The reason politics looks so ‘polarised’ is because we’re using our social structures to make decisions.…

The reason politics looks so ‘polarised’ is because we’re using our social structures to make decisions. That’s what social media has accelerated hugely. Decisions that should be straightforward, practical jobs to get done, now have to detour through the treacle of…/1

…social group dynamics. What I call ‘team sports politics’. Even in my childhood, if Australia needed new infrastructure, an assessment would be made and the most political it might get would be debate over the best of the offered options. Today that sort of decision is…/2

…immediately re-routed by libertarian think tanks and media organisations, and social media, into endless culture war team sport debates that have nothing to do with any of the issues at all. The issues are only totems, for different social groupings in the battle. They…/3

…use them as fodder in prosecuting their own status, in social life. The relevant experts become standard bearers of the different groups, and influencers the same. None of this would happen if we didn’t hold the ridiculous idea that a democracy is run by ‘the people’. /4

It’s run FOR the people. Not by them. That was one of the libertarian tricks, to ‘flood the place with shit’, to bog all change to the status quo down in interminable arguments between warring social groups. Not only does it stall change, it makes them a lot of money, via the…/5

…media networks and social media platforms they own, where all of this pointless and irrelevant ‘debate’ happens. Representative democracy was set up, deliberately, to prevent most of us having to know much about anything at all relating to how the country is run day by day. /6

The fact nearly everybody now suggests otherwise is only a libertarian victory, that they’ve managed to reframe the entire politics of our time in this way. They stripped society away, so now every new bit of broken society triggers some new debate, which tries to reinvent…/7

…some small part of the social coordination the libertarians previously removed. We all argue, all of the time, because the society that used to remove the need to have even a discussion about topics, let alone debates, is gone. The institutional engine room of society,…/8

…that used to run everything professionally and quietly, out of our sight and mind mostly, has been under assault. The libertarians are laughing at us, as the arguments which inevitably follow get interpreted as ‘democracy’ at work. It’s more like a train without a driver. /9

Our social lives and relationships shouldn’t be being used to try to run a country. Social life is all about conformity and status, not about calmly and expertly assessing decisions. /end