Societies of adolescents worship friendship. Here's why that's so dangerous, using Covid and climate change…
Societies of adolescents worship friendship. Here's why that's so dangerous, using Covid and climate change as examples. Friendship is a developmental social stage. Extending it to the centre of all adult life leads to social collapse. /1 https://t.co/MfgGYidzL6
Friendship is like L-plates and P-plates for the maturation into adult life. It absolutely dominates adolescent and early adult life, where we use friends to develop the social skills of beginning to live outside our families. Why the sitcom of the same name did so well. /2
And we all of course have friends, throughout our lives. But what's changed is the absolute centrality of that now to life at all ages. Men for example who retire are encouraged to join friendship groups, Men's Sheds and Men's Tables. /3
As if the loss of extensive and close friendship groups as we age is some form of problem. It's not a problem, that's what being an adult always used to mean, moving beyond the need for a constant culture of friendship. The claimed epidemic of 'loneliness' to me is the same. /4
A symptom of something broken, in the cultural sense. Friendship has come to dominate all ages because the traditional social structures and frameworks of adult life have been stripped away in favour of what we call a market, an economy. /5
The economy and its markets ensure that you never leave school, where you were that individual constantly jostling for attention and recognition, to find a group of friends to belong to. Markets by definition only recognise individuals. /6
Anything that might represent a level of collective organisation of adult life will be ruthlessly suppressed. We saw it with 'lockdowns', where a timeless method of controlling disease was transformed by economic propaganda into some form of oppression. /7
Grown adults responded in exactly the same way as teenagers who are grounded for bad behaviour. Because that's how their adult lives are now structured, it's not an analogy. The focus was entirely on denied freedoms and recreational fun. /8
None of that older historical adulthood, of accepting a struggle for a higher cause. All deliberately engineered over many decades, by the 'there's no such thing as society' economy cult. And it goes even further. /9
Because one thing friends rarely do is challenge each others' beliefs. That violates the cohesion of the friendship group. 'Never discuss politics or religion', as many now say. The total capitulation that represents needs to be unpacked every day. /10
All of the difficulties of adult life are now off-limits to even discuss, for fear of damaging friendship groups. It's the most perfect mechanism for infinite servitude ever devised, which is why I say 'the economy' is humankind's most lethal invention. /11
To defer to the man whose face I borrowed for my profile picture, Freddie Mercury, when asked what the internal dynamics of his band Queen were like. 'We hate each other, we hate each other's guts'. Of course they loved each other, but he meant that they argued incessantly. /12
It's what adults used to do. To achieve difficult and necessary outcomes. Now social media, the infrastructure of perpetual adolescence, is curated positivity crap between friends. There's argument between different groups, but that's just the team sports of adolescent life. /13
The relationships that matter most to people, between friends, have a self-inflicted taboo on discussing anything that might involve disagreement. We're strait-jacketed by friendship. It creates a rigid self-enforced status quo. /14
When shit happens, as it does now at an exponentially increasing rate, as no problems are even discussed, let alone solved, the positivity shots of us on holidays and 'having fun' proliferate to try to paper over the cracks. It's a catastrophic charade. /end