Because our education is now mostly training in jobs, I think we miss obvious things. 2022, for example, is…

Because our education is now mostly training in jobs, I think we miss obvious things. 2022, for example, is really just the Reformation all over again. A secular version of it. I see so many bewildered by what they see as social breakdown and chaos today. A short 🧵/1 https://t.co/pTeidrmS6M

The Reformation was driven by a movement of people passionate about individual rights and freedoms (the Protestants). Like our neoliberals and libertarians today. Both ‘protested’ against the institutional establishment of their day. It’s a tension as old as humanity. /2

Both also have their iconoclasts, believers so fanatically individualist that they smashed the institutions, not just reformed them. Today in the West these are the people who break up and sell off public institutions. It looks more refined, but it’s just smashing-in-ties. /3 https://t.co/fNRRSWpO3o

None of this is a play of analogies. These are the same basic collective movements, religious and secular. How does this all end, if history is a guide? With reformed institutions. In some orthodox churches they still celebrate the triumph of ‘orthodoxy’ over the iconoclasts…/4

…in a Feast of Orthodoxy every year. Societies can’t function without institutions, it’s how stuff practically gets done, so we always end up back at them. Much of what we take to be the ‘modern’ world repeats the same patterns humans created throughout history. /5 https://t.co/fR37wY3LQp

To me that puts some calmer context around the apocalyptic narratives we hear from all sides when these clashes happen. It also focuses us on the key to all peace and prosperity, institutions. Not personalities or other qualities of leaders. /6

Institutions are the way societies accumulate lessons learned through generations, they’re societies habits, operating without us needing to think, just as we don’t need to think about how to breathe or walk. When we smash them, suddenly individuals have to try to negotiate…/7

…both basic and existential threats, alone. I’m sure we can all feel that, right now. The reformation is coming. /end

@CdrHBiscuitIII