Battling to get decent ventilation at a shared event brings to the forefront how all of this is a social…
Battling to get decent ventilation at a shared event brings to the forefront how all of this is a social phenomenon. The resistance you get is for violating social norms. People are literally terrified of varying from ‘what everybody else is doing’. High school, literally. /1
This is the con that allows libertarian politics to win worldwide too. It sells itself as freedom and liberty for the individual. It’s the exact OPPOSITE of that, a total surrender to group status games. Humans have regulation to break open that group psychology. /2
Regulation/law were designed to implement the right thing to do, even if the group involved was currently doing something else. It gives people *permission* to break the ferociously intense social bond of imitating others. You could see that with mask mandates. /3
People wore them and could say ‘yeh, it’s the law, what can you do?’ It gave them an excuse to do the right thing, and to act contrary to the group. That’s how all law works, it’s how it helps societies move beyond the adolescent culture of within-group imitation. /4
Even in schools you have rules, to break open group behaviour. The deregulation libertarians inflict upon societies doesn’t free a single person from anything. It forces societies into permanent slavery to group status games. You literally never leave high school. /5
Unsurprisingly, the adult libertarians who run this schtick are often the same people who dominated social hierarchies in school, the Prom Kings and Queens, the bullies. This is their victory over adult life, which previously overwhelmed their shit. Populism is really this. /6
The capture of adult life, by school life. Popularity as the sole metric of worth and power. The Trumps of the world can get away with doing anything they like, because they’re popular. You can make anything popular, it’s called marketing. /7
Why all the tired narratives about adult life we use, that it’s ‘economies’, battles between ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, ‘neoliberals’ and ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ etc. don’t wash with me. All adult fairy tales, names we give to exactly the same social dynamics we learn at school. /8
Societies are SOCIAL. Always, and in every detail. You can call them economies, or political, or whatever else you like. They’re just banners for different groups playing the same social games. Believers in the economy are just another social group, promoting their group. /9
One thing only is not social, and even then you arrive it only via social means. Knowledge. The orthogonal player in schools too. The thing constantly at war with the social games of school. Ask any teacher, whose jobs it is to take that intensely imitative social clay and…/10
…shape it towards a different future, defined by knowledge. The battle between playground and classroom. That’s our adult world too, we just rarely notice. Why teachers are the key to solving most of our problems, the professionals at SOCIALISING knowledge. /11
And why they’re the most ignored group in all of our problems too. A populist adolescent adult world is never going to listen to teachers. When did the Prom Kings and Queens and bullies ever care what teachers said? They were bitter enemies. /12
Listen to libertarians whine about freedom and oppression. Have you ever heard anything more teenage? It’s like they’ve been grounded (what ‘lockdowns’ literally were for them, and why they responded so viciously). Our societies are now adolescent cultures, throughout. /13
Our oldest people, now the boomers, often live eternal lifestyle lives, refusing to age. The generation that drove this high school culture deep into adult life, and now replaced it with that. Not because they were bad people, but because it was the only culture they knew. /14
Adult life had already been severed from schools when they arrived in them. The world wars had brutalised societies, schools were to be the way we started anew. But it just meant we turned all society into a school. That’s where we all learn our social models. /end