The only recipe for social stability over generations is to build things. Not to have the things, but because…

The only recipe for social stability over generations is to build things. Not to have the things, but because building things disciplines human desire and behaviour in a way that debate never can. We will never agree because desire is too evasive. Here’s another Oz secret. /1 https://t.co/cxWGyYelZG

The Snowy Mountains Scheme did something remarkable that wasn’t about electricity, or even water. Something global. The scheme itself by the way was never really about electricity, it was the usual European Australia harebrained fantasy of ‘turning water inland’. /2 https://t.co/zU6l5vk0WR

Of redirecting the Snowy River mostly into the Murray Darling basin, so it could be used for irrigation. If you wonder how successful it was, well, no. The Scheme is a white elephant. But something it did achieve is much more important. /3 https://t.co/j7EpJxH3y9

It brought about 65,000 migrants to Australia, mostly from Europe. Refugees from a Europe pulverised by WW2. SBS is running a brilliant doco series on the Scheme right now, I highly recommend it. That influx built post-war Australia, *socially*. /4 https://t.co/UOn8hwI9GQ https://t.co/wLvoKrCR81

These were the same Europeans who just previously had been at war with each other, who’d blown much of their cities and landscapes to smithereens, killing millions. When they arrived here they could barely communicate with one another, and there were remnant hostilities too. /5

But over the next 25 years of building the Snowy Hydro together, that act of building brought them together. And welded a new Australia together well outside the Scheme, socially. Some of my relatives worked on this Scheme, I experienced that social shift firsthand. /6

There’s profound historical symmetry to what actually happened here. After 6-7 years of territorial warfare in Europe and Asia, with the destruction of so much social infrastructure, suddenly these same cultures were living harmoniously again here in the Snowy. For one reason. /7

They were building things. That act of building transcended all of the cultural differences and hostilities. You can’t engage with reality in that way, to build things, hard things, without putting your usual differences to one side. This is the story of all civilisation. /8 https://t.co/2Y7M7zJb5o

I Tweeted about how this was the main lesson of Roman civilisation, that we don’t usually see. Rome survived for so long, because it built. The act of building is the glue that holds societies together. A a bonus you get the things you build, to make your life better. /9 https://t.co/2Y7M7zJb5o

Aboriginal Australia was the same. Bigots see it as tens of thousands of years of ‘hunting and gathering’, as primitives engaged in a sort of continent level scout jamboree. But Aboriginal Australia was building a continent, and modifying that building that whole time. /10 https://t.co/2DIQQtMz5j

How do you have a culture that lasts 60,000+ years, when other cultures manage 5000 at best? You focus your social lives on the continuous building of things. In the First Australians case, on the continuous enrichment of an entire continent. Fast forward to today. /11

With us here on social media, ‘debating’ (really just team sports), producing nothing except hot air, and billions for the platform owners. Having long outsourced most building of things to China, which we now engage in chest-beating sabre-rattling with. /12

And wondering why our societies are falling apart. It’s simple. Because we don’t build anything. /end