About 40 years ago Michel Serres asked what seemed a strange question at the time (he was always way ahead of…

About 40 years ago Michel Serres asked what seemed a strange question at the time (he was always way ahead of everybody). "What does 'we' mean?" I see the use of 'we' here a lot, as in 'why are we allowing Covid to spread?' Etc. That's happening because there is no we now. /1

Not just because of individualist belief systems, though they're the drivers, enabled by a cultural shift in the past century where adult and adolescent culture merged, through mass schooling. But because that 'we' is the same thing as 'the public'. /2

The public in turn is not just a counting concept, 'all of the people'. It's an administrative construct. Created by and maintained by dreaded bureaucrats. Who measure and analyse collective interactions, and design policy and procedure to maximise collective benefit. /3

I've Tweeted many times how, from the end of WW2, the old privilege that was pushed to one side by the Spanish Flu and both world wars, so societies could survive, reasserted its historical hold over societies via a new politics, that disguised what they were doing. /4

How they invented a whole suite of new concepts, like 'the economy', and 'free markets', to restore the laissez-faire arrangements that had allowed them to dominate societies for centuries. Under cover of a supposed 'objective' and 'modern' shift. /5 https://t.co/mU0jhcdwXR

In reality they were just dismantling the public. The institutional infrastructure that both created and sustained the public. That made 'we' a thing for the first time in all of human history. They pretend that we is now 'majority rules', a concept they got from elections. /6

Elections they game with complete ease, not believing their luck when societies decided to make a popularity mechanism the direct route to ultimate power. Popularity is easily gamed, it's just marketing. 'We' has no connection with a majority. Not in any way. /7

You'll be better off trying to break through a brick wall with a plastic spoon though, than convincing people of this. We're all electoral fundamentalists now, mistaking democracy for elections. Universal elections are barely a century old. /8

They're categorically not what created the democratic surge of the 20th century. Institutions did that, bureaucracies, creating and maintaining a 'we' forced upon societies by catastrophes - pandemics and wars. Copying the Chinese, we employed hundreds of thousands.../9

...of experts in every area of social life, to analyse, design and maintain social arrangements that maximised benefit to society as a whole. Ken Henry was on the radio this morning, describing the disastrous inaction of the past 20 years in Australian politics. /10

He's an ex-Mandarin, he and the thousands of others like him who work(ed) in our 'public service' (it's in the fucking name people) have had to sit back and watch popularly-elected show ponies trash our society. Part of that trashing was trashing the institutions themselves. /11

Those old vested interests despise those institutions, that's their main target every time they're in government, how do people not notice this? Tens of thousands of 'public servants' (again, it's in the fucking name) sacked in that 20-year period. /12

Replaced with pliable chums in the consultancy industries. Because we're ultimately populists, still stuck in our high school culture, we can't take our eyes off the popularity games, what we call 'politics'. They're a sideshow. /13 https://t.co/MxUIoos5i2

Most politicians know next to nothing about anything they govern. That's what their thousands of expert officials are for. And why they've sacked those officials, and perverted the systems for those left, to make sure they'll ignore their expertise.../14

..and do the bidding of elected politicians instead. This isn't even an argument from first principles, it's a basic fact of history. The UK developed a public service because it was facing social problems its elected people had no idea how to solve. Australia followed suit. /15

The UK copied the model from the Chinese, who were one of the inventors of expertise in government, through their civil service. In this pandemic we've seen how little we understand this now, with experts in scientific disciplines shouting at governments over the parapets. /16

Nobody recognises that societies already solved this. That entire middle ground between the public and government is occupied by the public service. Expertise harnessed to social ends. Experts *in* running societies. In creating and maintaining the 'we'. /17

Instead we think politicians 'run the country', and that our role is to yell our individual opinions at them in hopefully a loud enough way that they'll pay attention to us. Politicians couldn't run a cake stall on the lawn outside parliament. /18

They not only don't have a clue how to run countries, they never have had a clue, and have never run them. People like Ken Henry run countries. The role of a politician is to be a conduit to the community, a liaison point. Not to run anything. /19

Meantime the same old vested interests dismantling the institutions that created the public for the past 70 years, now developed platforms like this, where we can all gather with our ludicrous ideas about democracy, and yell at each other angrily all day. /20

That diverts our energy and attention from the things that might actually shift this mess. We build up our little teams and engage in the daily team sports, not even seeing we're wallowing *inside* the frames those same old elites devised for us. /21

Wailing about how 'we' aren't fixing climate change or Covid. There is no we, we're pissing into the wind. /end