When you Tweet any of the disaster that is Covid, who are you speaking to? So many Tweets in this genre. All…

When you Tweet any of the disaster that is Covid, who are you speaking to? So many Tweets in this genre. All speaking to absent leadership that could fix things. So is there a point to it, given we’re speaking into a void? I think it needs reframing. /1

We’ve spent decades doing all of this with climate change. We KNOW it doesn’t work. Even Al Gore’s colourful mega-presentation didn’t budge the dial. Not one notch. We have the wrong model in our heads for how knowledge becomes action. /2

Ask teachers if the intrinsic logic of the knowledge they teach automatically educates and changes their students? They’ll laugh. Their entire profession is a recognition that this model can never work. They spend years persuading, disciplining, persisting, to succeed. /3

They know that knowledge is a social thing, that you need to socialise kids, into knowledge. The first instinct of most kids will be to resist that. To focus on their social world first and foremost. Teachers need years of patient fight to shift the focus of student attention. /4

In the adult world, with Covid, we have zero chance of succeeding by just firing data and graphs at people. The most open-minded may shift their awareness a little, feel some discomfort, but the overwhelming social pressure of their lives will always win. So what can we do? /5

There isn’t a quick or simple answer. By participating in closed dialectical loops with Covid minimisers here every day though, we’re not achieving much except raising our cortisol levels. It’s team sports. We love team sports, we don’t admit it. /6

And we also don’t recognise that we’re mostly in *agreement* with the minimisers. Paradoxically, the most vicious ‘division’ and debate can’t happen, without substantial agreement. In team sports, strict *agreement* is required for the sport to happen at all. /7

Agreement that the sport is our passion, using the same rules. Nearly everything both sides do is identical. The fury and passion isn’t about the sport, it’s about the team. Nobody is suggesting put the football away, they’re arguing who’s better at kicking and passing it. /8

Both sides in these debates agree they don’t want a pandemic. People (if they exist) who actually want a pandemic wouldn’t be debating this here, they’d be off somewhere licking handrails. We are in furious agreement here, the fury requires the agreement. /9

The division and debates are positioning, that’s all. Social positioning, trying to determine which people will determine our way out of this pandemic. Social media is brutal on this topic. Because the social structure we used before to deal with this topic is ruined. /10

That’s why this particular team sport exists. We’re trying to restore a structure that we lost. In the absence of calm authority and expertise-based hierarchy to do this work for us, we *socially* try to restore one here. Has nothing to do with facts at all. It’s ALL social. /11

To me it’s worth remembering that, when you design your next decisive barb against the minimisers, or ‘Covid Zeros’, depending on which team is yours. Actually we all agree to end the pandemic. We just don’t have a social structure to do it. That’s why we argue. /end