The reason I don’t show much enthusiasm for mobilising behind causes is because I think it misunderstands how…

The reason I don’t show much enthusiasm for mobilising behind causes is because I think it misunderstands how societies work. Petitioning elected representatives in various ways is the fantasy mythology we were all fed throwing up about how democracy works. It’s not. /1

‘The people’ doesn’t exist. Of course there are millions of people, but they don’t act as some sort of cohesive group. The public is different, that exists. But it had to be created, constructed. During the fight against social collapse in the late-19th and early 20th…/2

…centuries, from plagues and wars, we invented ‘the public’. But the public also isn’t some cohesive group. It shifts with every issue. 50 years ago the public backed comprehensive schooling. Now it overwhelmingly backs private. ‘The people’ was actually a concept invented…/3

…by the fascists in the 20th century. It has no similarity with the public at all. Authoritarians even today talk about the people whenever they want to create an impression of having a ‘mandate’ from the population for doing something. The public though just means the…/4

…consideration of the impact on the inter-connected social lives we live, for any proposal. It’s like ecology, for politics. It’s overwhelmingly created and maintained by the ‘public service’ (it’s in the name). Copying from the Chinese, the Brits invented the public service…/5

…to do this work, of managing those inter-relationships in implementing public policy. And no, it doesn’t mean handing over control of the country to the public service either (what many say to me, regurgitating spin from the political libertarians). It does mean letting…/6

…them ‘run’ the country, for about 99% of the time. That’s their job. We’re seeing with the Robodebt RC just how much populist, elected politicians make that job a nightmare for them. You do need a mechanism to make sure this running of the country is always focused on the…/7

…public good. Currently we use elections to try and do that. They’ve failed, utterly. They’re far too easily gamed by popularity politics, which is really just marketing. The people who sell things for a living have found it ridiculously easy to transform elections into…/8

…easy access to government power and social control. We can put much better processes in place (sortition, for example) to replace elections. But we also can’t forget that politics is also mostly about power. We’re not all sitting around a table calmly deciding the best…/9

…way to do all of this. We’re fighting for status and control. Societies run socially, and social groups operate using social conformity and status. Those who have status and control aren’t just going to relinquish it because somebody comes up with a good idea. /10

Why I’ve Tweeted a lot of times about how we made progress in democratic politics only for the very sad reason that existential disasters overwhelmed the status hierarchies of that time, in the late 19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries. Then, since the 1970s, those…/11

…hierarchies invented an ‘economy’ and fought back, stripping away most of the gains. How do we slow and even reverse that hijacking of decades of true democracy? Not by mobilising the people, again that’s a fantasy construct invented by the fascists. But by doing the…/12

…relatively small job of removing electoral-based popularity politics from the public service. Restoring due process. Of course the populists won’t have a bar of losing their social status, so it’s much easier said than done. Only two things may actually bring it about. /13

A total existential collapse of society, from an external threat, like a plague and/or war. That worked in the last century. So far Covid hasn’t done that, but it’s too early to call. The other is one I also Tweeted about, the sheer social-technical complexity of modern…/14

…societies will force change. Without that change they will cease to function. No matter how many populist windbags claim to be able to shape reality to their will, at the end of the day that doesn’t keep the lights on or the planes in the air. I suspect the…/15

…idea we have that we can mobilise change is profoundly naive. It’s the viewpoint of privileged societies, who are used to politics doing things for them. But that politics came from disaster, not from mobilisation by the people. /end