Life in a sloganocracy. Hit me again this week, reading debates about infection-driven immunity, or…

Life in a sloganocracy. Hit me again this week, reading debates about infection-driven immunity, or ‘exposure’ immunity, hybrid immunity etc. In a sloganocracy, what guides community life is no longer government and its associated institutions, but slogans. /1

Slogans designed to make people rally just enough to create some of the social coordination that was lost when the old institutional structures were damaged or removed. Very similar to urban myths, but generated by politicians and their spin doctors. /2

For example, I often talk to friends about the shift to renewable energy. I’ve lost count now of the number who won’t budge on it, because the entire topic for them is reduced to ‘doesn’t work when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow’. The LNP slogan. /3

It’d be easy to just call them stupid or gullible, but societies have never operated by all of us being expert in everything (that’s another libertarian fantasy). They’re relying on what they’re being given to provide order to their thinking and lives. A slogan. /4

‘Stop the Boats.’ ‘Debt and Deficit’. ‘You need to have a go to get a go.’ ‘Just like the flu.’ ‘We have to live with this virus.’ ‘The economy’. ‘Labor always taxes and spends.’ Etc. Look back on the years of conservative rule, and weigh the number of actual policies they…/5

…introduced (virtually zero), to the number of slogans they introduced (a long list). Slogans are being used to structure a society that was already structured, but is now fractured into tribalisms, rallying around these slogans. The same thing happens everywhere…/6

…’the economy’ (itself another slogan) has replaced societies. You need something to coordinate and order people. So back to immunity. Even within science now you see debates about repeatedly infecting people to build their immunity over time. Immunity as a muscle. /7

A lot of this is again just based on slogans. The vague hand-waving assertion that this is how things have always worked, kids have always got sick and it builds their immunity over time. But if you ask people who say this to provide actual examples, the conversation stalls. /8

What are the viruses and other pathogens we’ve aways all been (allegedly) repeatedly infected with, that led to us moving from severe disease to mild disease, over the course of our lives? Colds and flu? Aren’t they more or less the same severity our entire lives? /9

It certainly doesn’t stop us catching them. Colds often 3 times a year. And these are certainly the vague hand-waving experiences the people who say these things are referring to, because these are the main (almost only?) infectious diseases any of us get repeatedly. /10

This is how a sloganocracy works. Take some poorly defined, vague experience we’re all familiar with, and weaponise it. ‘You can live with Covid, just as we’ve always lived with the flu’. Actually most people I know have rarely had the flu, not because they had it…/11

…500 times as a kid and now they’re immune to it. But because we avoid catching flu, in multiple ways, by isolating the people who have it, vaccinating as widely as possible and having strong and clear messaging about risks, in a flu season. /12

Most people with the flu are too sick to come to work, but if they tried, they’d be sent home and told to pull their head in. Now we can all come to work with Covid, and the greater sin would be to even question it. We’ve been conned. When you see it, you can’t unsee it. /13

Libertarians have removed nearly all public policy and services, and replaced them with slogans and spin. The greatest, master-slogan is of course ‘the economy’ itself. Find any public issue right now that doesn’t have to pass the test of ‘the economy’. Good luck. /end