The foundation of our entire Covid approach is the idea that those at most at risk from the virus can be…

The foundation of our entire Covid approach is the idea that those at most at risk from the virus can be somehow shielded from it. Or that they can even somehow do that themselves. This is one of the greatest of all political libertarian fantasies. /1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/xS2HjTJn5h

Thinking we could somehow create islands of Covid-free space for the vulnerable is exactly the same as telling people who want to piss in the local pool to stay in their end. Totally childish, wilful ignorance about the critical inter-connectedness of modern societies. /2

And this is the libertarian fantasy, that society is millions of individuals all going about individual lives. Rather than millions of people all working together in groups, utterly dependent on those interactions. Not just socially, this is also how the economy works. /3

Mass infection is crashing economies because infected workers infect all other workers, in their inter-connected work. I’ve Tweeted before about how we see this laughable political philosophy up close in its ideas about freedom and regulation. That the absence of regulation…/4

…doesn’t create individual action, it reverts society to its default state, which is social action. Conformity, of groups. Like we learn at school. Regulation doesn’t oppress free individuals, it gives socially bound individuals *permission* to go beyond group conformity. /5

That’s why we invented regulation, to allow groups to shift their conformity towards evidence-based facts, rather than focusing only on internal group dynamics. Populism strips away all regulation, leaving us in the Trumpian world of naked popularity-based conformity. /6

I know so many despair at this state of the world. There is only one way out of it, and that is to end popularity as the mechanism used to create social hierarchies, to elect our leadership. It’s one of humanity’s most stupid ideas, and more so because it thinks of it as its…/7

…best idea. It thinks that’s ‘democracy’. The populist libertarians want us to think that, it’s the trick they use to hijack our societies. They can make anything popular, it’s just marketing. Even mass infection and death, as we’ve seen. /end