Watching prominent Covid minimisers move onto other libertarian causes reveals which ‘team’ they were always…
Watching prominent Covid minimisers move onto other libertarian causes reveals which ‘team’ they were always fighting for.( Not the public health team.) It’s worth asking, what fires up these libertarians? Short thread on how peculiar that is, and how society is always social. /1 https://t.co/X7yqmphGRf
This is the ratification of the Peace of Westphalia, in Nuremberg in 1650. 1648 is often given as the origin point for what we call modern States. The thing libertarians hate so much. The name is very revealing - the PEACE of Westphalia. States were invented to bring peace. /2 https://t.co/0efmOccIQ6
Peace at that time from more than 30 years of war, which had killed millions of people. States were the solution to this horrific bloodshed. And this is where the libertarians are so disgusting, tearing up one of humanity’s greatest learnings, born of tremendous suffering. /3
A recognition that some form of collective mechanism was required to regulate the social life of peoples, to stop the descent into endless war and bloodshed. Interestingly, prior to 1648, humanity had already learned and forgotten that same lesson. /4
The wars this peace was designed to end came about when a previous international unity, the Holy Roman Empire, came under increasing assault from monarchies from several countries, wanting their own ‘sovereignty’ to surpass that of the Church. /5
There’s no doubt that whatever collective mechanisms humans invent, others will try to bypass or destroy. The battle to maintain a collective as well as individual focus (or better, to see those as the same thing) is as old as history. /6
These are basic social facts, often described as political facts. Humans act socially in everything they do, politics is no exception, it’s just another name we give to the same social behaviour. We form groups or teams, which compete in imitative rivalry with other teams. /7
Take the language of modern libertarians. The ‘Nanny State’. That identifies the players here precisely. Who has nannies? Not you or me. Rich toffs, mostly. They see the State as a restriction on their capacity to achieve maximum power, status and wealth. /8
They’re brought up with parents constantly railing against ‘red tape’ and laws and regulations standing in the way of their easy accumulation of more wealth and more status and power. They’re socialised into this hatred. Covid then represented a complete violation, for them. /9
Of everything they hold dear. Their ‘freedom’ to do whatever they like, unfettered action for their team. I’ve Tweeted a lot about how this same *social* grouping has been fanatically active since the late-1970s, dismantling the great creation of the post-WW2 period. /10
‘The public’. A constructed entity designed to manage the collective survival of societies themselves, during and after the wars, sweeping aside previous hierarchies in favour of a collective focus in social affairs. These elites despised every moment of it. /11
I’ve also Tweeted how they invented one of the most strategically clever political tools ever, at this time, to reverse this shift towards collective life. What we call ‘the economy’. Replacing society with self-regulating markets. A social invention, disguised as economics. /12
Of course markets don’t exist, all economic transactions only exist and operate through extensive and structured regulation. Through laws. But the belief plays its social purpose, of obstructing everything that might have a collective, public focus. /13
By saying it ‘interferes with the market’. A genius social invention that allows the libertarians to rebuild all of their old social hierarchies, while pretending they’re just operating in a market, the true function of which is to stop anybody else doing the same. /14
Once you know this, you can see modern libertarians for what they really are. A (small) social group, a team, prosecuting their claims for social domination, for status and wealth and power. Historically, to restore a prestige they had pre- WW1 and WW2, the great disruptors. /end