While misinformation is obviously an important issue, it’s also a symptom of our broken societies that people…

While misinformation is obviously an important issue, it’s also a symptom of our broken societies that people need information at all. Public health used to be like sewage and electricity supply, taken care of. Mostly, nobody needed to know. /1 https://t.co/RMEV5O3v8g

Paradoxically for those who think democracy means everybody being involved in everything, our freedom and prosperity actually derived from the opposite. From the delegation of responsibility for most important things to small expert groups - institutions. /2

The fact millions of us now try to understand virology and epidemiology and climate science is a symptom of democracies being broken. We shouldn’t need to have to understand these things, they should be taken care of for us. And the people to do that are already there. /3

It’s just that N=1 politicians have spent decades sidelining those people, and painting them as ‘unelected’, in populist politics the worst possible thing to be. Only the elected are said to be qualified to make decisions and decide on things, under N=1 populism. /4

This is why elections have been the tool bad people have used to destroy democracies. Populism is able to bypass all of that delegated expertise, dismissing it out of hand as ‘unelected’ and therefore apparently illegitimate. Popularity becomes the single measure of authority. /5

But popularity has never solved a single problem in societies, and never will. There is not one way picking the most popular person to do something will make them the right person to do it. It’s just a carry-over of school social dynamics to adult life: /6 https://t.co/l1OFfr1BUB

It’s the jocks from school getting their ultimate revenge on the nerds, who previously took control once leaving school and entering the institutions of adult life. Now those institutions have been captured by the popularity mechanisms of school. The jocks now own the…/7

…entire adult life-cycle. This is NOT an analogy, as people sometimes say, thinking they’re being kind. This is the actual cultural conditions we now live under. We learned our social models at school, and then re-made society using these models. When we severed school life…/8

…from adult life, we created an incubator for complete social re-booting of society. Kids leave school and re-make society as a giant high school, because they don’t know anything else. The institutions who used to take over after school have been progressively undermined,…/9

…if not completely destroyed, by decades of libertarian/neoliberal, N=1 politics, which says there are no societies, just individuals, interacting in free markets. And therefore no expertise, no delegated authority, just personal responsibility, for everything. /10

And so now if you want epidemiology or virology in your life, for example, you better learn it yourself. Because the market doesn’t give a shit. This is the endgame for democracy, there may be no coming back. Once institutions are broken, you can’t put them back. 11/11