We won’t beat Covid by assuming the way out is for popularity Prom Kings and Queens in parliament to suddenly…

We won’t beat Covid by assuming the way out is for popularity Prom Kings and Queens in parliament to suddenly act. We need to change one fundamental belief we hold ourselves too, for change to happen. About the ‘local and the global’. Solar power can show us the way. /1 https://t.co/2SBJBOGUwD

The binary of local/global is another modern fiction. It’s dominated our politics for decades, or even longer. I’d trace much of it back to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the approximate birth of modern nations. The thing that’s always forgotten about that moment in history…/2 https://t.co/YxqfrkyUIX

…is that the ‘international’ community (the global) came BEFORE the ‘national’ (local) sovereignties - countries - that flowed from it. The international came before the national, the complete reverse to just about everything you’ll read about international relations today. /3

We even call our attempts at internationalism the ‘United Nations’. As if you become international by getting all nations to unite. It’s hilarious really, that we’ve forgotten that we spent most of our history already international, and the ‘national’ was added later. /4 https://t.co/dy2AAOLrdb

The national always was just a sop to various warring parties, to give them a bit of territory, to shut them up. Like giving your kids a room each in your house. Nobody says the house is a united agreement between the bedrooms. /5

This framing of parts and wholes is (for me) THE defining mythology of modern life. We’re convinced that to ‘act globally’, we have to aggregate or mobilise lots of different local things, into a collective global thing. Pish posh. Before coming back to solar, look around any…/6

…small country town. You’ll find cars from Korea, Japan, the US, Europe etc. An internet connection to the entire planet. Fuel from the Middle East. Jobs funded by companies based in a city somewhere else, or on the other side of the world. Etc. What’s ‘local’ about it? /7

Everywhere is universal, international, already. The Peace of Westphalia may have given warring humans the idea that the world is divided up neatly into sovereign independent territories, but reality never was. And it still isn’t. Now, back to solar. In Australia we’ve…/8

…followed a boring, predictable script on climate change seen in many other countries led by popularly-elected clowns too. At least 30 years of stalling, at that level, globally and nationally (the national is also the global, for each locality in a country). /9

But again, look to reality, not to that pathetic spectacle of popularity. In Australia, for most of that time, the community has ignored all of it, and completely replaced the national electricity generation system. Not by protesting or petitioning the elected dunderheads,…/10 https://t.co/HRUxQK0srI

…but by installing solar PV panels, on their houses. There’s a tsunami of energy coming from those panels, as the graph shows. It will overwhelm the grid as early as 2025. (Remember the popularity politicians blathering about ‘supply’ for decades? We’re swimming in supply!) /11 https://t.co/owDe8ewhmw

The important thing is that ordinary Australians mostly didn’t do this out of any passion for ‘thinking globally, acting locally’. They did it to save on their energy bills. Their actions weren’t ‘local’ actions, because energy was already national/global. They were acting…/12

…’globally’ (if we must use the word) the whole time. Just as their car purchases shaped world ‘economies’. No need to wait for anybody to aggregate anything, to create a global effect. Everything was already global, the distinction isn’t real. /13

The exact same thing is true for Covid. I’ve sometimes criticised the way we look at Covid data/charts based around these same categories of locals and globals. But Covid itself has *always* been ‘global’, from Day 1 of the pandemic. Not because it’s happening everywhere…/14

…in the world at once. That’s the old ‘united nations’ idea of global or international. Covid has been universal from day 1 because all of the activities we all do, every day, are already that too. The cars and energy examples. If I act like a Covid minimiser and…/15

…happily infect my family, friends and community, that infection could end up anywhere in the world, in a very short time, killing people there. Our lives are already interconnected, across all of those scales. Just by preventing infection in yourself and in the people…/16

…immediately around you, you’re doing ‘global’ Covid work. At every scale, in your region, State, nation, internationally. Those are all mythical demarcations anyway. I watch so many people on Twitter tagging senior politicians, pleading with them to end the pandemic. /17

And of course they’re critical to making that happen. But not because they’re the only way to ‘act globally’. We all act globally, in everything we do, and we always have, every day. It’s a trick, to make popularly-elected twits seem more important than they actually are. /18

They’re important only for providing a scaffold for each of our own, individual global actions. As they did when providing subsidies to have solar panels installed, in Australia, which triggered the energy tsunami. But our actions were already global, even without that. /19

The scaffolding just made it easier. As mandates do, with mask wearing and other anti-Covid actions. I like many others never stopped masking, with or without mandates. Our actions were entirely ‘global’ that whole time. We didn’t have to wait for others to mask, for that…/20

…to be true. That’s the myth, that you only get mass, collective action by adding up millions of individually isolated people and their actions. Baloney. Every single person is already universal, their actions can’t not impact every one of these mythical scales. I’ll finish…/21

…with another practical example of this. Obviously my profile pic refers to Freddie Mercury, and his success can be traced to his profound understanding of the ideas in this thread. When Queen began, they avoided the traditional (assumed) route to stardom. /22 https://t.co/F6xOYkqRxM

Of playing your ‘local’ (there it is again), the local pub and club circuit. They bypassed that entirely and played full concerts, immediately, within the limits of their budget. Like Puss in Boots, a profound tale, they rejected all the scale nonsense. The rest is history. /ends https://t.co/gkZONLIwQb