For decades we’ve lived with N=1 politics, the idea that individuals are all that’s real. It privatised and…

For decades we’ve lived with N=1 politics, the idea that individuals are all that’s real. It privatised and monetised society. Now this set of beliefs is infecting everybody, repeatedly. Time to expose the core beliefs in play here, if we’re to survive. /1 https://t.co/ncslkDXEeW

Because we all managed to struggle on, despite our health care and education and transport and everything else being sold off to the highest bidder and then used to enrich the buyers. We all got poorer and the outcomes in all of these areas declined. But society limped on. /2

Now we’ve reached a genuinely existential tipping point. Because we’ve privatised a pandemic. Across the world, entire populations are having forced infection and re-infection, in perpetuity, to satisfy this political belief system. Crumbling public life is joined by…/3

…widespread sickness and death. At a time these societies are ageing and already struggling to provide health care for people, we’re now deliberately sickening the entire population. It’s difficult to see how societies can survive this final act of libertarian lunacy. /4

I’ve Tweeted a lot about how democracy and elections won’t save us either. The N=1 zealots privatised democracy too, using elections to hijack the institutional bedrock of democratic life, replacing it with a popularity mechanism which is easily gamed. /5

Our institutional expertise knows how to fix all of these problems. It’s been completely sidelined by populist election-anointed N=1 politicians, who appoint their own advisers to replace them. Even progressive politicians refuse to tackle Covid, for a single reason. /6

They think they’ll lose votes. Without votes, nothing can be done. That’s how the N=1 crowd captured our democracies and now hold them to ransom. Everything has to pass through elections to get done, and N=1 politicians are experts at making all the necessary things unpopular. /7

So we have to return to the core beliefs. The N=1 crowd get away with all of this vandalism because everybody accepts their framing of some basic ideas. That individuals and groups/societies are two separate things. Even those who oppose N=1 politics use that same frame. /8

They say N=1 politics is ‘selfish’, and we need to act for all of us, etc. Greeting card philosophy. They’re puppets in the N=1 theatre. Look at how this trick works, it forces you to oppose (or ‘balance’) what’s good for you personally, with what’s good for everybody. /9

But those were never two separate or opposed things. The reason humans always created groups and institutions was to make *individual life better*. It’s economies of scale, to share the load of life so each person ends up freed to do more individual things. /10

The only individual freedom in the whole N=1 charade is their own. It’s a philosophy of freeloading, off the work of everybody else. They want to be free of all of the institutional attachments that actually create individual freedom, so they get a sort of infinite freedom. /11

They don’t intend you or I to ever share that freedom. We’re supposed to keep working to enable their freedom, as their modern-day serfs or peasants. Have also Tweeted how N=1 politics, and its handmaiden economic theory, are really a re-branding of old-style feudalism. /12

Call society a free market economy, and say it finds its own equilibrium, and hey presto the status quo (where the N=1 folk are already winning) becomes the natural state of things. Anything that interrupts it must be opposed on the grounds of ‘distorting’ the free market. /13

That includes any attempt to restrict basic things like disease. If it restricts the ‘economy’, it must be opposed. The NSW Premier defends doing nothing in the face of yet another wave of mass illness and death by saying we’re ‘open and free’. Pure N=1 fantasy. /14

Freedom is never individual. It’s a space opened up by collective effort. The idea an individual can defeat a highly contagious virus, or provide their own education and health care and transport, is too stupid to believe. But believe it we do. /15

The idiocy of all of this is that what the N=1 people say they want, maximum freedom for individuals, is what they destroy by destroying collective institutions. They’re crippling their beloved economy every day, while saying they’re freeing it. /16

This isn’t a battle of two competing belief systems, it’s just a basic empirical error of fact. Individuals and groups are not two things. And certainly not two opposed things. Individuals form groups, institutional collective action, to create more freedom for individuals. /end