If you can find a single reference to the public in the economic theory used in our politics, you’ve done…

If you can find a single reference to the public in the economic theory used in our politics, you’ve done very well. And that’s exactly the point of that theory. To get rid of the public, and replace it with a market. Markets also replace all politics, with those who dominate…/1

…the market. Again, that’s why these theories were invented. To give those people a disguised way to take control of entire societies, for their own benefit. Some of them actually seem to believe all the guff about setting people free of social and regulatory ties,…/2

…so that this glorious freedom will spontaneously build schools and airports, hospitals and broadband networks, etc. It never does, because how would it even happen? What would spontaneously make billions of isolated consumers in a global market get up on a weekend…/3

…(if they have the weekend off, which is increasingly unlikely), grab a shovel from the shed and head off to help build a new national highway, or a new local hospital? It’s hilarious these ideas ever got anywhere. The fall back is that ‘the economy’ (never defined)…/4

…allows us to ‘afford’ building all of these other things societies need. Let’s get that straight - we can’t afford to build things, unless we build things to allow us to build things. Who believes this stuff? None of this is ‘capitalism’ or ‘fascism’ or any of those other…/5

…debating favourites. No society has ever been organised enough to run any sort of -ism. People can’t even run a small club without it degenerating into tribal warfare within a few short years. But we’re expected to believe these complex -isms are running our societies. /6

Bollocks. Societies are run in the same way they always have been, and always will be. By the basic social behaviour of conformity, which produces hierarchies of trust. We’re not anywhere near clever enough to have transcended these basic social behaviours, which we use…/7

…throughout our entire lifespans. Right now they’re stuck in adolescent mode, for the majority of the lifespan, because the institutions which broke that circle have themselves been destroyed, by the same adolescent surge. Have Tweeted multiple times the only way those…/8

…institutions were ever allowed to even exist. Catastrophe - wars, plagues and massive natural disasters. That’s all that ruptures our underlying social behaviours. Our institutions came out of those catastrophes. Public health was one of them, now terminal. Public education…/9

…and broadcasting and infrastructure and parks and transport etc. etc. etc. were already terminal before Covid began. The public existed for less than a century. from the late-19th to the mid-20th century, as a result of massive catastrophes. It was emergency action, not…/10

…planning or foresight. We were trying to save our arses. The second the threats seemed less real, we went straight back to jostling for social status, in our social hierarchies. Back to high school. For many centuries before that religion filled that institutional role. /11

It’s trying really hard to be that agin, but I think that game’s over. To me our only hope is if the sheer complexity of the social-technical world we’ve built forces us to change, to prevent it collapsing. There are no subjectivities or identities that can keep that whole…/12

…complex social machine running. Engineering can. You can have those engineered mod-cons, or you can have endless adolescent debating games. Not both. /end