No matter what you think of Stan, this is the thing we need to talk most about, and good on him for…

No matter what you think of Stan, this is the thing we need to talk most about, and good on him for continuing to raise it. The problems with democracy. I don’t agree with everything here, for example I think social media is a response to the…/1 https://t.co/7ucHyJLIzF

…weaknesses of democracy, not a cause of those weaknesses. But unless we recognise that democracy is failing, it will ultimately fail. It was failing before the pandemic, and has been just embarrassingly useless during it. I see the people here every day, looking on in…/2

…stunned disbelief, at the magnitude of the stupidity of our response to Covid, worldwide. But the seeds of this go a fair way back, most obviously and recently with climate change, where we saw very plainly that democracy isn’t dealing with it. /3

Some see every critique of either democracy or autocracy as an argument for the other -acy. My two cents? Our problem is in believing either of them even exist. There are just people, believing certain things and then acting in certain ways. You don’t apply democracy or…/4

…autocracy to people, democracy and autocracy are the visible manifestations of people believing and acting in certain ways. We have it backwards. Ultimately all people are pretty much the same, and this is what we’re not seeing (I think). They want a degree of individual…/5

…freedom, but also a degree of hierarchy and guidance and structure. They want there to be hierarchies of value, in all things. They don’t want to just celebrate diversity, but they also don’t want to just be told what to do. They want both. The Chinese for example look…/6

…’authoritarian’ to us because they run their societies mostly using custom and tradition, they have a longer-term view where decisions have to be assessed according to multiple generations at once. The idea of letting individuals live according to their personal beliefs…/7

…alone seems ludicrous to them. It should seem ludicrous to us too, even if we don’t want the Chinese model. We’re seeing the outcomes of that sort of libertarian fantasy right now. We have multi-generational institutions with wisdom accumulated over centuries, who know how…/8

…to beat this pandemic. We’re not using them, populist politicians are deliberately sidelining them for cheap, short-term political gain. That was our way of having that Chinese continuity, in our own societies, without being chained to family hierarchies. In the meantime…/9

…and as the graphic for Stan’s story shows, if you remove the hierarchies, people will just re-invent them. Libertarians destroy institutions, but this doesn’t ‘free’ people; it leaves them feeling rudderless. So they mobilise behind whatever else is offered to them. /10

Every tinpot fanatic or fundamentalist then has a shot of filling that vacuum of hierarchy and guidance. There are no systems, just people. The more you allow both freedom and restraint (or better, see restraint as just an enabler of more freedom), the happier we’ll all be. /end