There’s something so important about this photo, a window into most Western countries and why they’re failing…

There’s something so important about this photo, a window into most Western countries and why they’re failing badly to do the most fundamental thing - end a pandemic. A thread that’s an update to my pinned thread about how societies are now high schools. Not an analogy. /1 https://t.co/PIXuqQgeFg

I say not an analogy because this is actual anthropology, a comment about the cultural form and structure of our lives. We’ve had more than 50 years now of a politics that I call N=1 politics, to separate it from all of the hobby horses like ‘capitalism’, and ‘neoliberalism’. /2

Those other concepts have too much baggage. Best I think to stick to the fundamental fact, that it’s a politics that focuses on the individual, thus N=1. Or at least it says it does; it actually does nothing of the sort. Understanding the gap between the claim and the reality…/3

…is the key that unlocks the total mess we’re now living, I think. What the politics of the last half century has mostly done is strip away the customs and traditions of adult life. It hasn’t even denied it was doing it, down with the establishment was the proud rallying cry. /4 https://t.co/Nnv2lk5Gdb

Once successful in this ongoing war of society against itself, what’s left, for adult life? As my pinned Tweet describes, it leaves us with the only cultural model still standing. High school. That’s where we grow up, and that’s where we learn our social models. /5

It’s mostly grafted onto us subliminally, we don’t often consciously think about learning cultural and social norms at school. We think about subjects, and friends etc. But it’s obvious that we also learn about how people interact together, as a group, at school. /6

Did anybody else have to read The Chocolate War, while in high school? A brilliant expose of the DNA of high school life. Once we started remaking societies as high schools, all those old categories like socialism and capitalism and Left and Right became meaningless. /7 https://t.co/GnR70F9q96

What Cormier describes is how what we used to call ‘power’ in adult life functions, in a high school. And thus how our societies now function. It is power, but it’s much more accurately described as conformity. Individuals are not free and then restrained by various forms of…/8 https://t.co/GA4Av8fZLw

…power, individuals live in groups whose root method of operation is conformity. Which the Pythons pointed out, though it became a bit of a religion-bashing exercise, rather than a broader note that this is how groups behave. How does shifting to a conformity idea change…/9 https://t.co/10NqKsLDo8

…things? Back to the National Cabinet selfie. One of the not often mentioned things about selfies is that they don’t show your self at all. They show you as you appear to others. A sentence of text will show more of you than a selfie. Critically though they show you in…/10 https://t.co/7O3K7FMTX2

…a way you want others to see you. They’re about conformity, to the group. This curation of self is the hot zone of all adolescent life. But now the most senior leadership of adult life is doing them too. There’s no clearer indication of the shift to a high school culture. /11

What we call populism is just another word for this same shift. The currency of the conformity of high school life is status, and that status is popularity. Our own cabinet since late-2021 has let a pandemic virus saturate our country, entirely to try to win elections. /12 https://t.co/xM9Ci5v8dm

The previous PM did it in late 2021, and now NSW and Victoria are driving the stripping away of more Covid protections to (they think) make themselves popular leading up to their own elections. Cormier’s novel is brutal, because adolescent school life is brutal. /13 https://t.co/WOFlfNsYof

Don’t be fooled by the curated smiling selfies of adolescent life. As National Cabinet has shown, you can kill thousands of people to protect your popularity, nothing else will be as important. Populism is probably the most ‘authoritarian’ of all political systems, because…/14 https://t.co/NE44Ke2sB7

…it taps into the most basic mechanisms of group life. Conformity is self-policing, as we’ve all seen with masks and other public health measures, people won’t do them if it means not conforming with what everybody else is doing. Why I reject the narratives of evil…/15

…masterminds of commerce and politics driving the Covid death bus. This grinning, simpering selfie shot is driving. We’re still in high school, and social media is amplifying the conformity of high school enormously. It’s the way adolescents structure our world, once they…/16 https://t.co/PojxBHYyTz

…leave school and the old customs and traditions of adult life are gone. It’s all they know. There’s no need to ‘grow up’ now, because social media provides the infrastructure to perpetuate school forever. There is nowhere to grow up to, the old ways are mostly broken. /17 https://t.co/qA9wF8SvdV

And sadly, it means there is no easy escape from this grinning, curated hell of conformity. Once institutions are destroyed, as Bruno Latour once said, they can’t be put back. We will keep insanely trying to ‘live with’ a pandemic, because that’s what adolescents would do. /18 https://t.co/mi6TozAqAI

They’re immortal. Problems are a ‘drag’ and you should just ‘chill’ and ‘live your best life’ (to use some of the concepts of the past half century). N=1 politics may in fact be the creation OF this adolescent high school culture, because as Covid ‘freedom’ protests show,…/19 https://t.co/UXUVfSGgC9

…the old adult protections of public health practice are interpreted as a teenager being grounded by their parents for doing the wrong thing. And the more economic version we get from modern conservative politicians, and their obsession with destroying the ‘Nanny State’,…/20 https://t.co/hYcs7dHLAs

…is just their own private/elite school experience and upbringing, translated into adult life. The nanny is the only person in their life who has ever denied them anything. So they name the entire adult world as a nanny. They’re still in school, just different schools. /21

We need to get rid of populist politics, and thus elections, so we can start rebuilding adult ways of dealing with problems like pandemics. High school culture won’t do it, it’s an accelerant of disaster. We will conform ourselves to mass extinction rather than ‘stand out…/22

…from the crowd’, or be ‘the odd one out’. And it may not even be possible, we may be too far gone. Given that nearly everybody I know thinks elections = democracy, I hold out little hope of actual change. The adolescent framing of life is too entrenched, invisible. /end