If you’re an expert who understands the disaster of Covid, arguing the facts is a dead-end. Societies run…

If you’re an expert who understands the disaster of Covid, arguing the facts is a dead-end. Societies run using social rules, not facts. You have to interrupt the social conformity process. Your current fact-based resistance only reinforces the existing tribal groupings. /1 https://t.co/ldFgO6oi6D

It marks you out as part of an opposing group of some kind, to the Covid minimisers. It’s the oil in the whole machine. Society is much more like football than like science (and even science is much more like football than like science). It’s competing teams, quite literally. /2 https://t.co/rxM9Utamde

So how do we shift this? It’s not about replacing social conformity with facts, social conformity IS society. It’s what holds it together, at every scale, from schoolyard groups, to workplaces, research teams, sporting clubs etc. /3

Like I say a lot, you have to look at society as a high school, because it’s what it literally is. That’s the model that we use implicitly to construct all of these social groupings, our teams. There is a type of person, pretty rare, in high school who manages to surf all…/4 https://t.co/kH636jhdOT

…of the different teams, who’s popular or at least tolerated by all. Think back to those handful of people who manage that at school, what they do. I’ve thought about that a lot, and I think they act orthogonally to the conformity that drives all human groups. /5

Not antagonistically, which again just marks them as part of an opposing team. They focus on the *individuals* inside groups, as individuals. Not in some ingratiating or toadying way, that will just trigger the group conformity mechanisms. /6

They touch the insecurity inside every person that drives them to social conforming behaviour, as shelter. They speak to that insecurity, in a ‘I hear you’ sort of way. If you speak to a Covid minimiser, try to talk to the insecurity that drives them to join that team. /7

They’re nearly always already outsiders in a social sense, that’s what drives so many to these reactionary groups, it offers them a sense of belonging. The handful who lead these groups are alpha-bullies, and you can talk to them differently, drawing out their real agenda of…/8

…social domination. In every case talk orthogonally, to that underlying social mechanism, rather than getting bogged down in the facts. The facts are weapons social groups use, they don’t really shape society themselves. /end