The default state of society is social conformity. Proust studied it in forensic detail in the Parisian…

The default state of society is social conformity. Proust studied it in forensic detail in the Parisian salons. Without regulation, all social activity, including against Covid, will follow the laws of social imitation, conformity. Libertarians know this, when they call for…/1 https://t.co/Y6vrNfkaks

…individual freedom, they don’t actually believe that exists. They know it will appeal to disaffected people, who will then happily fall in behind (conform) with the leadership offered by libertarians. As a corollary, if we want social change, it’s worse than pointless to../2

…ask individuals to make it happen. They’ll support change if it’s led by somebody they want to conform with. Status. Also how libertarians get working people to support tax cuts, by making it about aspiration, status. ‘You can be rich too’. Why the conservatives use the…/3

…term ‘politics of envy’ to describe attacks on tax cuts to the rich. They know what they’re doing, they want being rich and getting a tax cut to seem like a noble thing, a reward for aspiration and hard work. Paradoxically, politicians who fight for individual freedom know…/4

…best that it’s a fiction, they know societies run with social conformity. So they weaponise it, using freedom spin. Their opponents appeal to a non-existent collective will or justice, they provide no alternative aspiration or status to conform to. So they lose. /5

They offer a condescending view of the working people they say they represent, giving them no agency except ‘being oppressed’ and offering compassionate redress for them. Not aspirational leadership in a different direction. If we want to beat Covid, that has to be pitched…/6

…in aspirational ways. The conservatives undermine public health by offering aspirational ‘freedom’. To oppose them we need public health to be framed as more than ‘helping the poor victims’, it’s patronising. Unions succeeded originally because they offered an aspirational…/7

…image of working peoples’ lives. Now everything is framed as some sort of welfare, helping the oppressed. Again it patronises, describing people only as victims. Defeating Covid should be about giving ordinary people their sense of agency back. /end