All elections are now battles for the institution of government. Pollies are a sideshow. If the libertarians…

All elections are now battles for the institution of government. Pollies are a sideshow. If the libertarians continue to win, generations of expertise in government institutions will continue to be gutted. Those institutions are society’s immune memory, for solving problems. /1 https://t.co/TsgCn5JpId

Libertarian politics makes us live an eternal present. Problems proliferate like rolling snowballs gathering snow, because the institutional mechanisms for dealing with them are increasingly sidelined and then destroyed. Much of the reason we see the Chinese for example as…/2

…’authoritarian’ is because their decisions are made more by institutional mechanisms than populist whim. They embed the past in their present. That slows things, it restricts options, but because history has taught them some things should be done, others not. /3

In the West we’re trying to live an eternal present. Problems solved generations ago are now recurring, because we’re gutting our institutions. Our collective memory. Our societal immune system. It’s no coincidence libertarian conservatives from the 1950s onwards have…/4

…relentlessly attacked institutions. All the media networks they bought and created run constant anti-institutional propaganda, morning and night, 365 days of every year. Weaponised concepts like ‘red tape’ and ‘bureaucracy’ are staples. Powerful existing interests know…/5

…that institutions restrict their freedom of rampant profiteering. But their genius has been to use this institutional vandalism as a way to capture the minds and votes of the people it hurts most. Ordinary working people. By selling the idea that…/6

…these institutions are the ‘elite’, restricting their freedoms. As the institutions decay, the living experience of these ordinary people decays as well, and these same libertarians use this damage to mobilise these same victims to the libertarian cause. /7

There is a deeper level here though I think that is less seen. Critical advisers to the libertarians and neoliberals have been churches. Churches have millennia of experience in mobilising people, they invented our societies. And you only need to study a little history…/8

…to know that Church v State is the engine room of nearly all Western history. (Earlier it was church v monarchs, but the same essential battle.) It astonishes me that even educated people don’t see the apparent dysfunction of Western democracies today as just a continuation../9

…of that battle that has been waging for centuries. Have Tweeted before about how churches and religions have been attacking secular institutions for most of modern history. While political libertarians are often only rapaciously greedy grifters, churches are using them…/10

…as warriors in this long game. Churches and religions never gave up the idea of regaining control of societies. As above, they basically built the societies we live in, in many ways to them it’s the justice of having what they built, back. And please don’t misunderstand…/11

…me here by assuming I’m taking a side in this battle. I actually think both sides have legitimate claims. Democracies have a pretty poor record so far, compared to the millennia of church-led society. No matter what outcome we get, what this is about at an even deeper…/12

…level again is whether societies can function for any length of time without a unified system of beliefs. Societies are made of beliefs, it’s their raw material. The democratic ideal of absolute pluralism of belief can’t actually function in the most practical ways. /13

No matter how much we may want to worship diversity and pluralism, at the end of the day in the nuts and bolts of running a society, people have to agree on things, or you get what we’re seeing now. Chaos. Each to their own leads to endless war of competing belief systems. /14

For years we celebrated this diversity and pluralism, because our institutions provided a safe space for us to exercise these freedoms. But some of those beliefs are now destroying the institutions themselves, and there’s no coming back from that. Societies have tectonic…/15

…plates just as continents do. We’re feeling them grind against each other right now. We have to return to these core facts about all societies, about belief and unity of belief, if we’re to save ourselves. And that’s going to be a lot harder than somebody just saying ‘ok…/16

…you all have to agree with these ideas now’. That won’t work. Unity of belief is a long process of persuasion and seduction. That’s what churches did for all of those centuries. /end