January 2026
Complete authored posts and demonstrable self-threads.
Girard saw the 10th commandment as primary. You shall not COVET. All desire is imitative rivalry. We imitate what others desire. All crisis is mimetic crisis. Social media is a mimesis machine, burning our societies down from the inside via uncontrolled imitative rivalry. https://t.co/fT6i6ReWKv
The rapidly escalating pettiness of Trump's fights. He's doing us a favour, making visible the mimetic crisis that is the true threat to our societies. Humans desire what others desire. The object of desire is irrelevant, the toy here. We desire it because others do. /1 https://t.co/dFP7ufYm5t
That's why humans imitate one another, above all else. They imitate what others desire, in imitative rivalry. If your neighbour has a wankpanzer ute, you want one too. It's not about the ute. It's that the neighbour has one, and you don't. You COVET it. /2
Trump's increasing pettiness reveals a society with uncontrolled imitative rivalry. Which is what populism produces, by reducing apparent *separation* between people, in rank and status. That separation - hierarchy - is normally what stabilises societies. /3
Both monarchies and religions are also social technologies to prevent violence. By creating hierarchies of status, to keep separation between people. To suppress and control imitative rivalry. You can't imitate a god, or a magnificent palace. It's idolatry, or delusion. /4
Populism, or Trumpism, destroys all of that. Down with the 'elites'! Everybody is an expert in everything, everybody is equal. This creates uncontrolled imitative rivalry. Everything becomes a rivalry, an attempt to differentiate again in a mass imitative sameness. /5
What begins looking like arguments over actual things - the 'toys' of adult life - quickly reveals its true mechanics, unconstrained rivalry. That's Trump's pettiness. Rome is burning and he's kept awake by his imagined rivals. Everything is rivalry and revenge. /6
Social media society is a society of rampant imitation. It is driving us towards mimetic crisis. The closer we get to that crisis point, the more petty the rivalries will seem. The leadership of the free world will become the purest incarnation of this photo. /end https://t.co/d8lsVtblZa
In the roughly 4 billion years that known life has existed, it's only in the past 100 that one life form believed it determined its own destiny. The Greeks called that hubris. Nearly everything in our individual and collective lives is outside our control. This MATTERS. 1/4
The intensity of our imitative team rivalries as we hurtle towards a mimetic crisis blinds us to the meaninglessness of what we're doing. Hubris always blinds. We want to win these rivalries, to be right, to be victorious. We can't resist that. 2/4
Everything we fight over will be determined by forces outside our control. By reality itself. 'And yet it moves', hey Galileo. That should unite us. Reality will happily kill all of us. Every tiny 'political' thing through to huge climate things, is not ours to decide. 3/4
Reality will determine the outcomes. It couldn't care less about us. The material realities of existence will decide our fates. Now we just have to re-imagine a human life that understands that. Everything else is hot air. A battle for provisional, meaningless status. /end
Of course, what else can they do but surrender to populism? It can't be beaten. Only the social collapse it triggers stops it. A pattern as old as history. https://t.co/VbcMd2WTdk
Humans domesticate other species to ensure our own survival. As Paul Ewald says, we need to extend this to pathogens. They must be domesticated, towards lower virulence forms. Meaning adding TIME and evolution to the mix. Chronic, not just acute thinking.
The cycle of all human life and history. Drawing upon Girard, Burke, Tarde and Turchin mostly. Imitative rivalry. We imitate to have status. Past a threshold this destroys social order. Or that destruction can come from without. Institutions repair. And then it begins again… https://t.co/xOaL0Yu5jX
Here I’ve tried to replace ideologies and villains (moral heat), our moment-in-time thinking, with temporal depth. We’re always somewhere in this cycle. It de-personalises, stripping away panic, denunciation and utopian certainty. Restoring sequence, patience and humility.
The fragmenting of identity into ever finer distinctions, and ‘standing for’ each of these, is the bubble whole populations now live inside. Created by the collapse of distinctions in status, in all fields of life. Populism. Status = identity. Social collapse follows.
Trump’s Venezuelan action continues a long US tradition. Which was a Roman tradition. The US has always led the modern world in these actions. Regime change abroad is about managing elite rivalries at home, as it also was in Rome. Everything is always status rivalries. /1 https://t.co/cuAH7eUQn9
The Russians in modern times do the same, though at less than half the frequency of the US, and mostly contained to their own borders. US regime change ambition is global. China a fascinating exception, but is still about managing elite rivalries elite rivalries at home. /2 https://t.co/vVzJOjsFXQ
Why does foreign regime change manage elite rivalries at home, in the US and Russia and much earlier in Rome? Because none have/had effective mechanisms to maintain domestic elite rivalries. Foreign action dramatically expands opportunities for domestic elites. /3
Using @Peter_Turchin’s model again, elite overproduction domestically leads to social instability. Foreign regime change adventures expand opportunities for domestic elites, both during the action and subsequently. It opens up new territories for these elites to govern. /4
We’ve seen historically how Kings and emperors use conquest as a way to bestow new land and position on their elites. To appease domestic rivalries. That same mechanism continues today. American foreign military action enriches US elites and gives them new opportunities. /5
The same is true for modern Russian elites, though again at much lower frequency and more regionally-contained, than for the US. Since 1945, here are the rough numbers for overt and covert regime change actions: US: 60-80 Russia: 25-35 China: 5-10 Why is China so low? /6
China still must focus on the same core issue in history, the management of elite rivalries at home. But it does it differently. It generally uses dynastic succession at home, to put a broom through existing rivalries and create opportunities for rivals. And… /7
…it has some other internal mechanisms to manage elite rivalries, such as its civil service examination system, which regulates access to elite positions. As well as its Party structures. China’s foreign actions tend to target foreign elites in a support way. /8
To try to sway them towards Chinese interests, through monetary, military, industrial, aid and other support. This is often not dissimilar to the covert action the US for example takes in foreign affairs, often under Democratic administrations. /9
China acts in time, internalising its elite rivalry control mechanism, turning the crises these produce into managed succession mechanisms. The West and Rome act in space, using expansion to try to create new space for their domestic rivalries. /10
The key point is these are all homegrown rivalries. It’s always about managing elite rivalries at home. What looks like attempts to take over the world are really about creating space at home, between competing elites. Trump’s team is so overt that it becomes obvious. /end
Zoom out. America has been experiencing an elite overproduction crisis (Turchin). Historically this often leads to foreign adventurism, to expand opportunities for domestic elites. Kings often used battles to offer appeasing territory and influence to their barons. https://t.co/qD5fgehmCA
Those in US society who are ‘decamillionaires’ (>$10 million net worth) have expanded TENFOLD in the past half century. This isn’t about inequality. This is the group from which political aspirants tend to be drawn. The number of seats available hasn’t changed. 1/2
This is the elite rivalry that Turchin writes about. Status games in the US for a relatively fixed number of high-status positions have reached a critical point. They’ve now overflowed the borders into Venezuela and elsewhere. Empires do this, when elites proliferate. /end
Not criticising good peoples’ intentions here. It is a violation of due process. But those checks and balances we use to describe democracy themselves had their origins in elite rivalries. They were conditions barons put upon Kings. https://t.co/3UKslW0Ks2
And there are the rivalrous elites, in they go. Trump's gift to them, to stop them being rivals to him. https://t.co/QwMHVFCDV0
Increasingly it’s pointless discussing what’s happening in the world, with the framing of those events lacking any empirical connection to history or social dynamics. Venezuela, for example. The US has done this 60-80 times, since 1945. It’s like this is some new development.
We’ve always been under assault from post-infection conditions. Cardio- and cerebrovascular diseases, as well as cancers and neurodegenerative diseases - the big killers - likely have infectious origins. With Covid we just have the knowledge to see it unfold in real time.
Trump is the perfectly logical endgame of American culture itself. He’s not an aberration, stealing US democracy. US democracy has been a plutocracy for longer than any of us have been alive. In the fully technical rather than emotional meaning of that term.
America is a plutocracy, always has been. Its Civil War was just another elite rivalry between business interests in the South and the North. Business runs America. It always has. Trump isn’t new, he looks new only because of the proliferation of elite rivals for control. https://t.co/kE1jlEh03K
Trump is acting in other countries now for the same reason leaders have always done in history. To create breathing space for domestic rivalries. Kings would grant new land and titles to rival barons, through battle, to appease them. It’s all domestic.
I still believe Turchin’s overproduction of elites is a far better framework to understand Trump through. Look at the history of the Trump regime. Firstly the big increase in candidates for Presidency itself. The US is now overflowing with wealthy wannabes for President. 1/6 https://t.co/Hbk8idM4MY
That proliferation of rivals for top jobs always leads to populism, as each evokes ‘the people’ against incumbent ‘elites’. Trump rode to power on that populist wave. ‘Make America Great Again’, down with elites etc. A playbook as old as time. 2/6
Once in power, Trump’s decisions are easily traceable to the passions and obsessions of the fellow travellers on the elite Trump train. Always in history the leader has to appease their own team before anything else, to retain power. Et tu, Brute? 3/6 https://t.co/rZa6zITjda
Trump multiple times has expressed a personal dislike for US intervention in foreign conflicts and territories. That’s now shifted, again more than likely to appease other members of the MAGA team. 4/6
‘Imperialism’ has always mostly been domestic rivalries overflowing space available. The Romans conquered continuously, to try to absorb domestic rivalries amongst the Roman elite. Eventually the rivalries can’t be contained, and the society collapses. 5/6
As Turchin says, usually when the immiseration of the wider population is combined with an overproduction of elites. That makes that population much more susceptible to co-option in elite battles. Populism. That’s America today. /end
Maybe that’s a royal ‘we’ from the Herald Sun. It’d be a noble project for it to pursue in 2026. https://t.co/3BUaELedyC
Royal Commissions are hugely expensive. And generally forensically thorough, but entirely at the whim of the ruling status quo to ignore once published. Witness the Banking Royal Commission. Lots of righteous anger behind that. It’s gathering dust.
America using European experiences of fascism to describe their own situation is increasingly lacking in self-awareness. America has always been run by business. It’s not being overrun, this IS the culture. There are just more rich, powerful businesses fighting for control now. https://t.co/oB4t49dqHc
The genius of the Tupperware party was to understand that what people think and do is driven by social conformity. If you target the social networks rather than thinking of humans as information processors, you can have success. Now, applying to everything else… 1/2 https://t.co/TsP28VDYb4
… whether it’s pandemics, politics, climate change etc. Day after day I scroll here seeing people regurgitating facts, as if that will somehow change the world. Societies don’t run on information, they run on socially mediated status. /end
If it frustrates you that there appears to be widespread resistance to understanding basic facts, ponder the status of teachers in 2025. Teachers know what most of the rest of us don’t know. That learning is a socialisation, not transferring data points into brains. /1 https://t.co/ojdCanKcYV
There are a lot of very smart people on this platform, many of whom spend a lot of time tearing out their hair while sharing fantastic knowledge that most of society ignores. People will pay no attention to knowledge unless knowledge becomes socialised as part of life. /2
That’s the job of a teacher. To socialise knowledge itself, to work with people in their social raw state and incorporate knowledge into that sociality. All of civilisation today is an ongoing battle between classroom and playground . /3
The playground, where kids mix according to rules of status, in groups or teams, is absolutely winning in 2025. Social media recreates exactly the culture of the playground. The culture of the classroom is probably terminally damaged. /4
These aren’t analogies. Culture is created in very specific, empirical ways and locations. For modern people this is schools. The culture we create in schools becomes the culture we live as adults, kids take it from school and remake the adult world. /5
Social media as a technology has allowed human culture itself to regress to a permanent school playground. An entire culture run on social status games, on imitative rivalries. Everybody from children to seniors now transact their lives increasingly on these platforms. /6
Teachers are treated with contempt, and are now even physically assaulted. Because the playground is winning, and the classroom is dead. In the pandemic I’ve seen not one example of a teacher even being asked about Covid control in schools. The contempt is absolute. /7
It’s teachers who allow societies to escape social status games and introduce knowledge into how civilisation operates. By socialising knowledge, hardest job in the world. The terminal toxicity of the culture can be seen in the collapse in status for this role. /end
The flip side of status, which is the operating system of all societies, is humiliation. Humiliation is the destruction of all status. Germans felt humiliated after WW1, this made them receptive to the Nazi BS. Serial killers also nearly always have a history of humiliation. https://t.co/9zlMhTfUQW
Social media has always been a US libertarian attack weapon, to spread that culture internationally. Any attempt to regulate the platforms will be met by protest from whole populations, whose entire lives are now co-dependent with these companies. https://t.co/eBoBQXvxeH
Yep. America needs to have a much deeper reckoning with itself than just running fascism Memes. Trump is a completely logical extension of the culture itself. https://t.co/B0NGE7Mutj
Civil rights-era reforms are often evoked as evidence of people-led change in societies. In reality they came at a time when 2 world wars, a pandemic and economic depression had immiserated elites. Status-based rule has been waiting to return ever since. https://t.co/DKP5htqdiM
The Iranian protests have already been shoehorned into our usual ‘people power’ narratives. (Social media loves that narrative, it’s what it deludes itself that it’s doing every day.) Revolutions come from rivalry between existing elites. Coupled to… 1/2
…widespread immiseration of ordinary people, whose anger is than recruited by the rival elites. That model has been found by Turchin’s work to repeat throughout history. It is more than likely the real story of these uprisings too. Identify the elites, that’s the key. /end
European fascism in the 20th century was populations living in the economic ruins of a world war, coupled to a feeling of total humiliation generated by the truce. Are those preconditions in the US today? Or is it the B-grade Western that has always been American governance? https://t.co/dc9Niq9Sko
When populist gangs win power, they go through a honeymoon period where everything seems possible, and they implement all of their ridiculous fantasies. It’s this honeymoon period that becomes a fair proportion of the material used to indict them later.
All of this relentless idiocy has its roots in uncontrolled imitative rivalry, status games transacted via social media platforms. That is public life now, everything is a fake battle, for status. We’re living inside these platforms. We make our tools and then our tools make us. https://t.co/cqRhvNEZAJ
The last time ‘the people’ rose up in Iran. 1978. The West had restored its repressive monarchy, because their democratically-elected government wanted to nationalise the oil industry. ‘The people’ isn’t real. All revolutions replace an elite with a rival elite. https://t.co/POx9pKiARu
“You’ve had Covid now, why are you still wearing a mask?” “Hmm, well I know you’ve had car accidents, why are you still wearing a seatbelt?” The only part of the brain left in widespread use is mirror neurons. To copy the idiot behaviour of others.
We’re actually living in a time that you could call the reversion to the long mean. In historical terms, there’s only ever really been one superpower. Fossil fuels created a temporary disruption to the historical pattern, now returning to equilibrium. https://t.co/R4H8mXHpHw
Societies don’t run on information. In the absence of some form of leadership to define a different pathway of higher status, people will just default to what they’re already doing. https://t.co/vmlDz7V4iG
The corollary of the fantasy idea of ‘the people’ being a thing, is that this same people will naturally get along. Our politics is a million miles from understanding or using the most basic empirical realities of human social life and culture. https://t.co/Y3qwBZKO8L
Public health invented adulthood.
From Bob Hawkins’ regular UK respiratory stats update. Firstly, that still seems a clearly epidemic pattern. Secondly indicators of acute infection are surely now much less important than the extensive chronic impact of repeated acute infection? https://t.co/TjVo3J9VJO
After years of circulating facts on social media, to no effect, the well-meaning folks who do it escalate to ever more alarming, apocalyptic facts. It will make no difference. Societies don’t run on information. They run on status.
Can cultures who don’t consider time in any of their thinking come to terms with chronic as opposed to acute disease? Can they ever understand the true long-term impact of all infections? No. But here’s somewhere to start. https://t.co/IrfLqstnsA
Most nations don’t build in time, they build in space. This causes them to lurch from one revolutionary crisis to the next, with collective memory wiped between crises. Like geopolitical measles. China builds in time more than in space. We don’t understand that. https://t.co/4F8wvn70gL
Treating only the acute manifestations of infection. https://t.co/OoKtII95b5
The widespread disruption to social processes caused by social instability is a breeding ground for the generation and spread of novel pathogens. https://t.co/JQUqcHrj3e
That ‘hell of social comparison’ is the imitative rivalry Girard wrote about, the eternal battle for status. Societies that don’t find a way to suppress status rivalry don’t survive. It’s not politics, or economics. It’s social. It’s status. https://t.co/iiyYniqGS4
Imagine every driver in America averaging one car accident per year. Even if they escaped injury most of the time, that would be a road safety crisis. Every one of those infections harms. https://t.co/TvqMFRWEkT
The Holy Grail of health care seems more sophisticated ways to ‘tune’ our immune response? To increase the signal-to-noise ratio, to allow only the inflammation specifically needed. Freeing the immune system to clear in particular pathogens that are so often the root problem.
We can live inside Hollywood movies and pretend this nonsense is ‘totalitarian’ politics. Really it’s just bog standard democracy, crippled by a populist mechanism (elections) coupled to social media, that bypasses any connection between knowledge and governance. https://t.co/qj5iwaW131
Imagine a new world order where Europe and Asia (including Australia/NZ) all align behind China as the dominant superpower. And maybe even allow Russia back into the fold, it was the Americans that drove them out originally. 1/3 https://t.co/jSoRJcuext
In many ways this is already happening, a return to a global arrangement that has defined our world for 2000 years. We live inside an historical aberration, driven by fossil fuels. China already owns the renewables transition, it’s reversing that anomaly. 2/3 https://t.co/5UVN2INhw5
The Yellow Peril hysteria generated by Western powers from inside that anomaly ignores that China is the only great power that knows how to build with TIME. To use time as the raw material of human life. To create longevity. /end
This view on the progress of human knowledge owes more to affection for the US Constitution than to actual history. Knowledge is like evolution. It progresses one funeral at a time, to paraphrase Planck. Worldviews compete for status, socially. Imitative rivalry. https://t.co/vpYCOd1JxM
Yep, but millions are now incapable of transacting everything from the most personal to the professional and political without it, and will resist any sort of regulation or control. It’s a hijacking of centuries of civilisation. We’re living inside its bubble. https://t.co/s52H2GbLki
McLuhan tried to teach us that the ‘medium is the message’. That first we make tools, and then our tools make us. The escalating apocalyptic narratives of social media made me remember this. Those narratives are symptomatic of our capture by the medium. /1 https://t.co/v8F5PPSImS
Vasnetsov’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, from left to right - Death, Famine, War, Conquest - capture a lot of the vibe of daily Tweeting. If you had to assign a genre to Twitter, it would probably be ‘apocalyptic’. So what’s going on here? /2 https://t.co/RQbPkremjm
Thus the term ‘doom scrolling’, though this isn’t about personal choice, seeking out apocalyptic themes. The medium intrinsically generates doom. This is also not some toxic positivism saying ‘things are really fine, stop worrying’, as the minimising status quo often says. /3
Things are absolutely not fine, societies are at a critical juncture right now, points of real danger. It’s more about how you deal with those critical junctures in history. Let me suggest that apocalyptic wallowing only intensifies and extends the problems. /4
For example, I’m still recovering from my first Covid infection. I took every precaution for 5 or so years, and the fucker still snuck through. The posts I skip most often now, in recovery? The ones describing the apocalyptic impact of Covid on our health. Why? /5
Because I already knew Covid was terrible for us, it’s why I took all of those precautions. Right now it’s not helpful in recovery to read about how doomed we all are. What are people hoping to achieve, with those apocalyptic narratives? /6
Those who read the science don’t need convincing. Those who don’t aren’t listening anyway. I’ve Tweeted many times that societies don’t run on facts, and they won’t start either by describing the facts apocalyptically. This is where the medium infects us. /7
Girard pointed out in his mimetic theory that imitative rivalry drives all human activity. And that hierarchies develop to short-circuit this process, to calm and suppress rivalry. Institutions. Expertise that is widely accepted and allowed to act, rather than debated. /8
We’ve just lived through half a century of gradual dismantling of most of our institutional framework, through populist politics. Societies now pile onto social media platforms, which have becomes where social life itself is now transacted, personal-professional-political. /9
There is no DISTANCE on these platforms. Everybody is supposedly equally relevant. Those who can generate likes can generate visibility, and stand out from this ocean of indifference. Nobel Prize winning experts are easily outplayed by adolescent influencers. /10
Imitative rivalry is uncontrolled, in the battle for likes/status/visibility. In the absence of material institutional separation between levels of expertise, symbolic competition becomes existential. Everything becomes conflict. Every conflict feels like TOTAL threat. /11
Apocalypse is rivalry stretched to infinity. Who can outdo the other in end-of-days stories. At the same time Peter Turchin describes how we live in a time of the dramatic proliferation of rivals for elite position. This dramatically intensifies the rivalry. /12
These rivals mobilise narratives daily to try to get ordinary people as ‘followers’, in their battles against elite rivals. Apocalypse has always been a great mobiliser. Turchin’s insight. Where societies look chaotically ‘divided’, it’s really something else. /13
A relative tiny handful of elite rivals, whipping populations into apocalyptic frenzies to try to outdo one another in imitative rivalry, to rally more troops to their respective teams. Social media is the battleground in 2025. Many of these rivals OWN the platforms. /14
Symbolic capital substitutes for institutional power. Apocalypse functions as elite differentiation. The prophetic voice, ‘I see what others deny’, replaces formal (institutional) authority. ‘The system’ is rotten! Etc. /15
Again, things ARE badly wrong right now, civilisation itself is at stake. But apocalyptic rivalry doesn’t fix that, it accelerates the collapse. Because it comes from the same mechanism causing the collapse. Our tools (social media) have re-made us and blinded us. /16
Societies collapse always for the same reason. Because of uncontrolled status games between elite rivals. Status runs societies, not information or facts. You have to target status, to control it, to fix problems. /17
Status must derive from actual knowledge, knowledge focused on fixing collective problems. Embedded in institutions that are relatively impervious to point-in-time whims and rivalries, for status. That are humanity acting in TIME, not space. Creating continuity. /18
Sadly institutions generally arise (you can’t just create them) as repair mechanisms for the catastrophic destruction of societies by uncontrolled status games, or external threats. Like those post-WW2 that gave us historically unprecedented peace and prosperity. /19
Sadly status games tend to have to break things completely, for this repair to emerge. And sometimes it doesn’t, most civilisations expire, they become extinct. But recognising this objective social mechanism can really help, today. /20
If we dropped the hubris that any of us have control over much of existence, and that forces beyond us tend to determine outcomes, as they do in evolution, much of the rivalry could fall away. It’s irrelevant who wins status games. Reality always decides outcomes. /21
Calm, empirical, material facts of life put us in contact with that reality. Not rivalry over who speaks for the facts. A politics re-worked as ‘just fixing material problems’. Sans detours through ideologies and other rivalries. Fuck all that Left and Right BS off. /22
Stop thinking arguing with other people is the route to anything except more argument with other people. Just fix things. And help others do the same. /end
That collapse in SATs since the pandemic began. All catastrophes reboot societies. The status quo has tried desperately to rush everybody back to their old routines, ignoring public health. The old status quo still broke. I’m seeing this ‘checking-out’ across all parts of life. https://t.co/MhSfyDC2Aa
I think this platform de-prioritises everything you post unless you take a paid subscription. Which it’s open about, but I’ve had about enough of it.
Record crowds at everything now. Sporting events, gigs, travel destinations etc. As social media culture pulverises shared meanings and structuring hierarchies, we compensate with status-levelling crowd-events. We’re trying to release the tension of endless fights for status. https://t.co/63JqVpfQfo
Pandemics stop routines enough for people to reassess the lives they’re living. This checking out is still happening, across all parts of society. The pandemic broke the status quo. Not obviously at first, but like Long Covid the impact is now becoming more visible. https://t.co/D6kxSYfCCM
It really is difficult to not compare the US to Ancient Rome right now. Centuries of a democratic republic now under siege by populist tyrants. The uncomfortable truth from that history is that Rome‘s democratic republic was a river of violence and blood. 1/2 https://t.co/1RU81iJolv
While its existence as an empire under authoritarian emperors was one of relative peace and stability. Societies run on status. Democratic republics operate as if that isn’t true. They’re then pretty much always dominated by violence. /end
The history of modern Europe is the exporting of violence through imperial expansion. The history of the US is the internalisation of the same violence. It’s a significantly more violent place to live than its fellow modern democracies. https://t.co/naPSlEyXrR
The history of modern Europe is the exporting of violence through imperial expansion. As that expansion has waned, it has used the State to control violence internally. The history of the US is the internalisation of the same violence. It’s a significantly more violent place to… https://t.co/hXTkapXLqR
The normalisation of the ridiculous is one of the clearest ways to see that societies run via social conformity (status), not knowledge. For example the idea of ‘living with’ pandemics, clearly ludicrous but now accepted common sense. Another is the ‘range’ of vehicles. The…
AI worries me a whole lot less than humans driven by imitative rivalry. I was chatting to AI about my recent Covid infection, now a month ago. When I mentioned I’m now back at work, it said ‘oh back at work already, after such a serious illness’? Public health advice right now…
Other Western nations after loss of their monarchies controlled domestic status rivalries by multiplying the opportunities to gain social status domestically, through the development of institutions and their associated credentials. The US remains hostile to institutional life.… https://t.co/wHL5mMjB7J
Trump isn’t a fascist tyrant. He’s a conman. A grifter, selling snake oil. His pyramid scheme of bullshit is collapsing. The hysteria about him being the new Hitler is part of US culture itself. Its open hostility to institutional public life, from *all* parts of the… https://t.co/RuAFA1vq6f
The mostly undiagnosed rot at the heart of American culture derived from its Puritan origins. The fanatical hatred of institutional anything, any sort of public coordination of life. A hatred imported in the Puritan exile from Europe. What that did, and what we’re seeing today,… https://t.co/1CdqMSdKxn
No thought experiments or RCTs needed. Humans ran the trials over thousands of years. We know that societies with uncontrolled infection kill most humans before they reach adulthood, most before they even reach their teens.
Actuaries and insurance companies were the first to cut through the BS of the Covid minimisation earlier in the pandemic. They can offer the same for most public issues. I ignore most of the team sports hot air of public ‘debate’. Actuarial analysis is one tool of what i call… https://t.co/xTebttGrco
Actuaries and insurance companies were the first to cut through the BS of Covid minimisation earlier in the pandemic. They can offer the same for most public issues. I ignore most of the team sports hot air of public ‘debate’. Actuarial analysis is one tool of what i call… https://t.co/5HIqZyQIIJ
Actuaries and insurance companies were the first to cut through the BS of Covid minimisation earlier in the pandemic. They can offer the same for most public issues. I ignore most of the team sports hot air of public ‘debate’. Actuarial analysis is one tool of what I call… https://t.co/DMbY4sShPO
Problems that are persistent and have resisted all efforts to fix them are only very rarely problems of a lack of data or research. Nearly always there’s a conceptual gap. A new way of seeing the issue is needed. Here Noah Smith suggests research will fix fertility. I’d… https://t.co/we1IO1Qt4e
Life in a kidult culture. ‘I lost 7kg because of Covid, in 3 weeks.’ ‘Wow, that’s awesome, congratulations!’
Democracy is not primarily “rule by the people”; it is the multiplication of legitimate arenas for status, ambition, and rivalry, designed to prevent any single rivalry from becoming existential. ‘The people’ is a populist construction. It has never existed in the way we use the…
The moment people trust: •Leaders more than procedures •Charisma more than law •Identity more than office …the whole system recentralises symbolically, even if not legally. At that point democracy keeps its form but loses its function. https://t.co/Rfo4A6l9pB
𝑇𝑟𝑢𝑚𝑝 𝑖𝑠 𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒 𝑎 𝑝𝑜𝑝𝑢𝑙𝑎𝑟 𝑠𝑡𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑇𝑉 𝑠𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑑𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑑 𝑎 𝑟𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑓𝑖𝑟𝑠𝑡 𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑝𝑙𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑠𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑜𝑛𝑠 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑐𝑟𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑠 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑑𝑖𝑠𝑐𝑟𝑖𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔…
𝑇𝑟𝑢𝑚𝑝 𝑖𝑠 𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒 𝑎 𝑝𝑜𝑝𝑢𝑙𝑎𝑟 𝑠𝑡𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑇𝑉 𝑠𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑑𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑑 𝑎 𝑟𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑓𝑖𝑟𝑠𝑡 𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑝𝑙𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑠𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑜𝑛𝑠 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑐𝑟𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑠 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑑𝑖𝑠𝑐𝑟𝑖𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔…
America’s greatest casualty count by far is always self-inflicted. First it was the Civil War. Now overtaken by Covid. Everyday violence is orders of magnitude greater than any comparable country. The culture itself has fundamental issues that are never addressed. ‘People…
America’s greatest casualty count by far is always self-inflicted. First it was the Civil War. Now overtaken by Covid. Everyday violence is orders of magnitude greater than any comparable country. The culture itself has fundamental issues that are never addressed. ‘People…
Australia Day is now, like everything else in our lives, an argument. A debate. If you take a breath and step out of the daily debates, it becomes much more visible how we’re trapped inside something both artificial and deliberate. All of these debates are the ‘flooding the…
Tabloid media has one operating principle. Transform all of public life into an endless stream of arguments. This is political strategy, globally. Fire up the masses with fake anger, masses who mostly wouldn’t even bother to vote, given a choice. The content of these debates is…
At the end of the Obama statement about the killings in Minneapolis, was this. This is the broken operating system of America itself. The idea that democracy is driven from the ‘bottom up’, and worse that democracy is an individual responsibility. It’s these ludicrous beliefs… https://t.co/iE1EXV3dn0
At the end of the Obama statement about Minneapolis, was this. This is the broken operating system of America itself. The idea that democracy is driven from the ‘bottom up’, and worse that democracy is an individual responsibility. Holding your government accountable?… https://t.co/pq9kfN2gsr
Societies don’t run on information. They run on status, on social conformity. It’s very simple, actually. People don’t wear masks or control diseases now, because neither of those ‘trends’. https://t.co/KPSCue8und
The first casualty of war is always truth. I wonder how widely known it is for example that Ukraine has been run by oligarchs for the past 35 years? And it’s only the current war that has stripped them of their influence, replacing them with a militocracy that may be the only…
I can’t emphasise enough that in the absence of strong institutions, the only public policy and action you will see is what ‘trends’. And those trends shift by the minute. Institutions embed multiple generations of knowledge, and act based on that past experience, towards a…
Because institutions ran our societies (brilliantly) for much of the last 70 years, most of us in the West have a level of knowledge of basic governance along a continuum from non-existent to childish. Take this latest purge. Both Xi and Putin have devoted much of their… https://t.co/OZbXRJMAeP
But the only game in town in governance is control of status rivalries. Uncontrolled status rivalry between elites destroys all societies. I’m not defending Xi and Putin here, or taking any sides in geopolitical politics. I don’t play the idiot team sports of social media life.…
There are only a handful of historically proven ways to control status rivalry. Probably the earliest was invasion and conquest, by offering continuous new vistas to pillage. Domestic elites always had a share of spoils, taking pressure off the local leadership. Most empires…
The most famous and longest-lasting mechanism (often combined with invasion) is monarchy. The centralisation of all status within a dominant hierarchy, networked to an extended ‘court’ of elite rivals. Sometimes hybridised with religion, as we did in the West, with the…
The other major option is to distribute status extensively throughout a society, to give many opportunities for rivals to achieve status. What we today would call the ‘checks and balances’ of democracy. Not allowing the concentration of status (power) in a small number of hands.…
These checks and balances are often today confused with democracy itself. But their origins are monarchies, with rivals to the King demanding greater checks on his power. That’s what the Magna Carta mostly was. The origin document in many ways for democracies even today. It…
Importantly, none of these mechanisms is foolproof. To put this in caps: THERE ARE NO UTOPIAS. Societies that survive are eternally vigilant about the control of elite status rivalries. They’re *always* the main game. /7
In this way, the modern history of Russia and China is really inevitability. Both nations were crippled by revolutions, leading to uncontrolled growth in elites and their rivalries. Putin and Xi see as their primary task the control of these rivalries. It’s the baseline for…
There are still important contributions on these platforms, beyond the dross team sports. The Left/Right politics stuff is a waste of human life. The machine firing of more and more facts to try to counter misinformation is noble but hopelessly misconceived. The study of the… https://t.co/CP7zzsdbum
There are still important contributions on these platforms, beyond the dross team sports. The Left/Right politics stuff is a waste of human life. The machine gun firing of more and more facts to try to counter misinformation is noble but hopelessly misconceived. The study of… https://t.co/CP7zzsdbum
There are still important contributions on these platforms, beyond the dross team sports. The Left/Right politics stuff is a waste of human life. The machine gun firing of more and more facts to try to counter misinformation is noble but hopelessly misconceived. The study of… https://t.co/CP7zzsdbum
Cory Doctorow’s enshittification is about this, the whole business model is to progressively enshittify your experience, while creaming off revenue for shareholders. I’ve tried talking about that here, to critique the idea that social media is some kind of public square. It… https://t.co/XSr0UpJuW9
Humans will copy behaviour, no matter how ridiculous or dangerous, if there’s social status to be gained in the copying. Vaccination was driven by high status people at its invention. Today high status people couldn’t care less. So anti-vax is thriving. https://t.co/BygIac9vgc
Like getting Iraq to fall. That ended well. https://t.co/PS3eBBf2hk
Everything said about societies, about their supposed ‘division’, or anger or support for this or that person or idea, is an outcome of a successful attempt by some elite rival to have supremacy. Groups of people have no collective mind or feelings. All groups are led, by an…
Attention is the true battle today, amongst elite rivals. To get people’s attention. But you can see it on social media platforms too, the number of experts battling to have their point of view seen and recognised. Mostly this fails, the algorithms don’t allow for lasting… https://t.co/8w6kNVMbP5
Social media promised a world where most viewpoints didn’t disappear into ignored obscurity. But they still do, I’ve lost track of the number of brilliant expert views into the pandemic for example that have fallen away, given up. Attention is the currency of elite rivalry now.… https://t.co/8w6kNVMbP5
Again this is the huge gap in most people’s knowledge, the social basis for human thought, feeling and behaviour. Human beings aren’t fact-consuming machines, not information processors. They’re social animals. They pursue status, because status is also identity, for social… https://t.co/9kEd8GZ8Ey
There is no ‘we’ in societies that call themselves economies. A ‘we’ would be anti-competitive behaviour. Economies don’t exist, they’re a social invention to bypass the State, and replace it with status hierarchies grounded in business. https://t.co/yDK0rLnk2e
Ben Stiller’s share highlights again how for US culture, everything is conceived as a stand-off between ‘we, the people’, and government. That’s a remnant of the country’s revolutionary origins. It’s trapped in that one mode of being. https://t.co/m5TZGcpH8j
Every time I see a story about ICE… https://t.co/olfCz7AeUA
The ‘we’ many of us grew up with, where continuous calculation of collective good was centre to our governance, was not an initiative of any leadership. It was the repair of societies pulverised by war, plague and economic collapse. Only that stopped human status games. https://t.co/Y4cIQQHFL5
AI’s characterisation of America today as ‘Rome, but with more paperwork’ is glorious. The Roman Republic was set up to do what the American Republic was set up to do. To try to decentralise authority into institutions and laws. The Roman Republic and its brutal violence…
Brilliant summary of where geo-politics has arrived. The American Republic gifted a model of institutional stability to Europe post-WW2. Europe is still running with it. The American Republic is following its much earlier Roman predecessor. Back to imperial rule. Because… https://t.co/GOJP5jMU5i