The history of how the invention of the ‘public’ from the late-19th to the mid-20th century was deliberately…

The history of how the invention of the ‘public’ from the late-19th to the mid-20th century was deliberately unwound is a fascinating one. Much of it happened in the US, in a coalition between corporate and church interests. We’re living the endgame right now. Short 🧵/1 https://t.co/RuW96zJQ8j

Corporates wanted to wind back the whole regulatory apparatus of public life, because (they believed) it got in the way of them doing business. Conservative Christians wanted to wind it all back because the centuries-old battle between Church and State has never gone away. /2 https://t.co/WMu7m5P991

And so to Ronald Reagan, and The General Electric Theater. GE ran a TV series, stories of free enterprise and individualism. The softening up of the public, a new social narrative about the restriction of government and the freedom of individual enterprise. The true function…/3 https://t.co/7fq7eVVNVz

…of this theater was revealed by Reagan’s monologues introducing each episode, but also by extensive speeches given in schools and other institutions. You’ll note here that this is nearly 3 decades before Reagan would go on to become President of the USA. /4 https://t.co/443bYmDJrt

The people who plotted the downfall of public life, of the idea of the public entirely, play a very long game. Here’s the Reagans with a constant friend and ally, Billy Graham, showing the close nexus between corporate and church, in this mission to remove the public sphere. /5 https://t.co/nI6xkZ68xA

Here’s Reagan presenting Graham with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 1983. The movement to remove the public sphere, beginning in the 1950s, accelerated in the 1970s, and really exploded in the 1980s, steered by Margaret Thatcher and Reagan. /6 https://t.co/GkZW0w0XjL

Again corporates engineered this to free themselves from regulation of their business. While conservative churchmen had always despised the State, seeing it as a usurper of their control over societies. This was also a time when the ‘think tank’ was invented, generating…/7

…continuous free market propaganda, and feeding it into public media networks, which had increasingly been acquired by these same conservative interests. Elections became a sideline, as this great propaganda machine pumped out continuous free market ideas. /8

Societies that had until the mid-20th century been strongly supportive of their governments as critical players in their prosperous and free societies, were now becoming openly hostile to these same government processes. All deliberately engineered. /9

Societies became economies, free markets, by which was meant (it’s never really defined, because it’s nonsense) individuals freely interacting, to produce the optimum outcome, for these individuals. Government and regulation is what (they say) gets in the way. /10

We all know these ideas, because all of our democracies have been hijacked by them, since the 1950s. But it was a long game, which is one reason I often sound like a killjoy, saying who we elect is mostly irrelevant now. 70 years of bedding down an entirely different…/11

…framework for society itself can’t be overturned with elections. The reason Albo for example is limited in what he can do, is because he inherited a society that already thinks of itself as an economy. Everybody does, of all political persuasions. Including Albo. /12

The reason we can post graphs all day showing the magnitude of the public health disaster we’re in the middle of, with Covid, and it makes little difference, is because in an economy there is no public. And thus no public health. Public health is one of those pesky…/13

…regulatory things that gets in the way of the ‘economy’. There is no simple or easy way out of this, we’re 70 years behind in this race. We need to restore societies, and the ‘public’, as the drivers of our lives. To expose ‘the economy’ as our greatest ever myth. /14

The depth of this myth is revealed by even saying that, how everybody, from all sides, jumps in to defend it as some sort of foundation of everything. It’s what allows us to ‘afford’ to do other things. We’re repeating 70 years of propaganda. My only hope is one I’ve…/15

…Tweeted about before. That the sheer socio-technical complexity of modern societies will overwhelm this longstanding fantasy. You can believe everything you like. It won’t keep a modern society’s lights on. /end https://t.co/2Y7M7zIDfQ