Wonderful article shared by @NobodyImpawtant. Twitter users will see themselves here, defending the last…

Wonderful article shared by @NobodyImpawtant. Twitter users will see themselves here, defending the last relatively tiny island of public conversation we have left. But I think this goes further and deeper. /1 https://t.co/btC6O3ou45

I Tweet a lot about the transformation of our societies into ‘libertarian’ societies. By which is meant the political movement that transformed Western democracies from the 1950s onwards, and accelerated greatly from the late 1970s. The Thatcher and Reagan revolutions. /2

‘There is no such thing as society’, Maggie Thatcher famously said. The idea that what we call society is really just millions of isolated individuals. Reagan’s economics derived from these underlying beliefs is what we’re all living now. /3

All productive work focused on individuals getting ahead. On their ‘aspirations’. But it extends into all areas of life. To go back to public conversation, if you look at most social media, it doesn’t seem very social. Overwhelmingly you’ll see curated individual…/4

…personalities, people positioning themselves in the space and trying to ‘stand out from the crowd’. ‘Look at me’. Now that seems very anti-social, but actually I think what we’re seeing is that this IS how libertarian cultures view society. They’re incapable of seeing…/5

…a ‘social’ or ‘public’ act as anything except them presenting themselves, as individuals, to the collective gaze. Not interaction or conversation, the ‘public’ space is just where we, as individuals, display that individuality. /6

Have a look at the response to the pandemic, as an example. The pandemic became fertile ground for all manner of individual grievance and posturing. We used the massively intensified collective focus on this emergency as a stage to perform our individual gripes. /7

Protests on all sorts of matters. This collective emergency triggered not much more than individual complaint. Very little of it related to the pandemic at all. No big street marches to demand the virus be eliminated from our societies. No collective solidarity towards../8

…achieving a collective pandemic-related end. Using the pandemic instead as an opportunity to express our pre-existing individual grievances. Like society had provided us with poor customer service. Citizens *are* ‘economic customers, in libertarian countries. /9

Have also Tweeted before about how libertarians transformed societies more generally into ‘economies’, collectives of these individual customers. Our major challenge with defeating Covid isn’t the virus, it’s that our ‘economies’ don’t tolerate collective aims. To an Economy…/10

…a pandemic is an unacceptable restriction of trade. It crushes our individual economic aspirations. Small business owners going broke is seen as equal in gravity to thousands dying. To be ‘balanced’ against public health action. Unless we continuously come back to…/11

…the underlying beliefs that are the actual raw material of society, those beliefs will continue to make us puppets. They will even kill us in the millions, what war or pandemic isn’t generated by some obsessive idea(l)? I love daily Twitter, am not really fussed about…/12

…the team sports aspect of it, trying to frame everything that happens according to which political team you back. Society isn’t a footy game. But at least there are remnants of public conversation here, amongst all of the posturing. /13

As to how this libertarian lunacy actually succeeded, it’s mostly about schools. Not in what they teach, but in the sub-culture they became which then spread. Modern schooling separated out an entire demographic, removed it from real connection to wider adult life. /14

Lots of that is a good idea, to focus on childhood as a distinct development stage. But the consequences have been much wider than I think is realised. Because putting aside the maths, languages, music etc. we learn at school, what we learn most deeply is how to be social. /15

School became the model for society as a whole. Give kids 13 years in a sub-culture divorced from wider society, and that’s the only model they will then have to take into adult life, to understand society. And gradually society has been re-made as a giant high school. /16

In essence libertarianism is really nothing more than society seen through an adolescent lens. We all know teenagers focus extremely heavily upon their individual selves, that they chafe against restrictions and rules. No analogies here, we never leave high school. /17

It’s not a political shift, not just ‘neoliberal’ or libertarian political strategy. This was a shift in our culture itself, that drove the political changes. Through that lens, look at the posturing on social media, from all ages, and see if you recognise high school again. /end