State of Origin is an extremely useful tool to help understand why we can’t fix anything, from climate change…
State of Origin is an extremely useful tool to help understand why we can’t fix anything, from climate change to Covid. For the rest of the world, any of the soccer competitions are equally as good as examples. Your most popular team sport. /1 https://t.co/pm40UqAm0K
Democracy, as we call it, is ruling a country for the people. All of them. That’s what ‘the public’ means. Res publica, also commonwealth. The difficulty humans had when coming up with democracy was deciding how to actually do that. /2
You can’t sit millions around a table to make decisions every day. In earlier democracies social elites made the decisions, on behalf of the wider public. Today we use elections, to give every member of that public ‘a voice’ instead. /3
That sounds tremendous, noble even, what could be wrong with that? Have Tweeted lots about this, what’s wrong with it is that it ignores how humans interact, socially. It assumes some idealised state where individuals act individually, and then you just add them all up. /4
That’s not how humans interact socially, and nor will it ever be. Humans form status hierarchies, based on imitation. They copy one another, obsessively, and specifically they copy high-status individuals or groups, who then become the keystones of their status hierarchies. /5
Or as I often call it, ‘team sports’. Because that is quite literally the social model, and why team sports are such an obsessive passion for humans. Electoral politics quickly evolved into party politics, and the parties are the teams. And parties serve very useful functions. /6
Not least they allow for the development of wider policy platforms, rather than reaction to each issue individually. But their terrible, fatal flaw is that they emulate the team sports social structure. Humans turned them into teams almost the moment they were invented, /7
So our dominant social behaviour, status hierarchies driven by imitation, to create groups or teams, appropriated this new democratic thing immediately. And it’s controlled it ever since. It takes only a day for imitative rivalry between social groups to develop. /8
We’ve had party politics for a century or more. Football season in the winter is paralleled by party politics season 365 days of the year, where we back our team in exactly (not an analogy) the same way we back our football teams. Elections are the great social grand finals. /9 https://t.co/Lxc8FLTJDi
This would matter less if this social mechanism was focused on reality, on achieving some outcome outside the group. It never, ever is, if left to itself. It will always focus on the team sport, on beating the other team. Luke Burgis says it so well. /10 https://t.co/BRf1yyxElx
Party politics is literally a sport. Because our democratic ideas were so naively ignorant of how humans act socially, we’ve overlaid a continuous football competition on our democracies, and vested it with ultimate authority. It won’t end well, our societies are collapsing. /11
And people will not budge from this model, because as Burgis says, they not only won’t admit their ‘own mimetic preoccupations’, they LOVE it. Humans have always and will always love imitative rivalry, team sports. Zero Covids and Covid minimisers are new teams that show it. /12
The pandemic is going disastrously, and yet we still engage in the team sports version of it every day, thinking it might be getting us somewhere. Social media makes billions turning social issues into team sports, that’s its function. The perverse thing is, we mostly agree. /13
Nobody wants a pandemic. But team sports politics has turned every tiny, ridiculous issue like masking into months or even years of team sports. Both sides already agree, they don’t want a pandemic. But they can’t resist the team sports. Goya saw it very well. /14
We will keep slugging it out until we sink into the mud beneath our feet, suffocating us. Pandemics and climate change, in our case. But the addictive sport of that imitative rivalry is an almost impossible desire to break. /end https://t.co/lIKGGt0j3j
