A story to challenge the narrative that a majority wanted to move on from fighting Covid. One of the causes…

A story to challenge the narrative that a majority wanted to move on from fighting Covid. One of the causes of this rise in road toll is the large increase in the number of people avoiding public transport, to avoid Covid. People still know, and try. This is important. /1 https://t.co/zbkb5gCBM4

The narratives around ‘living with’ Covid were driven by a tiny minority. A smart tiny minority, who knew how to embed that desire into wider social action. They knew peer pressure, social conformity, would do the job for them, if they played it right. /2

But peer pressure NEVER means the people who go along with things like what they’re doing, or even agree with it. We all know this, from school. They’re not dumb or compliant sheep, they’re stuck inside the strongest force in the human universe. Imitative rivalry, conformity. /3

This is also a positive, because it shows that you don’t need to ‘mobilise’ or convince entire populations to bring about widespread change. It only takes a tiny number of people (about 5% of any group) to drive fundamental change. The other 95% will follow. /4

Look at the history of failure on climate change. The climate denialists have been winning for decades. Surveys and other data consistently show this is again a tiny minority position, which the overwhelming majority of people don’t agree with. And yet the minority wins. /5

Good people are too nice. These tiny minorities are usually not nice, they’re ruthless. And that ruthlessness hires the best strategists to find ways to get 95% of societies to agree to do things they fundamentally disagree with. They’ve been winning for decades. /6

I’ve told parts of that story here over the past few years, how conservative politicians and church leaders in the US in particular in the 1950s decided to form an alliance, to take back control of politics, in the centuries-old conflict of Church and State. They strategised. /7

Billy Graham was a key figure, but there were many others. Conservative politicians were interested in political power, the church leaders in undermining the secular State, to return churches to the centre of social power and control. You don’t need to study much history…/8

…to know this is almost the entire history of Western (and other) societies. Why do we think it ended in the 20th century? It didn’t, and it’s still the driving force of the 21st as well. Look at the US, where conservative politicians no longer even attempt to hide it. /9

I’ve said before I’m also agnostic about the outcome of this movement. There are powerful historical reasons to say secular States have been an abject failure. They killed over 100 million people in the 20th century alone, in wars. /10

And the Catholic Church more or less built Western society, on any fair reading of history, despite our Enlightenment-flavoured objection to any religious institution at all. So what’s at stake here won’t fall into the easy binary team sports of our modern fake debates. /11

This is an ongoing battle at the deep geological level of societies. Their most fundamental operating systems. I don’t want to get bogged down in more fake debates of Church vs State and the role of religion, I want us to acknowledge though that much more is in play here. /12

That if you want to shape societies in certain ways, you have to strategise. Not just protest and complain about the people who currently win these battles, as if they’re ever going to listen. You have to be smarter than them, to out-strategise them. /13

They’re also patient. It’s taken them over 70 years to fundamentally upend the public-focused agreement at the conclusion of the two world wars. The agreement to create something called a public, and to put it at the centre of our societies. I’ve Tweeted how they did it. /14

They invented a fake substitute for society, called an ‘economy’, and with it a whole framework of ideas like markets and competition, to undermine and dissolve the collective focus of public politics. It was a social strategy, which we mistake for some shift in economics. /15

With the economy, they’ve dominated every single public issue. Now nothing can be done or even talked about, if it’s said to damage this fake economy. The real purpose is clearer every day, to shut down all public, collective life. That’s what the economy was designed to do. /16

To generate a new model of social life, where everybody on the planet was a ‘free’ individual competing to maximise their own individual good. They of course don’t believe this themselves, or act in any way that is consistent with it. They form groups and hierarchies. /17

And use the economy as a Trojan Horse to give these groups and hierarchies ultimate power. They dispensed with the idea of public policy years ago. They generate masses of socially destructive slogans instead, earworms they fire into the community every day. /18

Earworms that rally masses of people around the economy, around prioritising coffee shops over public health for example. Their deeper game is to cement and extend their dominance in social hierarchies, using these ‘economic’ decisions to dissolve all other hierarchies. /19

Where they may have come unstuck now is with populism. Populism is social dynamite, nothing goes viral faster and allows the fast total domination of collective life. But it has a sting in its tail. Because it’s uncontrollable. Those who try to harness it always fail. /20

The great fascist movements of the mid-20th century were really populist movements. They took over much of the world in very short time. Their leaders met brutal ends. When populist fantasies fail, the crowd is always brutal. Completely unforgiving. Look at Trump in the US. /21

The Republicans at first loved the vote-winning machine he was. Then he took over their entire party, politically castrating every other person in them. They’re now puppets to his every whim. And he also won’t succeed longer term, populism never can or does. /22

Popularity can never bind people together. It’s always a rivalry, something these social media platforms milk for profit. All it can ever lead to is social collapse. And as I say, catastrophe historically is all that leads to major social change. That’s our trajectory. /23

To finish by looping back, we should with fair minds look back to what churches achieved. (I’m not part of any church or religion, I should add, but nor am I against them. Life isn’t a team sport.) They maintained social institutions which they also invented, for 2000 years. /24

They knew something about how to manage societies sustainably over centuries. We may not want theocracies, but they weren’t always that then either. We could learn a lot by understanding what they did. Another thread, another day. /end