How prepared are you to take on your own friends, to end this pandemic? What created and maintains this…
How prepared are you to take on your own friends, to end this pandemic? What created and maintains this pandemic is the social dynamics of friendship, what I sometimes call ‘team sports’. Social conformity. Not politics, or rather that’s all that politics is. /1 https://t.co/goysyGFqt4
We had a lot of decades where allowing each person to hold whatever view they liked was manageable. We could utter platitudes like ‘each to their own’, and get on with life. But we’re now at a point where those beliefs impact lives directly, and immediately. Dangerous beliefs. /2
One of my best friends is now a bitter enemy, because I told them their views are dangerous, killing people and a disgrace. I don’t care that it outraged them, it’s a line-in-the-sand time in history. My own family is being infected because of views like theirs. /3
We so often think of political battles as battles between us, the public, and politicians or government. But that’s not true. The reason the most insane things are happening right now is because politicians gamed our *social* behaviours. Like Tupperware-type parties. /4
Most of the work of destroying public health is being done BY the public, on behalf of these politicians. Social media is the secret sauce that insinuates itself into every household, opening the door to poisonous, lunatic beliefs. That’s how home-based selling worked. /5 https://t.co/4BBnO0Ea4Y
Companies recognised that the most powerful way to break down distrust and reluctance to buy was to have your own friends do the work for them. And that’s what’s happened with Covid as well. A small handful of anti-public health influencers drive the resistance. /6 https://t.co/1jrzVKXnrC
Right there in your own home, via social media. I think unless we’re challenging our own friendship groups directly, something people are understandably reluctant to do, we’re lost. The reason politicians aren’t listening is because your friends aren’t either. /7
And the politicians need your friends’ votes. The bastards have inserted themselves into our social networks, via these platforms, and now they’re flogging anti-climate action and anti-pandemic action to us 24/7, via our own friends. /8
Society is social, not political. We need to take social action. With our own friends. That stuff scales fast. Wailing at politicians goes nowhere. /end
As a P.S. the example of my friend might suggest I mean go to war with your friends. Not at all, they were just an extreme case that needed ‘blocking’ from my life. By ‘taking on’ friends I mean opening up discussion with them, on Covid.