October 2025

2 of the 3 suggested strategies centre on infection. Inflammation is poorly understood, but some researchers say persistent infection may be implicated there too. Add ‘avoid infections’ to ‘lifestyle modification’, and it’s a 3 from 3 clean sweep. /end https://t.co/8dPl5dsoJF

https://t.co/TN3kUYwW0i

Socially, power in society has shifted to ‘the people’, mobilising on social media. What are they producing with that power? Autocracy, authoritarianism. Or at least those are the words we use, through our idealistic claptrap filters. 2/3

Societies are reproducing the same social form they have for thousands of years. Monarchical hierarchies. Our inability to live or think outside the present moment of social media status games makes this invisible to us. A little bit of history makes it obvious. /end

It’s an example where the objective, material reality of the world overcomes the usual treacly bog of social relations. Status and power has resided in fossil fuel energy for so long, that offering a delocalised energy source is revolutionary, even for individuals. /2

Why I still maintain that you can try all the activism to maybe mobilise people, to overcome the problems we face. But none of it will have the impact of electrifying your home, powered by your own solar. It’s not just about cheaper, cleaner energy. /3

In a world where energy has been the currency of status and power for so many decades, nothing will collapse those hierarchies faster than changing your individual energy use. And it gets even better than that. Because all hierarchies connect. /4

By freeing yourself from fossil fuel hierarchies, which you can to a large extent do with your own solar and electrifying your home and vehicles, you’re knee-capping *every* existing hierarchy in society. Not just in energy. The Covid deniers, the ‘fascists’, etc. etc. /5

All of them have an umbilical cord to fossil fuel energy, in some ways. As Rousseau said, a society has all of its habits at once. Humans are almost completely incapable of taking their focus off other humans. We’re social animals. But here material reality triumphs. /6

Because the existing status quo is so fundamentally bound to fossil fuel energy, the capacity to bypass it *individually* is a new type of revolution. You can be free in a couple of days, without storming any Bastilles. You don’t need to convince or mobilise others. /7

Humans left to themselves will just fight each other for status, every day. But when status attached itself to the material reality of the world, through adoption of fossil fuels, it also left itself wide open to *material* revolutionary upending of that status. /8

By anybody, with a material alternative. Get solar, electrify your home and vehicles. That will change the WHOLE world, very fast. Activism won’t. /end

The most catastrophic belief about democracy is that it’s an aggregation of what is most popular. ‘Majority rules’. Popularity has no connection with the material reality of the world. It’s entirely a currency of social status. /2

Populism is just marketing. Anything can be marketed, made popular. You can convince millions to ‘live with’ pandemics, or that international travel is actually enjoyable and doesn’t destroy the places you visit. Anything, really. Hitler was popular. /3

Democratic elections are only popularity contests. Why all democracies have been in free fall on the measures of their health since universal suffrage became the definition of democracy. It was the identity politics of its day. Status games. /4

The Greeks, who invented democracy, would have laughed at the very idea of what we call democracy today. We think we’ve improved it, modernised it. It’s run aground on all the problems the Greeks saw. /5

True social progress is progress on the material foundations of life. As Latour said, we don’t have ‘object-oriented’ democracies. We have status games. What is empirically, materially true is what is true. The rest is just a pissing contest, for status in social groups. /6

Civilisations that survive put material well-being at their core. Mostly engineering of various kinds. Civilisations that flame out quickly are ones that fight over ‘ideals’, over the status of groups. Over the identity of people. /7

Building stuff isn’t ‘tools’, it doesn’t just give you ‘stuff’. It’s the way societies that survive weave their social bonds. Those bonds are non-human and material much more than they’re human. /8

Once you bind daily social life to the building and maintenance of material things, you sideline status. Status makes nothing work. The building and trade of things is what creates civilisations. Material things, responding to material needs. /9

Imagine a re-formed democracy, where the daily team sports over status of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ was banished until all the material needs of a society had been met. Just imagine that. Those material needs aren’t Left or Right. They’re just material needs. /end

None of these crumbs from the public health table the free marketers thought might sell this public health horseshit was ever intended to actually happen. It’s just infections, infections, infections. It’s not a strategy. It’s no strategy. That was the point. 2/4

It’s like climate change denial, also a libertarian/free market passion. The intent is to destroy ALL action. ‘The vulnerable’ is a specious smoke screen, they couldn’t give a fuck about anybody vulnerable to anything. Except the rich, vulnerable to taxation. 3/4

Read this declaration and you will see the public health ‘strategy’ now in play for Covid, in most countries. Our health ministers and leaders should be asked why a half-page free market wet dream was allowed to replace a century of public health infrastructure. /end

The idea of the ‘country’. Or the bush, as Australians like to call it. To paraphrase John Clarke, that place they like to pretend they live. Here’s the thing. There is no such thing as ‘the country’. Understanding why will reveal more ground truths of our cultures. /2

If you look at the history of pretty much every country town in Australia, for example, you’ll find the same thing. These were early extractive industries for the cities. The place they went looking for ‘resources’. Mostly farming and mining. /3

The fact these areas were sparsely populated by the farmers and miners created the fantasy that they were living an entirely different form of life to their city cousins. But they weren’t. Again, they were just extracting ‘resources’ from the land out there. /4

City/country is a fake divide. And you can see that in real time right now, in the article, how country towns simply disappear, once their extractive industries close up shop or stop employing anybody. Some try to stay alive becoming tourist destinations. /5

Transforming their towns into frozen-in-time theme parks for bored city dwellers looking for something to do in their time off. And/or gentrifying the towns, to replicate some of that exclusive leafy green feel of rich suburbs in cities, for less money. /6

Which mostly just floods the town with hipsters, who create nothing except expensive coffee, food and haircuts. Let’s get to the deepest cultural point here. /7

As old imperial cultures, by definition we never live IN the landscape. We never *inhabit* it. We live ON it. It’s only a resource to be plundered, to be returned to the centre of the empire. That’s what empires do. /8

We live inside maps, generated to facilitate transport of these resources. We then turn the rest of the world into the same, and make those locations our ‘bucket list’ of ‘places to see’. Like aristocratic youth on their eternal Grand Tour. /9

Just look at how much of our obsessive travel culture is about creating opportunities to generate selfies for our socials feeds. We never leave home, travel is just more fuel for our status games in our social groups. /10

Most of the ecological catastrophe of modern life is this simple, social/cultural fact. We have NO IDEA how to live IN a landscape. Only on it. We bulldoze most of it away to make room for our homes, which we then bid as casino chips in housing markets. /11

Longer term this means extinction. The landscape is all that ultimately sustains us, as many Indigenous peoples figured out over thousands of years. But how you do you live in it, rather than on it? /12

We pretend that means buying a big 4WD and churning it up on our wankpanzer Crocodile Dundee fantasies, of getting back in touch with our country. Just more theme park culture. Dundee is like the Elvis of landscapes in Australia, the white guy re-branding black culture. /13

Or the ‘back to nature’ crowd, worshipping the mess out there now as some holy object. Both at total arm’s length from actual habitation with the landscape. /14

There are no simple answers. It took our own Aboriginal culture thousands of years to create the landscapes we took off them. We idiotically thought they were ‘wild’ landscapes. They are now. Much of it a desolate wasteland. /end

Ouch. This is *per person*, not per plane. /end https://t.co/RjCulWA7l8

The market is the SAME idea as ‘democracy’, as popularly conceived. The idea that entire populations left to their own devices spontaneously create civilisation as we know it. ‘The people’ as the basis of democracy IS ‘the market’ as the basis of economic life. /2

It’s the same lethal, catastrophic delusion. What do populations do if left to do whatever they like? They do what humans always do. They create status hierarchies. They don’t create democracies, or markets. /3

Climate change is uncontrolled because ‘the market’ is being used to try to address it. You can’t make up just how stupid that idea is. That we have to incentivise ‘the people’ to move towards the needed climate action. /4

That’s not how the Industrial Revolution worked, that introduced fossil fuels. It was a REVOLUTION. It smashed all existing social status hierarchies. Only a revolutionary shift can do the same for renewable energy-based culture. /5

Leaving it to ‘the market’ only turns climate action into fodder for the status games played by the existing status quo. Both ‘sides’ of our idiot politics believe in this nonsense. /end

The one Tony Seba for example often talks about. Where the force of an innovation itself is so immense that it overpowers the status quo. His “10x” rule. If something is 10 times cheaper and better functionally, change is inevitable. Like keelboats vs steamboats, in the US. /2 https://t.co/Tae8Qjk4uD

Just think about that. Something needs to be 10 times better and cheaper, to overcome our socially-driven status quo. That’s the force of social conformity. Overcome again only by something non-human, but in this case less destructive than a war or plague. /3

Renewable energy and EVs for transport are either at or approaching this 10x limit. At that point peoples’ beloved opinions become completely irrelevant. A revolution occurs, smashing the status quo. /4 https://t.co/IOP4gntoH5

Give up the belief that ‘the people’ (never defined) ‘debating’ each other all day is democracy and progress. That’s all status games. Jockeying for positions in the existing status quo status hierarchies. Engineers change the world, when disasters are in short supply. /end

Those checks and balances were about buttressing the power of the royal court. Of the ‘aristocracy’, as we’d call it today. All societies are run by status. Status itself is run by the highest status people and groups. Kings and barons, and modern equivalents. /2

Centuries down the track those checks and balances on royal power are so far removed from modern historical memory that we’ve simply forgotten what they are and where they came from. ‘Democracy’ always was just putting limits on the powers of the King. /3

It’s a fight at the top end of societies, at the tip of status hierarchies. Because the rest of society works for that top end, the victories for either side of that battle will impact the rest of us, in good and bad ways. So we think this must be a ‘people’ centred thing. /4

That’s a fundamental, catastrophic error. The people (whatever that means, there is no such homogeneous group) benefit from the checks and balances only insofar as the barons they work for benefit from them. What if the barons and the King get chummy? /5

Welcome to 2025. Where our modern barons, our corporate titans and influencers, schmooze with the Kings of the day (Prime Ministers, Presidents, or actual kings). No need for those pesky checks and balances when schmoozing is the order of the day. Thus their collapse. /6

Fuck ‘the people’ now. No noblesse oblige operates in modern corporate aristocracies. They’d just as soon replace you with AI and robots. So ‘democracy’ is dying, everywhere. It has been for decades, we just ignore it. And not because of ‘authoritarian’ takeovers. /7

All societies are ‘authoritarian’, in the idiot way we use that word. Because they all run on status, and status is hierarchical, with a King or equivalent right at the top. Democracy is just when the barons and the King are at war with each other. /8

That is literally all it ever was. Throw in some catastrophic disruptions like world wars and plagues and economic depressions, smashing status hierarchies in the 20th century in particular, and you can feel like ‘democracy’ was in the ascendancy. ‘People power’ at last! /9

Utterly delusional. Not just because it’s not what actually happened, but because it could never happen anyway. ‘Popular sovereignty’ is an oxymoron. Governance bootstrapping. ‘The people’ will always do what all people always do. Fight for status. /10

Just like their barons and Kings. They join teams, headed by their higher status leaders in every field of life, and battle other teams, for supremacy. Imitating one another, to create team cohesion and strength. Why Girard called the basis of society ‘imitative rivalry’. /11

Another day of dreary scrolling through more of these status team sports, accusations of ‘authoritarianism’ and “No Kings” protests. That last one is funny. Like the US ever gave up Kings. The US President is the most royal figure in the world, and has been for decades. /end

I remember that story when thinking about ‘living with’ pandemics. How the social media-led obsessive focus only on present moment trends and therefore only acute Covid impact has blinded us to what’s been done. You can’t uninfect bodies. Only time reveals the damage. /end

What is ‘far Left’ today was ‘moderate’ only a few years ago. Etc. None of these points represent anything in reality except a provisional set of alliances, in opposition to other points on the spectrum. It’s entirely self-referential. /end https://t.co/yuEdMourk7

The actual experience is that humans, when faced with existential challenges, as these real boys were, are more united than at any other time. It’s when they’re separated from existential threat, in social environments, that they become most dangerous and violent. /2

We live in a teen culture, structured like a giant high school. 9.5 out of 10 people you ask would tell you that socialising is the key to a happy life, and ‘loneliness’ is the worst fate. That’s high school culture in a nutshell. In reality sociality is always violence. /3

The violence of imitative rivalry Girard wrote about. Do we not remember the continuously contested space of adolescence and high school? The constant fight to ‘fit in’? The more social we make adult life, the more it becomes high school life. The battle for status. /4

In societies that live actually inside social media, the violence becomes endemic. Ask anybody who does a public-facing job right now about the dramatic escalation in aggressive behaviours. Or drive on any of our roads. /5

Violence is not just physical assault. It’s aggression, rivalry. Who doesn’t feel the growing tension of that every day now, on both public and personal life? Who doesn’t see the signs in businesses saying ‘abuse won’t be tolerated’? /6

The history of civilisation itself is the history of the restriction of sociality, the deliberate suppression of crowds. Not (as we like to think) as part of various tyrannies or authoritarian schemes, but because without those restrictions blood flows like rivers. /7

You can see this all in real time on social media. Watch how previously unproblematic projects in your local area become battlegrounds for warring social media groups, who weaponise it for their imitative rivalries. Adult life is learning to be less social. /8

To learn to be resilient and true to your individual nature, rather than adjusting everything you think, feel and do to ‘fit in’ with social groups. The more we socialise everything, the more we destroy adult life. And the more violent and less resilient we become. /end

Unpopular things will be met less by resistance or outrage, than by silent incomprehension. You are literally checking out of all of the popularity-based status games. You are on no team. Trying to ‘mobilise’ nobody. /2

Thought in a populist culture, and look around here today if you don’t believe me, is entirely about apportioning somebody to one or other team, and then battling that team with another team. The content of belief becomes irrelevant. Identifying the team is the only game. /3

The same team can have fundamentally opposite beliefs in a very short period of time. Witness the Trumpians in bed with the old Soviets right now, their Great Leader games. Again, the content of belief becomes irrelevant. It’s only about team sports, battles for status. /4

How many truly unpopular things have you thought or done in your life? Not just contrarian things (which have their own teams), but where you escaped the teams entirely? Where you were almost a lone voice, and your social status became either void or a laughing stock? /5

That’s the only path to truth. Nobody will reward you, most will think you’re insane and ignore you. You won’t register in their team battles. But as Spinoza said, this is the only path to knowledge, and through that to the only genuine joy to be had in life. /end

Burke described how institutions evolved, like living things, they’re the customs and traditions that survive the test of lived reality over many years. They’re what survive that lived reality. They’re the hard-won lessons of repeated human lives, acting in the present. /2

They’re like a combination of society’s autonomic nervous system and memory. If destroyed they don’t get back up again, just as making a species extinct can’t be reversed. Only reliving centuries or millennia of the same brutal experiences might produce something similar. /3

I often post here about how only catastrophes shift societies meaningfully. They do that by generating institutions. New customs and habits that act against the status quo. Which then act autonomically into the future, guiding future generations too. /4

We live in such an adolescent culture now that our idea of change is trying to get things to ‘go viral’. Like selling yo-yos. ‘Mobilising’ people behind trends. It’s all ephemeral. Only multiple lived generations facing challenge generate lasting institutions. /5

The institutions that emerged after WW2 that led to the greatest peace and prosperity in human history, for much of the 20th century, are what we mistake for normal life. They’re absolutely exceptional, historically. Rarer than dodos. They invented ‘we’, ‘the public’. /6

A we often mistaken for the same adolescent culture protesting, either out in the streets or now on these platforms. Mobilising everything. The public is an institutional construct. Without institutions it simply ceases to exist. /7

From about the 1970s, humanity’s battles for social status went to war on these institutions. Both ‘Left’ and ‘Right’. The Left called them ‘the establishment’, the Right ‘red tape/bureaucracy’. All adolescents in an adolescent culture. Teams. playing status team sports. /8

Fake enemies, both playing the same status games, both gorging themselves on humans’ true delight, the fight for social position. Burke saw that revolutions are what these status battles produce. Revolutions that destroy institutions. /9

Russia and China never really recovered from their people power moments, in the 20th century. But we forget that the West had its own, later in the century. It’s countercultural revolution. When teenagers took over the West. /10

That’s why to this day Western life is still that giant high school, with rival teams battling for status in the schoolyard. When that massive demographic blip of teenagers hit adult life in the 1960s, they had no idea what to do with it. /11

An adult life pulverised by two world wars, a great depression and a pandemic. The teenagers had strength in numbers and fatally damaged adult institutions. So they remade the West as a literal giant high school, culturally. It’s all they knew. /12

Watch us in the West every day, the perennial culture of complaint, teenagers grounded by parents or teachers. Our response to all problems the same. ‘Protest’. No idea how to intervene in the material reality of our lives. The institutional basis of our culture, gone. /13

Our collective autonomic nervous system and memory destroyed. Only technologies bind us now, through the discipline they impose by their construction and upkeep. Everything else is team sports, for status. /end

“It revealed a troubling nonchalance about the principles of civil liberty that were so hard-won in the history of Western liberal democracy and should not be easily discarded.” Anybody with even the faintest understanding of history should recoil in horror here. /2

To oppose public health to freedoms and liberties is beyond the pale. The ‘lives and livelihoods’ bullshit we’ve heard throughout Covid. As if those are TWO things! You have no livelihood, without a life. /3

Civilisation itself is the control of infectious disease more than any other thing. The Old Testament is all about plagues. They knew, then, where the battle lay. Human life expectancy doubled in the past century through the control of infection and infectious disease. /4

Humans have no native, individual rights. No ‘essential freedoms’. Those come only from ‘collective’ life. Social life. Without social life, we’re all just Robinson Crusoe on his island. It’s our collective life that GIVES us *individual* freedoms and liberties. /5

There’s no binary here. We are freer the *more* we are bound to others in collective responsibility. It’s called economies of scale, division of labour. Otherwise again you’re on Robinson’s island, trying to avoid eating sand and drinking salt water. /6

The greatest progress by far in civilisation came with the control of infectious disease, only at the very latest hour of history, in the past century. That modern conservatives went to war with the public health that did it is a sign of how dangerous they are. /end

Most of Noah’s piece is a window into the terrible mess American thought and life is, when it comes to understanding how humans live collectively. This idea that ‘the people’ are the real game, constantly thwarted by kings and other tyrants. The American delusion. /2

I genuinely invite everybody who believes that guff to spend a week on a switchboard at their local council, or in any public institution. To get a taste of ‘the people’ firsthand. It’s idealised nonsense. People are so many flavours of batshit crazy. /3

And righteously crazy, convinced their way is the only way. The idea people left to their own devices are freedom-loving peaceniks is hilarious, and totally out of whack with the empirical reality of collective life. All people, at all times in history, do one thing. /4

They look to protect and promote their own status, at the expense of the status of others if needed. If you take away Kings and other more stabilised status hierarchies at the centre of societies, people will invent new ones all over the place. That’s Western life today. /end

The insane missed opportunity of Covid is that in most countries, there was enough remnant public health DNA still left to begin the pandemic with a sane response. The emergency phase. Now often attacked as the ‘lockdown’ stage, by muppets acting for the status quo. /2

Many times I’ve pointed out that the dreaded ‘lockdowns’ were completely at odds with the hysterical response to them. Mostly libertarian targeted and funded protest. The disruption was much less than the deliberately engineered hysteria about it wanted to let people see. /3 https://t.co/OOWJQhPAXD

That hysteria-led response to the public health response created an abomination. We jumped straight from the emergency phase of pandemic management, to ‘personal responsibility’ public health. A concept as fatuous as fascist flower arranging. /4

Sanity would have been using that emergency phase to plan and begin to implement widespread measures to clean indoor air. To begin the CONTROL phase of the public health response. A control that would then continue in perpetuity. As we do for all other serious pathogens. /5

Instead our kidult, adolescent ‘free market’ governance privatised the pandemic response, as it had already privatised (and mostly destroyed) education, transport, water, energy etc. If you wanted public health, you’d now have to do it and pay for it yourself. /6

Unfortunately many who do actually understand this then just revert to the idiot Left v Right, ‘neoliberalism’ blah blah status games of free market politics, to try to fix it. They play status games. But it wasn’t ‘capitalism’ that killed public health. /7

Capitalism isn’t even a thing, all societies are 100% social. None of the -isms are real. Public health was shafted by uncontrolled status games. By societies that take all of their framings for existence from adolescent, school life. They’re now giant high schools. /8

It’s obvious to see the evolution. Just quickly again, compulsory schooling created two cultures - child and adult - where previously there’d been just one. Then as children flowed out of these schools, they remade adult life with the only culture they knew. School culture. /9

The whining, protesting resistance to public health was just teenagers of every age resisting being told what to do. About anything. All of our adult culture now derives from adolescent, school life, if you look. Everything we give fairy tale names is just that. /10

It isn’t Left v Right, those are just schoolyard gangs. It isn’t capitalism v socialism/communism. More gangs. It isn’t democracy vs authoritarianism. Just more gangs. All fighting for status. /11

Adults now are kidults. Their entire way of seeing and understanding the world derives from their lives inside schools, battling for status against other teens. Our own cultures are always mostly invisible to us. Like water is to fish. /12

You can’t change culture quickly, alas. We’ve completely forgotten, as a culture, how to adult anything. Just look at the attempts to do basic things like install wind turbines. Nothing but whining, obstructive complaint. /13

Even the best-intentioned are powerless to even conceive of a way forward that isn’t just complaint, mixed with ‘mobilising’ people in viral campaigns. Just more high school life. Getting things to ‘trend’. Like the shoes you wore to school. /14

Understanding that all societies are 100% social, and nothing else, also means realising that all that ever shifts a (social) status quo is catastrophic disruption. Just ask any young person trying to buy a house now. They know all the ‘managed’ responses are bullshit. /15

Things are going to have to break, catastrophically, to restore adult life. Millions have already died from Covid alone, with minimal impact on the teen life we live now from cradle to grave. You have to understand culture. Social things. /end

There’s even more to see here. The idiot debates today about market versus public provision of housing ignore that there was no such thing as a market, until government intervened. Nobody owned homes, except for a tiny number of the elite. /2 https://t.co/ZrpofJXoGG

The idea of the market, or the free market as it’s sometimes called, is a political fiction designed by the same elite sections of society to dismantle government regulation of their activity. Humans never act in the way that market theorists describe. /3 https://t.co/wMPpOBzdsm

Housing just one more example of how societies run on status, and all that disrupts the status quo is catastrophe. Housing globally now is ridiculously unaffordable. With the absence of pressure from catastrophic disruption, it’s returned to being a high status marker. /4 https://t.co/5pGrGtwwVl

I’m sure Cameron Murray posted this graph originally, acknowledgements. /end

There was such a catastrophic loss of peasant workers that those that remained suddenly had the upper hand in negotiations with the landed gentry. They became mobile, paid workers, rather than indentured slaves. /2

This was such a threat to the existing status quo that Edward III issued the Statute of Laborers, in 1351. To try to rein in this new power of laborers. It’s only very short, have a read: https://t.co/O3yJc6ihmw /3

He failed, and from that failure our lives as modern workers began. It’s why you and I are no longer peasants. We saw the same thing with lesser impact, with Covid. The vaccines saved the status quo’s bacon. /4

Work from home is one of the only victories for ordinary working people that came out of Covid, and the pre-existing status quo despises it and is still trying to rein it back in. Again, only catastrophe creates meaningful change in a society. /5

The civil rights victories in the mid-20th century and in the early 20th century are often evoked as evidence that ‘people power’ was triumphant in these most modern times. Look more closely and you’ll see that catastrophes preceded all of them. Wars, plagues, pandemics. /6

For example feminism made apparently large gains in the 20th century, often attributed to protest and other activist action. Many historians will tell you that it was mostly the killing of so many men and the diminution of their influence that opened the door to that shift. /7

To shift a status quo, you first have to destroy it. It will never give up status on its own. And a status quo is all of us, not just ‘elites’ oppressing ordinary people. Take away those elites and ‘the people’ will recreate them, in quick time. /8

Why when we got rid of most kings, the people in ‘democracies’ quickly replaced them with Presidents and Emperors, and today with a variety of ‘influencers’. Status is to human society what gravity is to the material world. /end

And in reality, the first more restricted definition of populism will show you nearly always the same elites who are the fake target of the strategy, running the campaigns. It’s a con. They know popularity is just marketing, and easily gamed. /2

All of these basic questions about governance were discussed exhaustively by the Greeks, when they invented the idea of democracy. Populism is so entrenched now that the historical memory of public debate is about 10 minutes. We fight for a democracy of ‘the people’. /3

Never defined. Or for ‘public’ centred governance, without again a single clue what a public even is. The public of democracy is categorically not ‘the people’, as America would have us believe. That’s its toxic belief system introduced by Puritans escaping Europe. /4

The public is a *construct*. A continuously modified construct, by public *institutions*. It’s institutions that create a public, and through that, democracy. Not some undefined amorphous mass America currently appeals to, of ‘the people’. That people never rise up. /5

Aristotle knew that democracies work when institutions are staffed by what we now call the middle class. They do the basic work of keeping a country’s lights on, managing peace and prosperity. The US has a weak middle class, and therefore weak institutions. /6 https://t.co/cvxMtNzAzW

Which is why it lurches between tyrannies, of the rich and poor. Between oligarchs and populist influencers. There’s no strong moderating, mediating middle class layer, running institutions that create democracy. The data tells the story. /7 https://t.co/t4nI4F3BfH

It’s plain to see here that the greater the emphasis placed upon strong institutions and a middle class to staff them, the better the democratic outcomes are. Both the US and UK have historical hostility towards this fundamental truth. They’re both in decline now. /8 https://t.co/YfJqeXaGrJ

I can only encourage people to not be persuaded by these idiot platforms, themselves mostly of US origin, into adopting the cultural practices of this hostility, which we’ve seen decimate basics like climate and Covid action. It makes societies eat themselves. /9

A healthy democracy isn’t ’the people’ consuming vast quantities of information every day, trying to run the country themselves. It’s those same people paying little attention to those details at all, delegating them to trusted institutions to manage. /10

‘But the institutions are corrupt!’. You’ll hear Americans and Brits say this, because of that historical cultural hostility to institutional life. (The Brits don’t even have a written constitution.) Or others will evoke failures of things like public health, in Covid. /11

Those failures were engineered, and have been since the 1970s, with the institutions white-anted consistently as ‘red tape’ and ‘bureaucracy’, again mostly through influence from the hostile British and American anti-institutional culture. /12

Burke knew it. Aristotle centuries before him knew it. Institutions create not only democracy, but the public itself. The public is not and will never be ‘the people’, as just some mass of protesting folk in the streets. That’s just a mob. /end