The atomic unity of society is not the individual. It’s the household. Economy politics replaces society with…

The atomic unity of society is not the individual. It’s the household. Economy politics replaces society with a market, made up of independent, mobile workers, decoupled from place. But that’s not how most people live. The economy wants you to think of your household…/1 https://t.co/epte6GwtMr

…as just an address. A point on a map. Location, location. Real estate. But households are not just societies in miniature, they’re universes too. They’re a cosmic as well as a social order, peoples’ beliefs make their homes as much as walls do. /2

Economically household income is also the main determinant of wealth, not individual salaries. The reason political budgets get such resonance is that they were deliberately dramatised to be like a household budget (even though they’re nothing like them). /3

The household is society’s reference point, on all things. Also why the homeless are so marginalised, whereas in economic politics they’re just another potential worker. Understanding households as society’s atoms I think is key to fixing many of our problems. ‘Go households’…/4

…fixed the GFC in Australia. Australian households have re-built our energy generation system, with solar panels. Electrifying households, including their transport, is the likely fastest way to address both climate change and cost of living. Etc. /5 https://t.co/SpomF55veh

Our experience of ‘society’ is overwhelmingly our household, with excursions to work, social events, travel etc. giving us experiences with people from other households. A household is a way of framing all of existence itself, where we learn how to live, our beliefs, how to…/6

…view the universe as a whole. It’s our HOME. And it’s that idea which the economy, that great modern fiction, will not allow. Home. We’re so trapped in the framing of the economy that I don’t think we see this as where everything matters. We think ‘society’ is lots of…/7

…little independent pieces, individuals or households, added together. Like doing a jigsaw puzzle. That’s fundamentally wrong. Every piece of the jigsaw puzzle of society, households, is all of the puzzle, in every piece. Our homes are where we are grounded in *all* of our…/8

…existence, in every way. Economically, socially, emotionally, cosmically. The reason economies so resist ‘working from home’ isn’t about the practicalities of work. Those are all able to be managed. It’s about control, about the locus of your life. The economy cannot allow…/9

…that to be your home. It must be the job. The job is the true atomic unit of economies. It’s a locus of control. Jobs are what decoupled our lives, from our work. Jobs, jobs, jobs, as economy politicians openly say. What drained our communities of their expertise and…/10

…energy, commuting along ever wider freeways to and from jobs. Our homes became garages, with living quarters attached. The passion, obsession for transport that economic politics has. This is what the market they believe in does, strips away all agency based on location,…/11

…in favour of ‘globalised’ movement of people and resources. Really just ‘supply chains’ to continuously top-up mountains of gold the people at the centre of these chains rest upon. Meantime travel became the booming industry, as people displaced from the ground under their…/12

…own feet, travel obsessively to try to rediscover some sort of connection to place. Every point on the globe becomes just another place to ‘see’. Rather than to be grounded in. We’re not grounded, we don’t even understand what that word means now. When Indigenous peoples…/13

…are displaced from their land, it’s not just a change of address. It severs the basis of their entire existence, their connection to land. That connection isn’t ‘local’ or even ‘global’. That binary is the false one the economy invented, to justify stripping households and…/14

…their communities of things, in favour of ‘globalised’ economies. That connection is cosmic, it’s the root of all existence. European Australians don’t understand this, huddled on the shores for the past 200 years, nearly falling off into the sea, anything to avoid…/15

…actually connecting to place in some way, the vast majority of a vast continent confined to being some wanky mythology of ‘outback’ Australia, ‘the bush’. If we’re going to take societies back from economies, we need to understand home again. Our societies are where all…/16

…of our homes overlap, each one of those homes the entire world and universe, refracted in one specific way. Not one tiny Lego ‘part’ to make up a ‘whole’. Australia isn’t a little bit of the Smiths down at 23, plus a bit of the Singhs at 47, and so on through millions of…/17

…households. Each one of those households is all of Australia, refracted in one specific way. The most revolutionary act you can undertake is to make your home the centre of your existence again. Not in a prepper or gated community way (that’s the local/global nonsense). /18

We don’t want to go ‘off-grid’, nationally. The grid (in everything meaning of that term, not just energy) is fantastic, a huge distributed and shared resource. We want to re-prioritise the nodes on that grid, our homes. The people who are cavalier about Covid don’t seem…/19

…to mind it being brought into their homes. Because they have no real sense of that being a violation. Many loved lockdowns because it put their homes at the centre of their existence again, they stopped just being overnight resting points for their commuting job-lives. /20

Societies that are more resilient, economically, against pandemics, or whatever, are societies where the home is the fundamental reality. Strong homes are resilient societies. Society is nothing but the overlapping universes of every household in them. /end