Just as we can’t vote our problems away, nor can we discuss or debate them away. Society has two orthogonal…
Just as we can’t vote our problems away, nor can we discuss or debate them away. Society has two orthogonal movements, one social (our overwhelming focus), the other is knowledge. The social dimension of society will never provide you with truths about anything except itself. /1 https://t.co/uZnI6SY9ZF
Society is social, not political or personal. That remains true. But left to itself social relations provide no forward movement for humans, no human progress. Proust’s brilliant forensic analysis of the Parisian salons noted also the essential emptiness of this world. /2 https://t.co/QIurh2ypZL
How the incredibly complex ‘signs’ emitted by people in social groups - is she interested in me? Is he giving me the cold shoulder? Etc. - require complex skills to interpret. But that at the end of the day, these signs are ‘empty’, they lead to no human progress. /3 https://t.co/uBpp0YcgB3
The salon is now social media, the daily venue for this continuous interpretation and promotion of our respective status in social groups. I don’t think people should be under any illusion that this is solving any problems at all. Social relations are vital, they are society. /4
Conversation for example is the driver of most ‘economic growth’. It’s only by acting socially with others that social desires lead to ‘markets’ for goods and services. But this is intrinsically a zero sum game. The ‘economy’ is just code for the status quo. /5
No human problem except the status of individual people was ever solved in the salons, and now on social media. Sure social interaction shifts which person or group becomes rich and powerful, through the dominant fads and fashions of the day. /6 https://t.co/Nx1uEdTeFE
But it doesn’t change anything fundamentally in society. It shifts the deck chairs, that’s all. Only knowledge shifts societies, allows them to progress. (The exception being catastrophes like disasters and war, which can pop the salon bubble, though with mixed outcomes.) /7
And it’s here it gets tricky, because while there are social ways to organise knowledge (universities for example), everything has to be lived socially, but sociality and knowledge are never aligned. There’s an essential tension between them. We’ve seen that in the pandemic. /8
Prominent pandemic minimisers often come from respectable knowledge-based institutions. Others mobilise their own followers using social media. Neither of these social mechanisms guarantees the truth of anything the minimisers say. Science itself is resolutely social too. /9
We don’t see some of the best science, because the social games scientists play suppress it just as social games suppress everything else. As Planck said, science progresses one funeral at a time, it’s a social game as much as anything else. So is everything hopeless? /10
No. Knowledge will out. Through all of the social shenanigans we play, truth eventually asserts itself by the failure of all of its rivals. Vaccines mostly work, and some still resist them, but reality has mostly prevailed there. EVs will displace ICE cars, because they’re…/11
…just much smarter engineering in multiple ways. Social games will run interference in these and all other areas of our lives, but eventually reality will win. It can’t not. Or our societies will collapse, if social games prevail. Just another way of saying reality wins. /12
Our institutions, like universities, are that prevailing over history. As Edmund Burke said, trust custom and tradition because so often it’s a natural selection process - they survive because they worked. Not always and everywhere of course, there are no utopias. /13
Some of the world’s most toxic Covid minimisers for example are employed by universities, and those who have worked at senior levels of them should be doing more to pay attention to that. But overall, unis represent the progress of societies, the injection of knowledge. /14
It’s why the governance of them is much more difficult than business types will ever understand. Knowledge will not be tamed by any social process, including corporate governance. Knowledge must always reserve the right to overturn any social arrangement, if it’s stupid. /15
To end with the painting that says all of this so beautifully. /end https://t.co/qNyFH3LMuZ
