The response to collective emergencies today is to use them as platforms for the expression of individual…

The response to collective emergencies today is to use them as platforms for the expression of individual grievance, and self-promotion. They generate a space of attention where the problems of ‘we’ become problems about ‘me’. A logical endgame for wider libertarian politics. /1 https://t.co/gfZYHbrpgC

Here in Australia the same thing is happening, communities for example who have lived happily alongside prolifically polluting and butt-ugly coal-fired power stations for decades are suddenly outraged because somebody wants to put sleek while windmills on the hills. /2

As the agency of collective or public things has been progressively stripped away since the late-1970s, all that’s been left for people to express their agency is for them to act as spoilers for the few collective things left. Nobody is paying attention to most people. /3

So they will latch onto anything that at least opens some form of space of collective attention. Somewhere they may be at least seen and heard. Even if the things being spoiled in this way are profoundly important to our collective well-being. /4

Sometimes this shift is called identity politics. We invent constantly new ways to differentiate our individual selves from the crowd, taking all of our older collective ways of being and re-territorialising them into 8 billion new sovereign territories. It’s not the answer. /5

It makes us even more slaves to the destructive forces that brought about this dismantling of societies. While you’re fighting for collective *or* individual rights, you’re part of the problem. There is only one way out of the mess. To reject that ‘or’. /6

There never was and never will be any meaningful distinction between individual and collective. All the raw material a person uses to shape what they see as their individuality is collective - language, ideas, events. But all collectivity is also made by individuals. /7

Individuality and collectivity are two *phases* of social life. Just as water can be solid, liquid or gas. It’s all still water. The reason humans developed collective mechanisms was to increase individual freedom. Opposing them to each other is nonsensical. /8

Unfortunately, as I Tweet about a lot, the only thing that tends to ram this point home to most is total catastrophe, where suddenly people recognise that their individual lives and collective freedoms are the same thing. Humans are prodigiously social creatures. /9

History shows you simply can’t break through the imitative rivalry of group status games, without catastrophe. Or total disruption, the emergence of some engineering for example that so undermines an existing status quo that it becomes impossible to maintain it. /10

Renewables may be like that. Now so much cheaper that even their greatest oppositions historically are falling over themselves to invest. And because energy is central to everything we do, that may shatter the status quo in multiple ways. /end