I have huge respect for the law, it’s the last institution standing against the populist tidal waves of dumb…

I have huge respect for the law, it’s the last institution standing against the populist tidal waves of dumb destruction. Not because laws are rules, the libertarian obsession. But because law is a way of thinking. A story about Judge Judy from a senior lawyer is a way in. /1 https://t.co/raCr7XkEBE

A friend is a senior lawyer, now retired. One day we were discussing the law, and the huge success of Judge Judy. I expected him to be scathing about her, and was surprised that he was a huge fan. Why he was a fan is an insight into the sophisticated way law thinks. /2 https://t.co/L1GZyMOVFc

He said in all his years working with the public, what he’d realised was that they mostly just wanted somebody to act as an arbiter in decisions that were well beyond them to resolve themselves. He said the courts are constantly gummed up with petty grievances. /3 https://t.co/dfo8Z1LXDj

This is where he’d become a huge fan of Judge Judy. Somebody with legal training and understanding of due process, separate to the judicial process. He felt that a huge number of the grievances people take to courts could be resolved using a mechanism like this. /4 https://t.co/xYEo7cru4v

That people weren’t so much looking for the formal stamp of an official court ruling, they just wanted to be part of some authoritative mechanism, using a skilled and forceful third party, to resolve their disputes. The law already has done this for years with mediation. /5 https://t.co/7HPUGbX5hO

To try to reduce the load on formal court proceedings. But the Judge Judy method allows for the full antagonistic situation where parties can’t agree, without the expense and stress of court. This is what I Tweet about a lot, how societies use the 95/5 rule. /6

In a human group of any size, from the tiniest committee to a full nation, about 5% of people set the direction, and the other 95% follow it. And this isn’t just people being ‘sheep’, because we all have many areas of our lives where we have to follow others, their expertise. /7

Populism has demonstrated this with alarming clarity. How people can follow any sort of ‘influencer’, if it gives them a sense of what to do in an otherwise confusing situation. Reality TV stars can become leaders of the free world. /8

Judge Judy is an example of directing this foundational social behaviour away from pure populism, and towards a hybrid model where existing institutional wisdom is married to populist need. Judy was an actual judge, with knowledge of law and due process. /9

The thing I would love law to have introduced to other areas of life but which sadly is slow to catch on, is case-based thinking. Each legal case demolishes the distinctions we make been specific and general, local and global, individual and collective. /10

Every case is both informed by precedents, previous cases, while at the same time capable of becoming a precedent for other future cases. All of them. Everything is both local and universal, at the same time, in every detail. It’s a genuine wonder that is rarely noticed. /11

In politics or science or just about anywhere else, we struggle with fictions about the need to get a ‘big picture’, bird’s-eye view of things, to not ‘get lost in the weeds’. But everything is in the details, the most specific and universal things, at the same time. /12

I Tweeted a few times that tabloid journalism understands this so well, and progressive people mostly don’t. How what happens in one situation, to one person, can have immediate universal impact, can ‘go viral’. Because everything we think and do is *already* universal. /13

The language we speak, the ideas we use, all of it is a collective thing, while at the same time a fundamental part of who we are as individuals. There’s no binary. Every day on Twitter I see anguish because people seem so stupid, to not fight Covid for example. /14

They’re framing themselves in the way that defeats them, as isolated individuals powerless against great majority waves of opinion. But that’s not how societies work. Collective or global things aren’t the summation of lots of tiny individual views and actions. /15

Everything collective is ‘viral’. It’s some individual way of looking at and thinking about things that resonates with most other people. Often very fast, inside a day. We all have the power to make those global changes, by finding the right way to frame the issue. /16

We don’t have to spend years convincing millions of others, to effect change. We have to find the key that makes them flock to a change, in that 95/5 way. Instead of railing against the existing 5’s, we need to create new 5’s. That will bring change fast. Massive change. /end