December 2025

Australia. Even greater gutting of institutional density in public service provision. Public institutions are what run societies, and create a public. Not the idiocies of voting and party politics. But the story goes even deeper. 2/7 https://t.co/O0iDIN4UEa

Because even where headcount in public institutions appears relatively stable, it’s often a ‘hollow State’ at work. Much of that headcount is now private contractors. This guts coherence, accountability and institutional memory. 3/7 https://t.co/b06amMOIp4

We’re doing stupid things in the West not because of ‘Left’ or ‘Right’ decisions. Trying to frame what’s happening to us as Left or Right is one of the MOST stupid things we’re doing. But because beginning in the 1970s, we’ve gutted our own collective memory. 4/7

Our nations lost coherence, accountability and memory, leaving us with nothing but imitative social trends to try to shape our collective lives. We’re bobbing in a sea of viral trends that have no material connection to actual problems and shift every 10 minutes. 5/7

I’ve written often about how the 1970s was the decisive tipping point. Where post-war rebuilding, guided by new institutions focused on a ‘we’ (the ‘public’), was replaced by a resurgence of status-driven life. Combined with the anti-establishment countercultural surge. 6/7

Here’s the true story, in a nutshell. The State is everywhere and nowhere. It spends more, employs many, but commands less and knows less. We’ve lost our capacity to coordinate societies, using any sort of historical memory. /end https://t.co/89iKn8WEBJ

Institutions. You need to distinguish between modern ideas of what that word means, and much deeper meanings. For most modern minds it means bureaucracy. A government department, for example. That’s not what an institution is, though can form part of it. /2

An institution is a slow sedimentation of practices that no single mind could ever design. A sedimentation of what ‘worked’ to solve problems, over generations. Institutions are not designed. They evolve. /3

They are customs, traditions. By definition they act *across* time, across generations. They are humanity’s past and future, acting in the present. They BIND generations. They’re not a contract amongst living individuals, they’re a transgenerational organism. /4

They do the daily work of enacting all of the noble principles humans develop in their status battles between themselves, in the present. They’re societies’ autonomic nervous system. Always active, regardless of lapses in attention and interest in the daily melee. /5

They create an inertia, a resistance to fads and fashions of the present day. The world we now live in, where the most outrageous stupidities can ‘go viral’ and lead to immediate widespread change within minutes, is a world without institutional stewardship. /6

A world without past wisdom acting in the present, to protect the future. Without transgenerational focus in any way. Just ‘living your best (present) life’. Where even the best intentioned have to compete for precious attention space to get anything done. /7

You can’t hashtag social change. Activism is an adolescent fantasy, from a culture of adolescents. The great boomer revolution, the counterculture and its anti-establishment obsessions. Lasting change must be sedimented from a long period of trial and error. /8

Why destroying institutions, customs and traditions, is lethal for societies. You can’t just put them back again, once they’re gone. Like trying to restore extinct species. They took many lifetimes to evolve. /9

Revolutions destroy societies. Most of our modern democracies, or what we call that, stem from recent revolutionary destruction. China, Russia, France, and the West, through its countercultural revolution. /10

All of these revolutions were deliberate assaults on institutions. The revolutionaries woke up the next day, faced with the staggering challenge of running entire societies, and thought what the fuck do we do now? They always do the same thing to try to fix it. /11

They conceive universalist instruments - written constitutions, Bills of Rights, abstract generalisations. They need to act super fast, which is why they go totalitarian in their thinking and action. They need something to desperately hold things together. /12

None of it works, of course, because abstract principles are hot air next to actually keeping the lights on. The enormously sophisticated, evolved customs and traditions that did that, which the revolutionaries destroy, took generations to emerge. And so they fight. /13

Fight about the abstract principles, and how they should apply to the everyday lives of ordinary people. Of course they don’t apply, and so the fights also never cease. Witness America, throughout its entire history. We bucked the trend once in our lifetimes. /14

The astronomically destructive first half of the 20th century, with two world wars, a pandemic and an economic crash, halted much of the status games of present-day human life. Allowing new institutions to be built. /15

I’ll post another time about the enormous institutional building that happened between about 1945 and the mid-1970s. That work gave us the modern peace and prosperity we mistook for ‘democracy’ in action. Like all of our voting did it, hilarious. /16

But starting in those same 1970s, the revolutionaries have been attacking those emergent institutions without pause. And so today we’re living in a social media society, sans institutions, where our autonomic controls are replaced with idiot imitative viral trends. /17

The attention span of a Trump, who unsurprisingly is master of this new domain. Once institutions are destroyed, they don’t get back up again. Only multi-generational time coupled with catastrophe can do it. They need to emerge from those two ingredients. /end

This is the shift I often Tweet about. Towards a ‘we’, a ‘public’. The public is not as populists would have you believe, just a big collection of ‘the people’ (never defined). It’s a constructed, administrative entity. Constructed and maintained by State capacity. /2 https://t.co/1m5nFMOOni

This is the massive *institutional* building we did in that century. Only possible through the almost total destruction of prior status hierarchies in our societies, by those catastrophes between 1900-1945. It was about surviving, as societies. Status took a back seat. /3 https://t.co/PpluVkdmbj

It was this dramatic escalation of State capacity, of public institutions, that created the ‘democracy’ we now attribute to things like voting and activism. Even the vote only became universal with that demolition of status hierarchies. /4

1975 is a critical juncture. Where two social movements went to war on this miraculous global shift towards public life. Two movements that functionally were the same movement, but defining each other as enemies. The two ‘teams’ that have defined life since 1975. /5

One was older-style status, industrial and agrarian and ‘business’ interests, who invented an entire substitute for societies, to undermine this new State capacity. They called it an ‘economy’. Run by ‘free markets’. Neither actually exist, they’re political inventions. /6

The other was the countercultural revolution of the exploding boomer generation, post-WW2. The cultural juggernaut that took their high school culture, and began replacing adult life with it. Anti-establishment culture. Both movements were really status movements. /7

Both about battling to make their particular social form of life dominant in societies. Both in opposition to the public-focused life of the growing State capacity. Both led to life in 2025. Where social media has replaced nations, with continuous imitative status games. /8

The leader of the free world is entirely a social media creation. He even has his own social media network. It’s all naked status war now. ‘Culture wars’ we call it. Really just status unbound, uncontrolled by institutional (public) life. /9

Public policy replaced by what’s ‘trending’. Societies riven by the accelerating shift in those trends, with no coordination or stability, just fads and fashions decoupled from the material needs of civilisation. Why didn’t State capacity resist this? /10

I think because it never targeted status. The catastrophes of 1900-1945 held status at bay for a few decades, and the institutions we created then were almost entirely functional. Status allowed that re-building, because it needed it to survive. /11

But as soon as that work was perceived to be largely done, by the mid-1970s, it was on again. The historical forever pattern re-emerged. Status runs societies. And the State couldn’t offer people a meaningful status hierarchy to bed down its achievements. /12

So they invented their own. Populism was the tool, first in hijacking all governance with electoral mechanisms, which are nothing but popularity contests. All elected leaders became like the Kings we’d apparently replaced. /13

But now with tools like social media, the entire population can play status games 24/7. That’s what the ‘identity politics’ of our time means. Entire populations trying to find status and therefore identity, in a culture that offered them no centralised status framework. /14

Before this you did things ‘for King and God and country’, or whatever the status hierarchy of your nation was (usually monarchies and religions). The functional State offered no replacement. So people invented their own. /end

Ask people who actually work in government, they know this to be true. The elected came to power and were then guided and led by their institutional expertise. Populist politicians though now believe they ‘run the country’. Their first target? The institutions. 2/5

We’re still stuck inside the mythology that we can elect our way out of this, or that ‘fascism’ is taking over our democracies. It’s not fascism. Fascism LOVES a strong State, it just wants to be in charge of it. Populists HATE the State (the institutions). 3/5

They hate anything that obstructs the unregulated and uncontrolled exercise of popularity as the metric of all power and authority. ‘The unelected’ is their shibboleth. They are literally the jocks from high school, re-activating the schoolyard to dominate adult life. 4/5

Could we have just kept the institutions in charge? Human status games wouldn’t have allowed it. They were only allowed to operate because nations were in ruins, post-WW1, WW2, the Spanish Flu and the Great Depression. Only catastrophe creates a public. /end

The level of immiseration of the wider population (vertical axis) determines their receptivity to co-option by rival elites. Where elite hierarchies are stabilised and populations are relatively content, you get stable order (Attractor 1). /2 https://t.co/oQwfDjOC8h

Where there is competition between rival elite groups, but the population is mostly content, co-option of the population to one or other entire rivalry is minimal (Attractor II). High levels of immiseration with unified elites creates 'authoritarian' rule (Attractor IV). /3 https://t.co/d2AlL1urcs

Finally where there is significant immiseration and popular discontent, and also intense elite rivalry into opposing elite teams, you get violent bifurcation (Attractor III). That's the space of revolution. There's no returning to stability from that point, it's chaotic. /4 https://t.co/cNEHkHYV4n

Once violent bifurcation occurs, the only way back is a complete re-build of society. There is no time in which 'the people' run anything. They are only co-opted into rivalries between elite. That IS history. /end

Social media takes the ambiguity that usually leads to social change, where the disconnect between beliefs and reality create pressure for change, and it uses this ambiguity to feed ‘identity politics’. Social status games. /2

So that rather than an obviously broken social situation leading to pressure to fix things, it leads to the creation of social groups or teams who feed off the ambiguity itself. To battle other teams circling the same ambiguity. This is social media’s core business model. /3

It means that not only do obvious problems go unfixed, but they get orders of magnitude worse because the existence of the problem feeds the imitative rivalry of a proliferation of identity/status-driven social groups. Social media weaponises social problems. /4

Because that weaponisation leads to monetisation. Fucking over societies is how social media makes money. Just look at how at war the kidult CEOs of these platforms are with existing governments. The vanity of their megalomania. /5

Sane societies would shut them down today. Or at the very least impose stringent regulation, as they always have done for traditional media. The population will resist that regulation, because the platforms target their deepest desires, for imitative rivalry. Status. /6

We’re addicted to our own destruction. By comparison AI has the potential to fundamentally short-circuit the usual detouring of human knowledge through these same status games. It’s a shame it’s often owned by the same kidult CEOs. /end

Even the most basic experience of occupying a piece of land to us is positional - it’s about space. We live inside maps, we carve up our ‘territories’. When in reality geography is also about time. About finding a way to endure, together with a landscape. 2/5

What we call ‘politics’ is more positioning, we talk about our positions or viewpoints on issues. All geographical, spatial metaphors. What would public life look like, if time was our metric, instead of space? 3/5

It would be a public life run by institutions, as Edmund Burke said. Institutions are human life + duration. Multi-generational, emergent practices that regulate the present with the accumulated lessons of the past, towards a better future. 4/5

Not a point-in-time daily jostling for position in meaningless debates that are really about occupying territory, in social status games. We have not one idea about how to occupy time, rather than space. Which means time will destroy us. /end

A magnificent Fra Angelico here capturing that core message. Humans battle for status, in groups or teams. Via imitative rivalry. When that rivalry becomes too intense, a mechanism appears to short-circuit it. A scapegoat is found to assume guilt for the rivalry. /2 https://t.co/ZSWHUPY4S0

Look at any contentious news event, and you will see this same mechanism. The Bondi shooting for example, the fight to establish a scapegoat is intense. To find somebody or something to blame. Albo, or antisemitism, or whatever. The event is used to further status games. /3 https://t.co/28rSSuXVK1

Christmas celebrates Christ’s response to this status mechanism. To assume that scapegoat role, to remove it from mortal human life. Crucify me, stop scapegoating each other. End the status games. /4 https://t.co/dL0Lqoci0h

Much of the existence of Western civilisation is the success of that re-routing of status games. To make the transcendent mortal, to assume the blame game and vacuum it out of human existence. To provide an arbiter to human rivalries, that transcended those rivalries. /5 https://t.co/0hS0vtGpje

That institutionalised ‘turning the other cheek’. That immiserated vengeance. Not only can’t you win status battles when the tip of the status hierarchy is a transcendent but mortal God. You can’t even begin the game. /6 https://t.co/MUK8tUch5a

Kings achieve a similar thing, codify all status inside an aristocratic hierarchy, to suppress widespread violent status rivalries flooding all of human life. But they’re mortal, despite their attempts to be divine. They sort of work, but never permanently. /7

At Christmas I remember, without being a practising Christian, what Christianity’s innovation was. At a time when our lives are again uncontrolled status games. If you don’t control status, it will destroy you. The violence and blood will never cease. /8 https://t.co/yROnKJJpJL

Status infects every tiny aspect of being human. You have to learn to recognise it in all its forms. It will make you no friends to root it out. Friendship and all human life relies upon it. /end

Similarly, nearly all of the meaningful change in societies is forced upon them by catastrophic disruption to their status quo. Without that disruption, humans will just battle each other for status, via imitative rivalry. /2

Pleas every day that ‘we’ should fix this or fix that. There is no ‘we’, until existential threat creates one. Without that threat, there’s just various social groups fighting each other to be top of our status hierarchies. Social progress is mostly emergency action. /3

The panicked response to threats to our existence. The really alarmingly funny idea that ‘democracy’ is humans working together in non-threat times to guide social progress - what planet are we living on? We’re the rump of an historically unprecedented 70 years. /4

From about 1945 until today, that’s our baseline for understanding social life and social change. No other time in history was like those 70 years. It’s created an enormous, damaging distortion in the framing of our lives. /5

Those 70 years were re-building the cataclysmic years between about 1900, and 1945. Two world wars, a global pandemic and an economic collapse. That created a genuine ‘we’, of a magnitude history had never seen. The cataclysm did it. Not ‘democracy’. Horses and carts. /6

That we is effectively now dead. It’s too long since we’ve been confronted with that level of existential threat. Nothing disciplines human thought and behaviour towards collective ends except cataclysm. /7

Many might say we’re heading for an even larger cataclysm today, with climate change and other pressures. That’s entirely possible, even likely. A ‘we’ may then re-emerge. /end

Compare everything to school, because in schools you’ll find the origin of our entire modern culture. We all go there, that’s where our culture is incubated. Previously those who did well at school academically went on to run the world. Our institutions employed them. 2/3

Now social media completely flips that. It’s the Revenge of the Jocks. Replacing an adult culture of institutional expertise with one thing only. Popularity. The jock currency. These aren’t analogies. It’s what is actually going on, socially/culturally. /end

As with Tesla’s FSD, I think what’s partly not understood is that AI brings the intelligence and experience of many more people to a problem than has been possible before. That’s how the technology works. It’s not non-human. It’s lots of humans, rather than just one. 2/5

Similarly the idea that text-based thought carries with it a lot of human judgment and experience. It’s a distillation of many minds, working on a problem. Contrasted with AI, that ‘just processes texts’. But those texts come from the human process. 3/5

AI is distilling all of that collective human work, to make it available in real time. We watch too many Hollywood movies, Terminator is as destructive for AI as Jaws was to sharks. Will it make mistakes? Will it hallucinate sometimes? Of course. 4/5

That’s another feature of all significant change, holding the competitor to the status quo to a much higher standard. What the world desperately needs is more intelligence. Social media is a much graver threat, because it replaces intelligence with social status games. /end

The US is a revolutionary society, it exists in a state of permanent revolution. The dream is to launch the next revolution there, to upend any settled social arrangements and become rich beyond all historical sense. That IS the culture. No coherent sense of public good. /2

The disproportionate fortunes this creates, concentrated in the hands of a tiny number, have global impact. Disruption can be a good thing, if it replaces an entrenched status quo pursuing the wrong collective ends. Tesla for example came from this social ecosystem. /3

Tesla still has the capacity to help lead the world in revolutionary changes to its use of energy, which is its ostensible mission. But it’s lumbered with the same cultural artefact, the latest US celebrity oligarch, perverting the disruption. /4

Revolutionary societies can’t think or act outside the desperate passion to upend everything, all the time, to raise your own head above the chaotic melee of a society without any embedded sense of purpose. To try to become kingpin, to escape the melee. /5

Life in other countries now is the experience of being smashed from one direction to another by competing US oligarchs and their latest attempts at world domination, mostly through the IT industry. The US is a machine for the overproduction of elite rivals. Turchin. /6

It can’t form any sort of stabilised status hierarchy at home, and it exports that social dysfunction globally. We all become bit players to that rivalry of US elites. Only societies that stabilise status rivalries survive. I’ve Tweeted often about how that’s done. /7

The Europeans historically did it with monarchies and churches. Judaism does it with knowledge, embedded in a rabbinical tradition. The US sees no need to do it at all. The French, Russians, Chinese etc. had their own revolutions. /8

Their pre-existing institutional mechanisms to manage status rivalries though managed to rein revolutionary impact in to some extent. The US is revolution, all the way down. It began as a revolution. It’s not clear it can ever escape that modality of being. /end

It's critical to understand how they get away with it. It's mostly not some evil dark forces, though we have those too. It's our shared belief that 'the people' is a thing, some form of agency in the world. That knowledge is the aggregation of opinion. It isn't. 2/2

The dominant narrative that we’re labouring under, that ‘the people’ run societies, and are currently being either victorious (Trumpian populism) or are under assault by authoritarians (anti-Trumpian populism) is farcical. It’s a Punch and Judy show. /2 https://t.co/bvhGzRChbJ

A fake binary or rivalry, because humans always construct those. It’s how the wider population is recruited to elite battles, using these big binary fight metaphors. As Turchin describes, the US right now, as it does throughout history, has overproduced elite players. /3

The fractious nature of America today is not as tedious, lazy analyses say, ‘a country divided’. It’s a battle between too many elite rivals for status supremacy there. Those rivals are co-opting the wider population into their battles, using various narratives i.e. spin. /4

The tech bros are persuading millions the State oppresses them, and come and live in our tech-driven utopias instead. They create these platforms, which convince millions more globally they’re practising ‘democracy’ here every day. It’s hilarious, and tragic. /5

Older elites respond with reference to older institutional forms that support existing status hierarchies. Meanwhile social media ‘influencers’ enter the fray as new elite players. /6

Societies are always driven by status rivalry, between elites. The perception that ‘the people (not even a thing, just a counting term) are the driving force of anything is a toxic fantasy. They attach themselves to one or other of the elite teams. Elites use them as PR. /7

What does this all mean for the social change that is badly needed? I’ve used Victorian England as an example before. Meaningful change comes when elites are coupled to collective ends, through what Storr calls ‘success’ status games. /8

In Victorian England, status came from undertaking massive collective-focused work on public infrastructure. Engineers were their heroes. Scientists too. The Republic of Letters was focused on improving our collective lot. /9

Knowledge ran societies, and was celebrated for doing it. But it only happened because status was attached to it first. Existing status hierarchies attached themselves to these innovations. Nothing will stabilise until the elite rivalries stabilise. Until somebody wins. /10

And then nothing will improve unless the winners play success games, turning status into the production of things for the collective good. Like the Victorians did. And the Romans long before them. These patterns repeat throughout history. /end