is completely distinct from all of the teams. The team sports use material reality only as a venue for more status games. /11

Why I often call for a ‘reality-based politics’, where our collective lives are focused only on the solving of material problems facing societies. Status games mostly won’t allow that. They will insist the fight for the right to attribute progress to their team is vital. /12

It’s a completely unnecessary detour. There are no ‘Left’ roads and bridges and water filtration plants, just as there are no ‘Right’ hospitals and schools and cars. The social teams use all of that material progress only as fodder for status games. /13

If you think this is idealistic, look at the Roman Empire. Yes it had status games, but more profoundly it put engineering at its centre. It prioritised progress on the material conditions of life. Victorian England did the same. /14

Mostly by giving status to the engineers and reformers who were focused on the material realities of human life. You can’t be free of status games. But you can direct them towards material realities. /end

At the end of the 19th century, American life was dominated by robber barons. Rockefeller, Carnegie and Vanderbilt in particular. To connect to my wider posts, what preceded the Gilded Age? Total catastrophic destruction. The American Civil War. /2

Only catastrophic destruction to a status quo creates significant change in a society. Nothing is more powerful or resistant to change than a status quo, the current state of play of social status games. Humans never voluntarily relinquish status. /3

The Civil War left American society wide open to rapid escalation of status by a small number of players. The status quo had been terminally damaged. And thus the robber barons arrived. And with them, Veblen, and guess what was at the centre of his analysis? Status. /4

Veblen clearly saw that social life is driven by status, and that economic analysis needed to recognise this. He saw the emergence of these robber barons as the re-emergence of older feudal forms of social life. Driven by status. /5

If any of this is beginning to sound eerily similar to life in America today, it should. We’ve had many decades now of idiot economic analysis of social life has a great self-regulating economic machine. A ‘market’. Veblen would have laughed. He saw the status games. /6

He saw the repeated patterns of human social life, in history. The robber barons were there back at the signing of the Magna Carta almost a thousand years earlier. And well before that too. It’s the model of all human social life. The forming of status hierarchies. /7

Topped by a King-figure, with his associated ‘court’ of nobles. The robber barons. Most of what we see as the checks and balances of democratic life derived not from any consideration of ‘the people’ at all. They were checks on the King, imposed by powerful barons. /8

That’s what the Magna Carta was, a tentative agreement between the king and his barons, a setting out of relative authorities. Here the barons are, surrounding the King, forcing his hand. Most democratic ‘systems’ in turn derive from the Magna Carta. /9 https://t.co/mdRnsgjrhn

Democracy never was a movement of ‘the people’, it has always been a temporary, imposed restraint union Kingly power, by members of the King’s court. It doesn’t last because the barons never mobilise together for long. They want status individually, not collectively. /10

And again, if you can’t see the same pattern playing out again today in the US, with their current robber barons circling Trump to try to get the greatest share of their own status, then open your eyes. We’ve arrived at the next Gilded Age. Try some Veblen. /end https://t.co/KZEQyKPFBL

The ‘we’ that we grew up with, through our public institutions, was only a remnant legacy of the cataclysm of the first half of the 20th century. Two world wars, a pandemic and an economic collapse. We’ve been living off the fat of those catastrophes ever since. 2/3

Now the fat is gone. We’re back to pure status games, to restore a king and his court. The pattern of all human history. /end

Is what we’re seeing with the likes of Putin, Xi and Trump an assault on ‘democracy’? Why would this supposed new form of governance have only emerged in the 20th century? We just got suddenly smarter? Please. 2/7

We see our current lives through the distorting prism of the chaos of the first half of the 20th century. Probably the greatest disruption to human life in history. We came out the other side of it and felt a camaraderie, in the rebuild. We called it democracy. 3/7

But the kings are back. That’s what Putin, Xi and Trump are about. They want to rule kingdoms, not nation States. And in that they’re just repeating the standard pattern throughout all human history. It’s right there in front of us, to read. 4/7

What we called democracy was really just a collapse of the status quo through the catastrophic damage of that early-20th century cataclysm. Suddenly it seemed ‘we’ were all in it together. Because we were, to survive. And we rebuilt. 5/7

And when that was done, the standard social form restored itself. Kings are back, with their courts. It remains to be seen if churches and their leaders will return to the head table as well, where they’ve sat for much of 2 millennia as well. 6/7

None of this is visible to the intense social media status war bubbles we live inside, in societies without clear status hierarchies but fighting to restore them. Zoom out, you’ll see it. Only Kings and Pope-equivalents tame status games. /end