That mountain of personal debt is what’s created the illusion we live in democratic countries. That and…

That mountain of personal debt is what’s created the illusion we live in democratic countries. That and welfare (which conservatives strip away) disguise what’s really a feudal society going back centuries, relatively unchanged. Including now infecting the peasants. Short 🧵/1 https://t.co/Dm5i9Dkche

My focus every day is on that feeling so many have that the society they now live in seems to have gone batshit crazy. It doesn’t even fight a pandemic. But the real truth here is that all the pandemic has done is exposed how our societies have always worked. /2

It takes existential threats like wars and plagues to reveal how we actually live. Where there are no longer any ways to paper over it with illusions. The public health apparatus we crave to swing into action itself came out of previous existential threats, like cholera. /3

It wasn’t a sudden desire to be more progressive, more democratic, looking after more people. It was about the 5% of society that determine what happens trying to protect their status quo. That is ALWAYS what drives all politics. They invented public health to try to…/4

…protect their status quo at the time, which was under assault by microbes. The moment they felt that threat was over, as our past 70 years of peace and prosperity and relative health has done, they ditched public health. Most if not all progress in history is the same. /5

You have to threaten the status quo, the feeling of safety and security of society’s top 5%. That’s what brings change. Nothing else really does. We’ve fooled ourselves that facts and logic change things. But science and expertise for example are supported, so long as they…/6

…don’t threaten the status quo. The 5% support science when it builds them nice cars and bombs and jetliners. Not when it suggests slowing the economy down to fight a pandemic, threatening their status quo. What we call the ‘economy’ IS that status quo. /7 https://t.co/DR02b9kzR9

It was a genius invention, a set of pseudo-scientific sounding mathematical indicators that could be substituted for society itself. Politicians talk about economies now, not societies, watch them. And none of these indicators point to any widespread improvement in prosperity. /8

Economic growth, inflation, GDP - all of these things can go in the correct economic ways, without ordinary people being any better off. They’re not designed to help the 95%. But as I Tweet about a lot, none of this is to say ‘democracy’ means getting rid of the 5%. /9

You can’t run a society as a 100%, because underneath all of this politics is some basic social behaviour, that never changes. Status and conformity. If you remove the 5%, people will just reinvent something to put in its place. Aspiration and emulation drive society. /10

That’s also where expertise slots in. About 5% of people in any field are its true experts, its geniuses. You can’t change that, it’s just how things tend to be. As Planck said, that doesn’t mean they’ll always lead their fields, because status in a field is rarely driven…/11

…by expertise. As we’ve seen in the pandemic, where experts jostle for status, with ‘minimisers’ facing off against ‘doomers’. Personally I think the doomers have the obvious facts on their side, but I have no status in those debates, so nobody will care what I think. /12

In any case, if we feel now that our interests aren’t being looked after, that’s because they aren’t. They never have been, 70 years post-WW2 where the world was in ruins created an illusion that politics and status games had been left behind forever. They haven’t. /13

We’ve been living off the fat of that last existential disaster. Only those disasters shake things up, shift who holds status, at least for a while. Since the 1970s conservatives, representing those who had status and lost it in that last great war, have been progressively…/14

…trying to restore it. Using austerity programs and free market ideas and self-equilibrating economies, and other sleights of hand, to strip away the post-war collective re-shuffling of status. We’ve arrived at their victory, the attitudes of the 5% to public health and…/15

…well-being are now indistinguishable from the aristocracies of previous centuries. Covid will need to interrupt our 70 years of peace and prosperity and health more yet, to cause a greater threat to the 5%, if we’re going to see real change. /16

Just to finish, note how the 5% are weaponising this carnage of ordinary working people to their own ends. The top of the headline, the suggested solution? Tax cuts. Which will overwhelmingly favour that 5%. /ends https://t.co/tvNnTtAk06