The neoliberals/libertarians (the N=1 crowd) keep winning because they target the 5%. The 5% of any group,…
The neoliberals/libertarians (the N=1 crowd) keep winning because they target the 5%. The 5% of any group, including society, who provide the direction others then follow. I’ll use SKY News Australia as an example. The channel nobody watches but which shapes Australia. /1 #auspol https://t.co/CDrNVy6rBe
The N=1 crowd understand something their opponents don’t, and it’s why they’ve been winning for so many decades. Including on Covid. They understand that there is no such thing as a group will, groups never, ever guide themselves in any direction. Attending any committee…/2
…meeting will tell you that. It’s always a tiny number within a group that provide the direction others follow. I say 5%, based on research showing that’s roughly how many ‘lead’ groups. The N=1 crowd themselves, the financial elite of society are themselves a tiny group. /3
And yet they’ve dominated politics now for over 50 years. They’re the ‘top 1%’ of society, they’re vastly outnumbered. But they’ve been in power most of the past half-century. Understanding how is the key to beating them. SKY News is a good window into that how. /4
SKY News targets the 5%, it’s as simple as that. It plays continuously in the offices of LNP politicians, for example, and (until recently) in airports where the 5% are constantly getting on and off planes. It doesn’t try to educate or persuade ‘the public’. /5
It knows the public doesn’t have any agency. Groups don’t work like that, of any size. Democracy, despite its own PR, has never been the public doing anything much except attend elections. It delegates the expertise and work to the 5%. Makes life better for everybody. /6
The top 1% keeps winning against the other 99% by targeting that 5% of society who actually decide things and hold power and wealth. It then portrays that as the ‘will of the people’ (SKY News at night commentators never shut up about being the voice of the people.) /7
In this way it on the one hand gets the 5% to do everything the 1% want, while making the 99% feel they have champions looking after them. The 99% get slogans and spin, the 1% get everything else, all the spoils of our collective work and wealth. /8
They’re playing the same games again with Covid. Sending funding and support to the 5% to flog anti-public health messages because the 1% find protections distasteful interruptions to their lifestyles. There is no mass movement against Civid measures, for example. /9
There are a tiny handful of agitators, the 5%, sometimes funded by the 1%, mobilising noisy action to provide an illusion of mass resistance. Populist politicians fall for it, the ones not already on the 1% payroll. The battle against Covid minimisation is a battle against…/10
…a TINY group of people. Not against the public. We don’t need mass education campaigns to fix Covid, we need to focus on the 5% who are trying to stop us stopping Covid. They’re winning right now by leading the public to reject public health. The public can easily be led…/11
…to support public health. It’s what we elect people to do. Right now those elected leaders need to dig out their old copies of Puss in Boots and figure out how a tiny group of people is influencing another tiny group of people, and winning everything. /end https://t.co/qi6UXRh7jC
