Grown ups have fairy tales too, with goodies and baddies. My favourites are characters like ‘capitalism’,…

Grown ups have fairy tales too, with goodies and baddies. My favourites are characters like ‘capitalism’, ‘democracy’, and ‘authoritarianism’. Good on Stan for saying that something is rotten, because it really is. But it’s not these things. /1. https://t.co/i5Z0Q6CR8Q

It feels good to say these things, to describe the world in simple categories that fit into simple narratives. It can really mobilise our given team, because in populist societies everything is about playing for your team. It’s why football seasons define our adult year. /2

Just as the economy doesn’t exist, it’s a character constructed out of statistical indicators, neither does capitalism, nor socialism, communism, or authoritarianism. Sure these ideas exist, but in reality no country comes close to actually implementing them. /3

Take the definition of capitalism, the private ownership of the means of production and of wealth. In Western democracies the wealthy overwhelmingly use the State - the public sphere - to create and maintain their wealth. While in ‘authoritarian’ countries, most of the wealth…/4

…is concentrated in private hands. ‘Private’ and ‘public’ are more fairy tale characters that don’t exist. My personal definition of ideology is applying all of these beliefs to reality and thinking they define it. We have to look at what actually happens in societies. /5

I shared this article, because it’s a window into what we’re not seeing. Despite all of these ideologies, the same pattern recurs in every nation, throughout history. Hierarchical organisation, organised around some ‘sovereign’. /6 https://t.co/QZPwjEyY2I

Who or what the sovereign is varies, but it makes little difference to the actual social patterns that evolve. In the West we make ‘the people’ sovereign, in our ideas anyway, even though the idea is an oxymoron. If everybody is sovereign, nobody is. /7

What happens when this, our own democratic ideology, meets reality? We turn it into a - surprise - hierarchy, with a sovereign on top. Because we think ‘the people’ (whatever that even means) run our societies, we set up vast populist methods of accumulating their views. /8 https://t.co/uxPgAhzq6D

We call these elections, and between elections we call it polling. Nothing is valid unless it’s popular, even though in all the rest of our life and work popularity runs pretty much nothing. Because it doesn’t work. I Tweet a lot about how we started believing this nonsense…/9

…because the intergenerational social structures we had previously were levelled by the invention of adolescence, and its home, high schools. Without connection between generational activities, each generation just ‘living its best life’, we leave high school with it being…/10

…the only model of social groups we know. So we remake all of society in that same way. Popularity is the engine room of high school, and is now of society too. That’s where populism came from, not ‘capitalism’. Societies that didn’t re-route everything through high schools…/11

…retain a lot of that inter-generational social structure, and appear ‘authoritarian’ to us because people there think their ‘best life’ is following the traditions and customs of the past, regulated by older people who they look up to. But I’m not even opposing one to the…/12

…other, because as I started this thread by saying, they’re really pretty much all the same. Only the names we call things change. We abandoned inter-generational authority structures, but we remade them as popularity-based authority structures, performing an equivalent…/13

…function. As the Aeon article describes so well, the only thing that really disrupts all of this equivalent activity in every country, just called different names, is large-scale emergencies like wars and plagues. Between these emergencies we create an illusion of…/14

…levelling hierarchies in various ways. Usually it involves debt, to inflate the apparent wealth and power of the majority of people who normally would just be perennial peasants. Financial crises can be another leveller, for the same reason, when this debt explodes. /15

While some see history as a gradual secular victory over old religious superstitions, I think that may be backwards. The Bible for example is full of stories about plagues and debt. My feeling is religion emerged as a reaction to politics, not the other way around. /16

Humans wanted a hierarchical organisation that bypassed the endless warfare of populism and generational cronyism. They wanted a ‘higher power’ or principle that couldn’t be gamed by humans, because it wasn’t human. And that’s where religion maybe came from. /17

Christ in the temple is this exact battle, explicitly. Religion cleaning up the political and economic mess of the day, purging the moneylenders. The story itself betrays which came first here - the politics. Dave Graeber and Marshall Sahlins in some of their last work…/18 https://t.co/VUsc84amAZ

…both agreed that this is why the King form of hierarchy is dominant throughout history. The monarch is always constructed as God’s representative on Earth. As Walsingham says in the film about Elizabeth 1, people must be able to feel like they touch the divine, on Earth. /19 https://t.co/7dMxM57io1

It won’t have escaped all of us how deeply enmeshed the funeral of QE2 was with the church and religion. Most of the ritual we saw was the complex exchange of powers between monarch and church, and thus the divine, however defined. These are the structures of our entire…/20 https://t.co/TA4EII3COO

…history. We just don’t recognise them now because we call them by different names. Harry and Meghan’s wedding was an important event in this way. It made visible the shift, they packed the church in this monarchical and religious occasion, with celebrities. /21 https://t.co/mwQpmSu5LG

Our new populist monarchs. Rock and film stars, and social media influencers. We pretend we’re free of hierarchy and pomp and ceremony. But then we reinvent it all, in new ways. The problem with populism is, and this is the rotten bit Stan worries about, that it provides no…/22 https://t.co/pAmDXamMLO

…stability. There is no continuity in historical terms, you get fads and fashions. Celebrity doesn’t last, it can shift inside a week. And electoral democracy is churning through its populist leaders at great pace now, for the same reason. We tire of them, as celebrities. /23

Elections, and more broadly popularity-based politics, are destroying democracy. Not capitalism, which is a myth anyway designed by people who use it to hide that they’re really just plundering the Treasury. /end